Concepts of record (1): Evidence, information, and persistent representations

American Archivist

Volumn 70, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 315-343

  Yeo, Geoffrey ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 78649833640     PISSN: 03609081     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.17723/aarc.70.2.u327764v1036756q     Document Type: Review

References (172)

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953).
2. In the archival community, much of the interest in postmodernism arose from the publicity accorded to Derrida's Mal d'Archive, published in English translation in 1996:
3. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996);
4. Victoria Lemieux, "Let the Ghosts Speak: An Empirical Exploration of the Nature of the Record," Archivaria 51 (2001): 82.
5. For a bibliography of postmodernist writings by archivists, see Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, "Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory," Archival Science 2 (2002): 10, fn 17.
6. Postmodernist concerns also dominate many of the papers in Sue McKemmish, Michael Piggott, Barbara Reed, and Frank Upward, eds., Archives: Recordkeeping in Society (Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, Aus.: Charles Sturt University, 2005)
7. and Francis X. Blouin and William G. Rosenberg, eds., Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). Such concerns remain largely absent from records management literature.
8. See Eleanor Rosch, "Principles of Categorization," in Cognition and Categorization, ed. Eleanor Rosch and Barbara B. Lloyd (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1978);
9. Edward E. Smith and Douglas L. Medin, Categories and Concepts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981);
10. George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987);
11. 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).
12. For example: Peter Walne, ed., Dictionary of Archival Terminology, 2nd ed. (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1988);
13. ANSI/ARMA 10-1999, Glossary of Records and Information Management Terms (Prairie Village, Kans.: ARMA International, 2000);
14. The InterPARES Glossary (2001), available at http://www.interpares.org/ book/interpares-book-q-gloss.pdf;
15. State Records New South Wales, Glossary of Recordkeeping Terms(2003), available at http://www.records.nsw.gov.au/recordkeeping/glossary-of- recordkeeping- terms-4297.asp;
16. Richard Pearce-Moses, A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology (2005), available at http://www.archivists.org/glossary. Web addresses cited in this article were accessed on 6 July 2007.
17. Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
18. Lemieux, "Let the Ghosts Speak," 81-111.
19. Discussions of this topic include Trevor Livelton, Archival Theory, Records, and the Public (Lanham, Md.:Scarecrow Press, 1996), 3-5;
20. Richard J. Cox, Managing Records as Evidence and Information (Westport, Conn.: Quorum, 2001), 7-22;
21. Virginia Jones, When Worlds Collide: Records Management in an IT Environment (2003), available at http://www.edocmagazine.com/vault-articles.asp? ID=26624.
22. As Livelton notes, the narrowly focused perceptions of legislators are often problematic for recordkeeping professionals, since these perceptions necessarily underlie the definitions of records found in laws and statutes in particular jurisdictions. Where such definitions exist, professionals are constrained by them in their daily work, but "need not feel obliged to accept them as the sole foundation of their thinking." (Livelton, Archival Theory, 4).
23. For an analysis of the influence of these two paradigms, see Anne Gilliland and Sue McKemmish, "Building an Infrastructure for Archival Research," Archival Science 4 (2004): 149-97 (especially 163-70).
24. Geoffrey Yeo, "Concepts of Record (2): Prototypes and Boundary Objects," American Archivist 71 (Spring/Summer 2008), forthcoming.
25. Greg O'Shea, "Keeping Electronic Records: Issues and Strategies," Provenance 1, no. 2 (1996), available at http://www. provenance.ca/1995-2000backissues/vol1/no2/features/erecs1a.htm.
26. For the "rediscovery" of evidence, see Margaret Hedstrom, "Cohesion and Chaos: The State of Archival Science in the United States," in The Concept of Record: Second Stockholm Conference on Archival Science and the Concept of Record, 30-31 May 1996, ed. Kerstin Abukhanfusa (Stockholm: Riksarkivet, 1998).
