Concepts of record (2): Prototypes and boundary objects

American Archivist

Volumn 71, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 118-143

  Yeo, Geoffrey ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77952177222     PISSN: 03609081     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.17723/aarc.71.1.p0675v40tr14q6w2     Document Type: Article

References (102)

1. Geoffrey Yeo, "Concepts of Record (1): Evidence, Information, and Persistent Representations," American Archivist 70 (Fall/Winter 2007): 315-43.
2. Eleanor Rosch, "Principles of Categorization," in Cognition and Categorization, ed. Eleanor Rosch and Barbara B. Lloyd (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1978).
3. See also Edward E. Smith and Douglas L. Medin, Categories and Concepts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981);
4. George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
5. Lawrence W. Barsalou, "The Instability of Graded Structure: Implications for the Nature of Concepts," in Concepts and Conceptual Development, ed. Ulric Neisser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 107, 117, 122.
6. Similarly, within the category of dogs, "some dogs are more prototypical, are nearer the center of dogdom, than are others. The fox terrier is a better instance of a dog, in some sense still to be explicated, than is . . . a pekinese": Roger Brown, "Cognitive Categories," in Psychology's Second Century: Enduring Issues, ed. Richard A. Kasschau and Charles N. Cofer (New York: Praeger, 1981), 195-96.
7. Rosch, "Principles of Categorization," 36.
8. Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, 41.
9. Eleanor Rosch, "Cognitive Representations of Semantic Categories," Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 104 (1975): 192-233.
10. John R. Taylor, Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3-5.
11. William Labov, "The Boundaries of Words and Their Meanings," in New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English, ed. Charles-James N. Bailey and Roger W. Shuy (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1973).
12. In certain Australian aboriginal languages there is no word corresponding exactly to "bird" in English. One language has a term that includes not only birds but also bats and grasshoppers; in another language the closest equivalent of "bird" excludes bats, but also excludes emus. See Anna Wierzbicka, " 'Prototypes Save': On the Uses and Abuses of the Notion of Prototype in Linguistics and Related Fields," in Meanings and Prototypes: Studies in Linguistic Categorization, ed. S. L. Tsohatzidis (London: Routledge, 1990), 367.
13. Benjamin Lee Whorf, "Science and Linguistics," in Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John B. Carroll (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1956), 213.
14. Taylor, Linguistic Categorization, 39. Taylor notes that bureaucrats may decide to limit the category "adult" to those who have passed their eighteenth birthday, but outside bureaucratic circles adulthood is often judged on graded criteria of physical or emotional maturity rather than exactness of age.
15. In the 1990s, statements in the electronic records literature that "you do not have records when you save databases . . . databases are not records" (David Bearman, "Archival Issues in a Computing Environment," in Playing for Keeps: The Proceedings of an Electronic Records Management Conference Hosted by the Australian Archives, Canberra, Australia, 8-10 November 1994, ed. Stephen Yorke (Canberra, Aus.:Australian Archives, 1995), 234, 321)
16. and "we . . . make a clear distinction between data management . . . and the management of electronic documents and electronic records" (David Roberts, "Defining Electronic Records, Documents and Data," Archives and Manuscripts 22 (1994): 23)
17. encouraged this perception. Such statements were intended to distinguish records from dynamic or informational databases, but took no account of transactional data. For further discussion of transactional data, see Elizabeth Shepherd and Geoffrey Yeo, Managing Records: A Handbook of Principles and Practice (London: Facet, 2003), 15-16.
18. According to The InterPARES Glossary (2001), available at www.interpares.org/book/interpares-book-q-gloss.pdf
19. a record is "a document made or received and set aside in the course of a practical activity."European Commission, Model Requirements for the Management of Electronic Records (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2002), 11
20. characterizes records as "documents produced or received by a person or organisation in the course of business . . . ." Earlier examples can be found in How to Manage Your Records: A Guide to Effective Practice, Peter Emmerson, ed.(Cambridge: ICSA Publishing, 1989), 5;
21. Judith Ellis, ed., Keeping Archives, 2nd ed. (Melbourne, Aus.: D. W. Thorpe, 1993), 477.
22. A variant approach has been to seek to extend the meaning of "document," as discussed by Michele M. Tourney, "Caging Virtual Antelopes: Suzanne Briet's Definition of Documents in the Context of the Digital Age" Archival Science 3 (2003): 291-311.
