Principles, methods, and instruments for the creation, preservation, and use of archival records in the digital environment

American Archivist

Volumn 64, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 238-269

  Guercio, Maria ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 2942629486     PISSN: 03609081     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.17723/aarc.64.2.n88455np210p8j5v     Document Type: Article

References (38)

1. On this topic, see Maria Guercio, "Classificazione e archiviazione in ambiente digitale," in Labirinti di carta. L'archivio comunale: organizzazione e gestione della documentazione a 100 anni dalla circolare Astengo. Modena, 28-30 gennaio 1998 (Roma, Ministero per I beni e le attività culturali, Direzione generale per gli archivi, 2001), 400-17
2. and Linda Giuva, "Gli strumenti archivistici per la gestione dei documenti: la registrazione di protocollo, la classificazione, I piani di conservazione," in Rassegna degli Archivi di Stat (1999), 128-39.
3. Read what Luciana Duranti writes on this issue, describing the changes that have occurred at the international level in the introduction to the volume, I documenti archivistici:La gestione dell'archivio da parte dell'ente produttore (Rome: Ministero per I beni culturali e ambientali, Ufficio centrale per I beni archivistici, 1997), 1-13.
4. In 1987, Paola Carucci drew attention to the absence of studies on records of the contemporary era in Il documento contemporaneo: Diplomatica e criteri di edizione (Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1987), 27, with specific reference to the opportunity to develop analysis in the area of diplomatics research, a promising discipline for qualifying the archival functions in the fragmented contemporary records world.
5. Cf. On this topic see Paola Carucci, "Evoluzione dei sistemi gestione delle fonti archivistiche: dalle metodologie tradizionali alle nuove tecnologie," in Le carte della memoria: archivi e nuove tecnologie, edited by Marcello Morelli and Mario Ricciardi (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1997), 239-59.
6. Cesare Paoli, Diplomatica (Florence: G.C. Sansoni, 1942) 18.
7. Alessandro Pratesi, Genesi e forme del documento medievale (Rome: Jouvence, 1979), 25.
8. Duranti, I documenti archivistici, 15.
9. In the cited work of Paola Carucci dedicated to the contemporary record, interest in the critical analysis of records is substantially motivated by, if not concerned exclusively with, the necessities of the task of organization or of the activity of research. "For those concerned with contemporary archives," the author writes, "the study of individual records addresses the context of the study of the original reconstruction of the archives directed to the analysis of the relationships which exist between the institutional activity of the entity, the production of records, and the criteria of classification of records in the organization of the archives. The analysis of the form and substantial characteristics of records is indispensable to identify the series constituted by the registry, to bring individual records back to their original files, to understand the relationships among records referring to the same procedures but preserved in different series, as for example, sentences, legal case files and related repertories. . . . Diplomatics analysis of the contemporary record has, therefore, in comparison with that developed for older records, the objective of contributing to the history of the administration." Il documento contemporaneo, 30-31. 13
10. This is intended to emphasize the fact that the appraisal of records for purposes of preservation is an operation which takes place (at least as first creator decision) in this earliest phase of the creation of the archives. See Maria Guercio, "La selezione dei documenti archivistici nel recente dibattito internazionale: voluzione e continuità nella metodologia e nella prassi," Archivi per la storia, 11, no. 2 (1998): 43-64.
11. On the specific problem of the definition of record in archival theory, see Trevor Livelton, Archival Theory, Records and the Public, (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press and Society of American Archivists, 1996), in reference to Anglo-Saxon literature ( Jenkinson and Schellenberg in particular).
12. Carucci, Il documento contemporaneo, 99: "Elements such as the medium of inscription or the writing become relevant to the objectives of historical research only in particular cases."
13. Cf. Victor Crescenzi, "Prime pagine per la storia del formalismo negoziale," Initium. Revista catalana d'historia del dret (1998, no 3), 275-382.
14. See Luciana Duranti,Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science (Lanham, Md. and London: Society of American Archivists and Association of Canadian Archivists in association with Scarecrow Press Inc., 1998).
15. See the InterPARES web site: http://www.interpares.org , specifically the final report of the Authenticity Task Force.
16. See, in particular, Luciana Duranti and Heather MacNeil, "The Protection of the Integrity of Electronic Records: An Overview of the UBC-MAS Research Project" Archivaria 42(Fall 1996)
17. Cf. on this subject G. Buonomo, "Atti e documenti in forma digitale. Prime note sul regolamento di attuazione dell'articolo 15, comma 2, della legge 15 marzo 1997, n. 59," in Forum per le tecnologie dell'informazione, Le tecnologie per l'informazione e la communicazione in Italia. Rapporto 1998, (Milano, Franco Angeli, 1998).
18. It is not only private writings that do not require the subscription as a legal requirement for existence, especially in the realm of bookkeeping (journal books and invoices, but also telegrams and copies of letters, as Paola Carucci noted, Il documento contemporaneo, 107). Although government bodies have in the past always required subscribed signatures in records, whether to citizens or to their own subordinates, the principle of the "certain reference of the record to its author" is, in fact, used to introduce technological innovation in the production of records, permitting, "for example"-writes Buonomo in the cited article-"the sending of notices of driving infractions to residences, or the creation of administrative certificates with mechanographical or automated tools." (p. 130) It is, however, possible that in the future we will proceed further along these lines through a more rapid process of automation of the production of records, linked to the too complex cryptographic public key infrastructure, introduced in Italy in law 513/1997, which seems destined to prove itself difficult to implement for purposes of the permanent preservation of digital memory, with other more limited systems which are equally capable of guaranteeing the integrity and authenticity of records.
19. See the case studies report of the InterPARES project at the project web site: . .
20. Alessandro Pratesi, Elementi di diplomatica generale (Bari: Adriatica Editrice, 1962), 60-61.