27. The emergence of the evidential focus in the Pittsburgh project during the 1990s is described in Cox, Managing Records as Evidence and Information, 32-34.
28. See especially Verne Harris, "Law, Evidence and Electronic Records: A Strategic Perspective from the Global Periphery," Comma 2001, nos. 1/2 (2001): 29-43;
29. Brien Brothman, "Afterglow: Conceptions of Record and Evidence in Archival Discourse," Archival Science 2 (2002): 311-42.
30. State Records New South Wales, Documenting the Future. Appendix 2: Records and Recordkeeping (1995, updated 2000), available at http://www.records.nsw.gov.au/publicsector/erk/dtf/append-2.htm;
31. E-government Policy Framework for Electronic Records Management (2001), available at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/egov-framework.pdf, 7.
32. Examples of similar statements can be found in Elizabeth Shepherd and Geoffrey Yeo, Managing Records: A Handbook of Principles and Practice (London: Facet, 2003), 2;
33. Richard J. Cox, "Why Records Are Important in the Information Age," Records Management Quarterly 32, no. 1 (1998): 38;
34. and Justine Heazlewood, Data Archiving and Electronic Recordkeeping (2001), available at http://www.prov.vic.gov.au/vers/pdf/010314.pdf, 5.
35. See Sue McKemmish, "Introducing Archives and Archival Programs," in Keeping Archives, ed. Judith Ellis, 2nd ed. (Melbourne: D. W. Thorpe, 1993), 5-7.
36. David Kelley, The Art of Reasoning, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 36-37.
37. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London: W. Strahan, 1755), unpaginated.
38. Dissatisfaction with the classical Aristotelian approach is not limited to those working within a postmodernist or interpretivist paradigm. See for example the essays reprinted in Stephen P. Schwartz, ed., Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977);
39. E. J. Lowe, Kinds of Being: A Study of Individuation, Identity and the Logic of Sortal Terms (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989);
40. Jerry A. Fodor, Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
41. Quoted in National Archives of Australia, Keeping Electronic Records (1995), available at http://www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/er/keeping-er/creation. html.
42. Collins English Dictionary, Desktop Edition (Glasgow: Harper Collins, 2004), 541.
43. Oxford English Dictionary Online, available by subscription at http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/ entry/50079133.
44. David A. Schum, Evidential Foundations of Probabilistic Reasoning (New York: John Wiley, 1994), 1.
45. Smith and Medin, Categories and Concepts, 11-15;
46. see also W. R. Garner, "Aspects of a Stimulus," in Cognition and Categorization, 102-5.
47. Schum, Evidential Foundations, 58, 66-67, 92, 201-5;
48. Tim May, Social Research, 3rd ed. (Buckingham, England: Open University Press, 2001), 189-90.
49. Schum, Evidential Foundations, 97-99.
50. Luciana Duranti, "Reliability and Authenticity: The Concepts and Their Implications," Archivaria 39 (1995): 5-10;
51. Claes Gränström, Torbjorn Hornfeldt, Gary Peterson, Maria Pia Rinaldi Mariani, Udo Schäfer, and Josef Zwicker, Authenticity of Electronic Records: A Report by ICA to UNESCO (2002), available at http://www.ica.org/ sites/default/files/Study13-1E.pdf.
52. Archivists and records managers have sometimes thought that credibility is an absolute that can be guaranteed, perhaps by following the precepts of the InterPARES project or standards such as ISO 15489:2001 Records Management and BIP 0008:2004 Code of Practice for Legal Admissibility and Evidential Weight of Information Stored Electronically, but it can also be argued that measurements of credibility are subjective: that what is fully credible to one person may not be so to another.