23. Jennifer Rowley and John Farrow, Organizing Knowledge, 3rd ed. (Aldershot, U.K.: Gower, 2000), suggest that "stored data in any form constitute a document" (p . 40); but this interpretation is counter to the prevailing usage in computer science and elsewhere.
24. Adrian Cunningham, "Beyond the Pale? The 'Flinty' Relationship between Archivists Who Collect the Private Records of Individuals and the Rest of the Archival Profession," Archives and Manuscripts 24 (1996): 20-26.
25. See also Catherine Hobbs, "The Character of Personal Archives: Reflections on the Value of Records of Individuals," Archivaria 52 (2001): 126-35.
26. State Records New South Wales, Normal Administrative Practice (1999), available at http://www. records.nsw.gov.au/recordkeeping/docs/ normal%20administrative%20practice.pdf; Library and
27. Archives Canada, Authority for the Destruction of Transitory Records (1990, updated 2007), available at http://www.collectionscanada.ca/information- management/007/007007-1016-e.html.
28. National Archives and Records Administration, Agency Recordkeeping Requirements: A Management Guide (1995), available at http://www.archives.gov/ records-mgmt/policy/agency-recordkeeping-requirements.html.
29. Bearman's view that a record is necessarily something that has been communicated (David Bearman, Electronic Evidence: Strategies for Managing Records in Contemporary Organizations Pittsburgh: Archives and Museum Informatics, 1994), 15, 189-90) also implicitly denies record status to working drafts.
30. European Commission, Model Requirements for the Management of Electronic Records, 12, 14.
31. Luciana Duranti, "The Archival Bond," Archives and Museum Informatics 11 (1997): 216. Duranti posits a change of status at the moment when documents are "set aside," but other writers on Italian theory emphasize that the archival bond is independent of the formal structures of registration, thus implying that the act of setting aside in a recordkeeping system is a realization of a bond that already exists.
32. Cf. Maria Guercio, "Principles, Methods, and Instruments for the Creation, Preservation, and Use of Archival Records in the Digital Environment," American Archivist 64 (2001): 249;
33. Paola Carucci, Le Fonti Archivistiche: Ordinamento e Conservazione (Rome: Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1983), 230.
34. Steve Stuckey, "The Australian Archives' Policy on Electronic Records," in Playing for Keeps, 121;
35. Shepherd and Yeo, Managing Records, 4, 108-9.
36. Alan MacEachren's study of map prototypes offers a close parallel. MacEachren notes how borderline cases are not only less widely accepted as maps, but "often viewed with some suspicion": Alan M. MacEachren, How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 161.
37. See, for example, Trevor Livelton, Archival Theory, Records, and the Public (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1996), 64-65
38. where records are said to be "documents made or received by an institution according to law or its particular mandate and preserved by that institution as evidence or information"; and [U.K.] Public Record Office, Functional Requirements for Electronic Records Management Systems 2: Reference Document (London: Public Record Office, 1999), 9
39. where records are "some document(s) produced by an organisation in the course of business, and retained by the organisation as evidence of its activities." The revised edition of 2002 omitted this definition, asserting instead that a record is "a document which has been declared as a formal record, constituted of both format and metadata" (Public Record Office, Requirements for Electronic Records Management Systems 3: Reference Document (2002), available at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/ referencefinal.pdf, 5).
40. G. J. Renier, History: Its Purpose and Method (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1950), 98.
41. Luciana Duranti, Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1998), 65-66.
42. The formula indicates the purpose of the record in letting persons present and future know that a particular transaction has occurred. See Thomas Madox, Formulare Anglicanum (London: J. Tonson and R. Knaplock, 1702), 184-215.
43. Some early medieval charters are even more explicit about their longtermrole. A tenth-century charter admonishes that transactions "ought to be fortified securely with ranks of letters, because the frail memory of men . . . forgets what the writing of letters preserves and retains"; and an eighth-century grant affirms that "to prove donations" and refute those infringing them "nothing would seem stronger" than a written document (Dorothy Whitelock, ed., English Historical Documents I: c.500-1042, 2nd ed. (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979), 571, 491).
44. Cf. Armando Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 239-46.
45. AS 4390.3-1996 Records Management, Part 3: Strategies, sec.5.3.
46. See, for example, the "audit" of newly created patient health records proposed in Just for the Record: A Guide to Record Keeping for Health Care Professionals (London: NHS Training Directorate, c.1996).