21. On this subject, see, besides the frequently cited study of Paola Carucci, Luciana Duranti, I documenti archivistici, 42-44.
22. Giorgio Cencetti, "Il fondamento teorico della dottrina archivistica" Archivi 6(1939): 7-13.
23. Hilary Jenkinson, A Manual of Archive Aadministration (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1922), 12.
24. Once the essential elements which define the nature of the archival record are identified, other qualities can be determined. Luciana Duranti (I Documenti archistici., 18-19) takes up Jenkinson's ideas, adding to the characteristics "provided to archival records either from their physical nature or from their original connection, only and surely with facts, acts and their context" also interdependence (the record does not have value in isolation, but as the result of a practical activity carried out in the exercise of the functions of a physical or judicial person: is set from the start, by reason of its nature, in relationship to the other records of the same activity); the uniqueness (the record is unique, insofar as it can have no substitute in the sequence of records in which it belongs, even in the case of a copy: its role and its meaning derive from the position which it occupies); naturalness (the record has an organic and natural connection with other records because the process of accumulation serves the interests and the institutional goals of the records creator and, in consequence, to the start, the development, and the completion of a juridical connection: the order of record is determined ab origine and cannot be modified. It derives, that is, from the natural and necessary accumulation of records produced in the course of the activity).
25. Pratesi, Elementi di diplomatica generale, 6.
26. Theodore R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives: Principles and Techniques. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 44.
27. In a still very recent history, information technology and organizational experts thought it possible to provide both functions in one and the same process of automation which utilized workflow management products. On this topic, see certain parts of the document, GEDOC (Gestione elettronica dei documenti), developed in 1997 by the Agency for information technology in government . A critical revision of this initiative took place, as appears among other places in the second report on GEDOC, published in 2000 on the same website. Without giving up the framework of a greater control over administrative flows with the objective of increasing the transparency and efficiency of administrative action, the necessity of developing modular integrated automation programs, which respect the specific characteristics of all functions while not renouncing the objectives of transformation and simplification, is becoming obvious.
28. See Maria Guercio, Classificazione e archiviazione in ambiente digitale.
29. Cf. Maria Guercio, "La sfida delle quantita archivi intermedi e strategie di conservazione dei documenti archivistici" in Per la storiografia italiana del XXI secolo. (Rome: Ministero per I beni culturali e ambientali, Ufficion centrale per I beni archivsitici, 1998). It treats of an organizational hypothesis that the problem of externalization of services, or outsourcing has no effect, since in this last case the legal responsibility for the function delegated to a third party always remains that of the party which contracted for the creator.
30. Cencetti, Il fondamento teorico della dottrina archivistica, 40.
31. In addition to the frequently cited UBC research, the working group established by the University of Pittsburgh in the second half of the 1990s concerned itself with the functional requirements for "reliable recorded evidence of human activity in a computerized information world." See, in particular, David Bearman, Electronic Evidence: Strategies for Managing Records in Contemporary Organizations (Pittsburgh: Archives and Museum Informatics, 1994).
32. This distinction has been authoritatively upheld by Adolf Brenneke (Archivistica: Contributo alla teoria ed alla storia archivistica europea, text edited and integrated by Wolfgang Leesch, Italian translation by Renato Perrella, [Milan: Giuffrè, 1968], 28):
33. "Records [Urkunden] are the oldest materials received in our German archives, coming almost exclusively from the medieval period. While in fact the record is accurately preserved, and therefore the final step of a legal affair, considered as documentation of particular relevance which proves the existence of a legal title, the preceding stages of this documentation, which have also found various modes of written expression (petitions, minutes, etc.), would ordinarily have been destroyed. Gradually, among others, correspondence [Brief ] came to assume an ever increasing value, even if it was not always preserved. Naturally, the letter could, in certain cases, bring a legal affair to conclusion, or, at least, have this goal. From this particular type of letter, that is the letter for reasons of service, acts [Akten] were born. While simple letters consisted almost exclusively of received materials, acts comprise both received and sent writings, or internal acts." Similar considerations have been repeated successively by scholars who have been concerned with the history of archives, in particular by Filippo Valenti ("Riflessioni sulla natura e sulla struttura degli archivi" in Rassegna degli Archivi di Stato (1981) 15)
34. who also distinguished, on the basis of the different nature of preserved records, in typologies of archives, the sedimentary archives, in which "the records of an activity spontaneously collect," and "treasury archives" intended as deliberate, systematic and orderly selections, always constructed for practical or operational reasons," formed principally of legal titles, including territorial, jurisdictional and estate policies within a system. Widespread in the Middle Ages, the archives which collects formally selected records coexists in the modern era with natural records collections accumulated in the natural course of administrative activities in chanceries and, thus, in all the numerous government apparatuses in what Robert-Henri Bautier called "special administrative archives" in "The Crucial Phase of the History of Archives" Archivum 18(1968):146.
35. See especially Elio Lodolini, Archivistica: Principi e problemi. (Milan, Franco Angeli), 71-94.
36. Raffaele De Felice, L'archivio contemporaneo (Rome: Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1988), 23.
37. E. Lodolini, Archivistica, 96, points out that complete transcription in Italy applies to "all records of public agencies which result in a permanent obligation of the treasury." 49 Raffaele De Felice, L'archivio contemporaneo.
38. On this topic, see especially Antonio Romiti, Le principali sentenze sul protocollo delle pubbliche amministrazioni (Viareggio, 1995).