53. The plural form was used in England in earlier times. It was employed more or less as a synonym for records and more specifically as a collective term for charters and title deeds. See for example the references in Geoffrey Yeo, "Record-keeping at St Paul's Cathedral," Journal of the Society of Archivists 8 (1986): 30-44
54. to a sixteenth-century register "of evidences and writings" (p. 39) and seventeenthcentury instructions for the preservation of "the records and evidences" of the cathedral (p. 30). The Oxford English Dictionary Online gives an example of this usage from the Paston letters of 1444. But the dictionary shows that the former practice of using "evidences" in the plural, like the obsolete use of "an evidence" to refer to a witness or a spy, was linked to a different semantic concept from the more widespread use of "evidence" as an uncountable term.
55. Jeremy Bentham, Rationale of Judicial Evidence, vol. 1 (London: Hunt and Clarke, 1827), 17.
56. J. H. Wigmore, The Principles of Judicial Proof, 2nd ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1931), 8, 12.
57. Luciana Duranti, "The Concept of Electronic Record," in Luciana Duranti, Terry Eastwood, and Heather MacNeil, Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), 9;
58. cf. Luciana Duranti, Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1998), 6, fn 5.
59. Hans Hofman, "Lost in Cyberspace: Where Is the Record?," in The Concept of Record, 121.
60. Wigmore, The Principles of Judicial Proof, 8.
61. Even in legal writings, the view that evidence refers to inference rather than materials is scarcely borne out by the use of the term in practice. Cf. William Twining, Rethinking Evidence (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 179: "the main examples of judicial evidence are statements by witnesses . . . , things . . . and documents." Of course much of our response to Wigmore's model depends on what we understand by the assertion that the term evidence signifies a relationship. The terms uncle and employer are also terms of relationship; uncles do not exist absolutely, but only in relation to someone else whose uncle they are; yet every uncle is necessarily a particular person. It could also be argued that evidence is necessarily embodied in particular entities.
62. Michael K. Buckland, "Information as Thing," Journal of the American Society for Information Science 42 (1991): 353. His italics.
63. David A. Schum, "Evidence and Inferences about Past Events," in Evidence and Inference in History and Law, ed. William Twining and Iain Hampsher-Monk (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 20;
64. Morris R. Cohen and Ernest Nagel, An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 5.
65. Schum, Evidential Foundations, 74, 505.
66. Cf. Peter Achinstein, "Concepts of Evidence," in The Concept of Evidence, ed. Peter Achinstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 145 ff.
67. Bruce W. Dearstyne, The Archival Enterprise (Chicago: American Library Association, 1993), 1;
68. International Council on Archives, Guide for Managing Electronic Records from an Archival Perspective (Paris: International Council on Archives, 1997), 22.
69. Brothman, "Afterglow," 334.
70. The idea that evidence derives from use, with its diminution of the role of the creator and its concomitant notion of evidence as a subjective rather than an objective concept, has an obvious appeal to those of a postmodernist persuasion; but objectivists too may choose to see evidence in terms of use. According to Duranti, "The Concept of Electronic Record," 10, it is from the point of view of the user seeking "potential proof," that records can be seen as evidential. Potmodernist thinking emphasizes the role of individual interpretation; objectivists argue that users employ records to prove the truth of hypothetical facts.
71. Ira A. Penn, Gail Pennix, and Jim Coulson, Records Management Handbook, 2nd ed. (Aldershot, England: Gower, 1994), 4.
72. ISAD(G): General International Standard Archival Description, 2nd ed. (2000), available at http://www.ica.org/sites/default/files/isad-g-2e.pdf, 11;
73. The Sedona Guidelines: Best Practice Guidelines and Commentary for Managing Information and Records in the Electronic Age (2005), available at http://www.thesedonaconference.org/content/miscFiles/TSG9-05.pdf, 3.
74. ISO 15489-1:2001, Records Management, Part 1: General.
75. Christopher J. Fox, Information and Misinformation (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 3.
76. Recent surveys of the literature on this subject include Rafael Capurro and Birger Hjørland, "The Concept of Information," Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 37 (2003): 343-411
77. and Donald O. Case, Looking for Information: A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs, and Behavior (San Diego, Calif.: Academic Press, 2002), 39-63.