47. John Van Maanen and Brian Pentland, "Cops and Auditors: The Rhetoric of Records," in The Legalistic Organization, ed. Sim B. Sitkin and Robert J. Bies (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1994), 53;
48. quoted by Terry Cook, Beyond the Screen: The Records Continuum and Archival Cultural Heritage (2000), available at http://www.archivists.org.au/ files/Conference-Papers/2000/terrycook.pdf, 9
49. and Ciaran B. Trace,"What Is Recorded Is Never Simply 'What Happened': Record Keeping in Modern Organizational Culture," Archival Science 2 (2002): 155.
50. Cf. Terry Cook, "Archival Science and Postmodernism: New Formulations for Old Concepts," Archival Science 1 (2001): 7.
51. Trace, "What Is Recorded Is Never Simply 'What Happened'," 137-59.
52. Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 186-207;
53. Edwin M. Lemert, "Records in the Juvenile Court," in On Record: Files and Dossiers in American Life, ed. Stanton Wheeler (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1969), 355-87;
54. Robert J. Barrett, "Clinical Writing and the Documentary Construction of Schizophrenia," Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 12 (1988): 265-99;
55. John Scott, A Matter of Record: Documentary Sources in Social Research (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 123-29;
56. Leslie Margolin, "Deviance on Record: Techniques for Labeling Child Abusers in Official Documents," Social Problems 39 (1992): 58-70;
57. Marc Berg and Geoffrey Bowker, "The Multiple Bodies of the Medical Record: Towards a Sociology of an Artifact," Sociological Quarterly 38 (1997): 513-37. None of these authors are archivists or records managers, but archivists opposed to thenotion of objective evidence often cite their work.
58. Randall C. Jimerson, "Archives and Memory," OCLC Systems & Services 19 (2003): 90;
59. Alf Erlandsson, Electronic Records Management: A Literature Review (Paris: International Council on Archives, 1997), 19;
60. Angelika Menne-Haritz, Business Processes: An Archival Science Approach to Collaborative Decision Making, Records, and Knowledge Management (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 2004), 11;
61. Albert Meijer, Consequences of the Use of Information and Communication Technologies for the Availability of Data for Accountability (1998), available at http://www.digitaleduurzaamheid.nl/bibliotheek/docs/delphi1.doc, 20.
62. As Trevor Livelton noted, "conscious intent to convey a message is evident in the act of recording, though not necessarily an intent to bridge time" (Livelton, Archival Theory, Records, and the Public, 62). Of course not all letter writers lack a longer-term perspective. A decision to write a letter rather than speak to someone face-to-face or by telephone may be made purely for reasons of distance or because of a desire for a formal mode of communication, but may also be made because the writer recognizes a need to be able to refer back to the correspondence at some future date. File copies are kept to meet this need.
63. For a very full exposition, see T. R. Schellenberg, The Management of Archives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965).
64. Sue McKemmish, "Introducing Archives and Archival Programs," in Keeping Archives, ed. Judith Ellis, 2nd ed. (Melbourne, Aus.: D. W. Thorpe, 1993), 5-6.
65. See C. P. Auger, Information Sources in Grey Literature, 4th ed. (East Grinstead, U.K.: Bowker-Saur, 1998).
66. For many archivists and records managers, unique or unpublished items may still form part of the mental prototype of the record, but in a world where entire series of electronic records can easily be duplicated for security in preservation, where copies are indistinguishable from originals, and where digital materials can be "published" without creating multiple physical copies, the traditional division between published and unpublished materials is hard to maintain. See also James M. O'Toole, "On the Idea of Uniqueness," American Archivist 57 (1994): 632-58;
67. Digitale Bewaring Testbed, Emulation: Context and Current Status (2003), available at http://www.digitaleduurzaamheid.nl/bibliotheek/docs/white- paper-emulatie-EN.pdf, 23-26.
68. Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, "Institutional Ecology, 'Translations', and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology," Social Studies of Science 19 (1989): 387-420;
69. Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 296-98.
70. Michael Shepherd and Carolyn Watters, "Boundary Objects and the Digital Library," in Knowledge Organization, Information Systems and Other Essays, ed. K. S. Raghavan and K. N. Prasad (New Delhi: Ess Ess Publications, 2006), 189.
71. Susan Leigh Star, "The Structure of Ill-Structured Solutions: Heterogeneous Problem-Solving, Boundary Objects and Distributed Artificial Intelligence," in Distributed Artificial Intelligence, ed. Les Gasser and Michael N. Huhns, vol. 2 (London: Pitman, 1989), 46-47.