78. An older but still useful study is N. J. Belkin, "Information Concepts for Information Science," Journal of Documentation 34 (1978): 55-85.
79. Fox, Information and Misinformation is a good example of this approach.
80. This notion has given rise to a further debate about whether information is absent unless the message is successfully conveyed to the recipient, who is able to understand it; see Case, Looking for Information, 60.
81. David Bawden, "The Shifting Terminologies of Information," Aslib Proceedings 53 (2001): 93-98.
82. This interpretation is exemplified by Allan D. Pratt, "The Information of the Image," Libri 27 (1977): 204-20.
83. Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1949).
84. Buckland, "Information as Thing," 351.
85. Charles Oppenheim, Joan Stenson, and Richard M. S. Wilson, "Studies on Information as an Asset. 1.Definitions," Journal of Information Science 29 (2003): 159-66;
86. Jonathan J. Eaton, Is Information a Resource? (Sheffield, England: University of Sheffield Department of Information Studies, 1987).
87. This model is usually associated with corporate libraries and information units, but sometimes makes an appearance in records management literature; see for example Catherine Hare and Julie McLeod, Developing a Records Management Programme (London: Aslib, 1997), 7-8.
88. June Lester and Wallace C. Koehler, Fundamentals of Information Studies (New York: Neal-Schuman, 2003), 15.
89. T. R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives: Principles and Techniques (Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1956), 139-60.
90. The parallel is not exact because of Schellenberg's seemingly myopic view of evidence. For the limitations of his perception of "evidential value," see Shepherd and Yeo, Managing Records, 151.
91. Angelika Menne-Haritz, "What Can Be Achieved with Archives?," in The Concept of Record, 19-20.
92. Center for Technology in Government, Models for Action: Developing Practical Approaches to Electronic Records Management and Preservation. Report to NHPRC for the Time Period from 4/1/97 to 9/30/97 (1997), accessed at http://web.archive.org/web/20030303003854/http://www.ctg.albany.edu/projects/er/ thirdrpt.html on 1 September 2006
93. but no longer available. Cf. Charles M. Dollar, Archival Theory and Information Technologies (Macerata, Italy: University of Macerata, 1992), 45.
94. The idea that the evidentiality of records derives from the conjunction of their content, context, and structure originated with David Bearman; see David Bearman, Electronic Evidence: Strategies for Managing Records in Contemporary Organizations (Pittsburgh: Archives and Museum Informatics, 1994), 5, 148, 191, 285.
95. For symbolic connections, see James M. O'Toole, "The Symbolic Significance of Archives," American Archivist 56 (1993): 234-55.
96. Geoffrey Yeo, "Understanding Users and Use: A Market Segmentation Approach," Journal of the Society of Archivists 26 (2005): 34;
97. Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H. R. Harper, The Myth of the Paperless Office (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 17.
98. The notion of affordances has its origins in James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1979).
99. Harris, "Law, Evidence and Electronic Records," 41.
100. Dearstyne, The Archival Enterprise, 1.
101. Recent writings on records and memory include Richard J. Cox, Closing an Era: Historical Perspectives on Modern Archives and Records Management (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000)
102. chapter 6 "Archives, Records, and Memory"; Brien Brothman
103. "The Past that Archives Keep: Memory, History, and the Preservation of Archival Records," Archivaria 51 (2001): 48-80;
104. Archives and Manuscripts 33, no. 1 (2005) is a themed issue on collective memory.
105. An emphasis on memory is appropriate not least because it reflects the linguistic origins of the word record. In classical Latin, recordatio meant a mental recollection of something in the past. In early medieval England, it had come to mean a verbal statement or recollection formally presented as oral testimony, but as the courts of law began to recognize written procedures and documentary evidence the words recordatio and recordum came to be used for written documents; see M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 77. The original meaning survives in some European languages. In Italian, for example, ricordi are recollected thoughts, or mementoes, and the word archivi is normally used where records would be employed in English-language professional discourse.
106. European Commission, Model Requirements for the Management of Electronic Records (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2002), 11.
107. Tally sticks were notched pieces of wood that served as financial receipts; see Hilary Jenkinson, "Exchequer Tallies," Archaeologia 62 (1911): 367-80.
108. For the Inca strings, or quipu, see Gary Urton, "From Knots to Narratives: Reconstructing the Art of Historical Record Keeping in the Andes," Ethnohistory 45 (1998): 409-38;
109. for wampum belts, see Wampum: Treaties, Sacred Records (1996), available at http://www.kstrom.net/isk/art/beads/wampum.html
110. and Francis Jennings, William N. Fenton, Mary A. Druke, and David R. Miller, eds., The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1985), 88-90, 99, 105.
111. Even when records are in documentary format, it may still be questioned whether there is a one-to-one correspondence between record and document. The Public Record Office Victoria, for example, has noted that "records can be made up of multiple documents" (Public Record Office Victoria, Electronic Recordkeeping: Advice to Victorian Government Agencies (2000), available at http://www.prov.vic.gov.au/publications/publns/PROVRMadvice1.pdf, 2)
112. Angelika Menne-Haritz, Business Processes: An Archival Science Approach to Collaborative Decision Making, Records, and Knowledge Management (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004), 11;
113. Randall C. Jimerson, "Archives and Memory," OCLC Systems and Services 19 (2003): 90.
114. Cf. Dollar, Archival Theory and Information Technologies, 45, 47;
115. Alf Erlandsson, Electronic Records Management: A Literature Review (Paris: International Council on Archives, 1997), 19.
116. Bearman, Electronic Evidence, 189-90.
117. Edward Higgs, "Record and Recordness: Essences or Conventions?," in The Concept of Record, 105.
118. According to Duranti, the label "probative" should be restricted to records whose written form and procedurally separate construction are legally required (Duranti, Eastwood, and MacNeil, Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records, 17-18, 76). However, the remarks here apply to all records whose creation is procedurally separate from the activity they describe, irrespective of legal status.
119. The range and variety of recent literature can be gauged from the following. In philosophy: Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1970);
120. Jerry A. Fodor, Representations: Philosophical Essays on the Foundations of Cognitive Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981);
121. Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988);
122. Robert Cummins, Representations, Targets, and Attitudes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996);
123. Claire Colebrook, Ethics and Representation: From Kant to Post-structuralism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999);
124. Emma Borg, ed., Meaning and Representation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002);
125. Hugh Clapin, ed., Philosophy of Mental Representation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002).
126. In linguistics: Antoine Culioli, Cognition and Representation in Linguistic Theory (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1995);
127. Edwin Williams, Representation Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003).
128. In psychology: Alberto Greco, "The Concept of Representation in Psychology," Cognitive Systems 4 (1995): 247-56;
129. Ilona Roth and Vicki Bruce, Perception and Representation: Current Issues, 2nd ed. (Buckingham, England: Open University Press, 1995);
130. Philip Van Loocke, ed., The Nature of Concepts: Evolution, Structure and Representation (London: Routledge, 1999).
131. In anthropology: John Van Maanen, ed., Representation in Ethnography (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995).
132. In history: F. R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001).
133. In art: Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London: Phaidon, 1960);
134. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968);
135. John Willats, Art and Representation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997);
136. Richard Wollheim, "On Pictorial Representation," in Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting, ed. Rob Van Gerwen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
137. In photography and film studies: Robert Wicks, "Photography as a Representational Art," British Journal of Aesthetics 29 (1989): 1-9;
138. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
139. In management and organization theory: Simon Lilley, Geoffrey Lightfoot, and Paulo Amaral, Representing Organization: Knowledge, Management and the Information Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
140. Interdisciplinary studies include Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985);
141. George Levine, ed., Realism and Representation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993);
142. Jonathan Potter, Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction (London: Sage, 1996);
143. Stuart Hall, ed., Representation (London: Sage, 1997);
144. Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, eds., From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002).