72. State Records New South Wales, How to Take Control of Your Records (2004), available at http://www.records.nsw.gov.au/recordkeeping/guideline-18- how-to-take-control-of-your-records-6922.asp.
73. Philip Bantin, Recordkeeping Metadata Specifications (c. 2002), available at http://www.indiana.edu/∼libarch/ER/nhprcfinalmeta.doc.
74. Patricia E. Wallace, Jo Ann Lee, and Dexter R. Schubert, Records Management: Integrated Information Systems, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1992), 218-20.
75. ISAD(G): General International Standard Archival Description, 2nd ed. (2000), available at http://www.ica.org/sites/default/files/isad-g-2e.pdf.
76. ANSI/ARMA 10-1999, Glossary of Records and Information Management Terms (Prairie Village, Kans.: ARMA International, 2000).
77. Schellenberg, The Management of Archives, 67.
78. David Bearman and Wendy Duff, "Grounding Archival Description in the Functional Requirements for Evidence," Archivaria 41 (1996): 281, fn 9.
79. Public Record Office Victoria, Victorian Electronic Records Strategy Final Report (1998), available at http://www.prov.vic.gov.au/vers/pdf/final.pdf, 14;
80. Public Record Office Victoria, VERS Basic Concepts (2004), available at http://web.archive.org/web/20060820064024/vers.imagineering.com.au/basic- concepts/what+is+record.htm;
81. Shepherd and Yeo, Managing Records, 53-57. Managing Records uses the word process with a specific meaning, but also notes (p. 50) that the literature shows considerable variation in the meanings assigned to this word and to related terms such as function, activity, and transaction.
82. Many of the classic articles on this subject were reprinted in Peter Biskup, Kathryn Dan, Colleen McEwen, Greg O'Shea, and Graeme Powell, eds., Debates and Discourses: Selected Australian Writings on Archival Theory 1951-1990 (Canberra: Australian Society of Archivists, 1995).
83. See also Sue McKemmish, "Are Records Ever Actual?," in The Records Continuum: Ian Maclean and Australian Archives First Fifty Years, ed. Sue McKemmish and Michael Piggott (Clayton, Victoria, Aus.: Ancora Press, 1994);
84. and Susan Healy, "The Classification of Modern Government Records in England and Australia," Journal of the Society of Archivists 11 (1990): 21-26.
85. Hilary Jenkinson, The English Archivist: A New Profession (London: H. K. Lewis, 1948), 2.
86. Guercio, "Principles, Methods, and Instruments," 248-49.
87. Michael Roper, "The Development of the Principles of Provenance and Original Order in the Public Record Office," in The Archival Imagination: Essays in Honour of Hugh A. Taylor, ed. Barbara L. Craig (Ottawa: Association of Canadian Archivists, 1992).
88. W. E. Johnson, Logic, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924), xviii-xxi;
89. Peter Simons and Joseph Melia, "Continuants and Occurrents," The Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 74 (2000): 59-92.
90. According to Richard Pearce-Moses, A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2005), 31
91. Cf. Stuckey, "The Australian Archives' Policy on Electronic Records," 121. If it is an electronic draft its persistence might be at some risk, but a saved draft persists beyond the end of the drafting activity if it is not overwritten.
92. Luciana Duranti, "The Concept of Electronic Record," in Luciana Duranti, Terry Eastwood, and Heather MacNeil, Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 2002), 61, fn 13.
93. ISO 15489-1:2001, Records Management, sec.7.2.
94. Bernard Dupriez, A Dictionary of Literary Devices (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 367.
95. The "recordness" of oral histories is discussed in Lisa Klopfer, "Oral History and Archives in the New South Africa: Methodological Issues," Archivaria 52 (2001): 100-25; see especially 114-19.
96. Anastasia Rodgers, "Constructing Beauty: The Photographs Documenting the Construction of the Bloor Viaduct," Archivaria 54 (2002): 72-91.
97. Cf. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Truth (New York: Thomas Dunne, 1997), 173-74.
98. Cf. Peter Carini and Kelcy Shepherd, "The MARC Standard and Encoded Archival Description," Library Hi Tech 22 (2004): 19;
99. Daniel Pitti, "Encoded Archival Description: The Development of an Encoding Standard for Archival Finding Aids," American Archivist 60 (1997): 275;
100. Bearman, Electronic Evidence, 230-31.
101. Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, website available at http://dublincore.org.
102. This succinct phrase is of course borrowed from Hilary Jenkinson, A Manual of Archive Administration, 2nd ed. (London: Lund Humphries, 1937), 44.