145. Richard Bernheimer, The Nature of Representation (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 34;
146. Stephen E. Palmer, "Fundamental Aspects of Cognitive Representation," in Cognition and Categorization, 262, 266;
147. Karl Bühler, "The Key Principle: The Sign-character of Language," in Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, ed. Robert E. Innis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 72;
148. Allan Paivio, Mental Representations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 16. The word representation is also used as a noncount noun, to refer to the process of representing or the concept of being a representative of some group or individual. Our chief concern is with representation as a count noun having a plural form.
149. W. J. T. Mitchell, "Representation," in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 13.
150. Maria Guercio, "Definitions of Electronic Records, the European Perspective," Archives and Museum Informatics 11 (1997): 221;
151. Paola Carucci, Terminology and Current Records (2000), available at http://www.ica.org/sites/default/files/terminology-eng.html.
152. For a non-Italian perspective, see Elisabeth Kaplan, "Many Paths to Partial Truths: Archives, Anthropology, and the Power of Representation," Archival Science 2 (2002): 209-20.
153. Palmer, "Fundamental Aspects of Cognitive Representation," 262-72, 290-7;
154. Paivio, Mental Representations, 16-19;
155. Cummins, Representations, Targets, and Attitudes, 91-96, 109-11. These propositions are not beyond dispute, but are indicative of views commonly held by cognitive psychologists and philosophers of mind.
156. Characterizing records as "persistent" is preferable to the statements in many definitions that a record is something "set aside" or consciously preserved. Effective records management requires an appraisal process to decide what should be captured into a recordkeeping system, but acts of capture do not determine whether particular entities are records. A record is still a record even if it remains in someone's desk or briefcase and is never captured into a formal recordkeeping system. See Yeo, "Concepts of Record (2): Prototypes and Boundary Objects," forthcoming.
157. Space does not permit full discussion of the meaning of activities or their relationship to functions, processes, and transactions; for an exploration of these questions, see Shepherd and Yeo, Managing Records, 2-3, 49-57.
158. Duranti, Diplomatics, 67-70.
159. The inaccessibility of any past reality has been frequently asserted by Verne Harris, following his reading of Derrida. See for example Verne Harris, "Claiming Less, Delivering More: A Critique of Positivist Formulations on Archives in South Africa," Archivaria 44 (1997): 135;
160. "The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory, and Archives in South Africa," Archival Science 2 (2002): 65.
161. For alternative viewpoints, see Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 3:
162. "Because one can see reality only through representation, it does not follow that one does not see reality at all. Partial, selective . . . vision of something is not no vision of it whatsoever"; Carlo Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian (London: Verso, 1999), 17:
163. "Every representation is constructed in accordance with a predetermined code. To gain direct access to historical reality . . . is impossible. . .. To infer from this, however, that reality is unknowable is . . . unsustainable in existential terms and inconsistent in logical terms." 83 Mitchell, "Representation," 21.
164. Marc Berg and Geoffrey Bowker, "The Multiple Bodies of the Medical Record: Towards a Sociology of an Artifact," Sociological Quarterly 38 (1997): 513-37.
165. See for example State Records New South Wales, Standard on Full and Accurate Records (2004), available at http://www.records.nsw.gov.au/ recordkeeping/docs/standard%20on%20full%20and%20accurate% 20records.pdf.
166. Dennis W. Stampe, "Toward a Causal Theory of Linguistic Representation," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 2 (1977): 48, 50-1.
167. For discussion of the representational character of archival description, see Wendy M. Duff and Verne Harris, "Stories and Names: Archival Description as Narrating Records and Constructing Meanings," Archival Science 2 (2002): 263-85;
168. Elizabeth Yakel, "Archival Representation," Archival Science 3 (2003): 1-25.
169. Stampe, "Toward a Causal Theory," 42. Linguists and developmental psychologists call this "metarepresentation."
170. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1-17.
171. For a critique of Rorty's "antirepresentationalism,"
172. see Ankersmit, Historical Representation, 273-80.