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What is recorded is never simply ‘what happened’: Record keeping in modern organizational culture

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Abstract

Traditional premises in archival theory and practice hold that archival records are authentic as to procedure and impartial as to creation because they are created as a means for, and as a by-product of, action, and not for the sake of posterity. Such Positivist assumptions about the nature of records have come under sustained scrutiny in the archival literature over the past decade. The post-Positivist view of records embraces the record as a socially constructed and maintained entity. This paper situates itself within this new paradigm in an exploration of the beginning of the life of the record. It is therefore concerned with the creator (or recorder) and the social construction of the record. In expanding beyond a purely administrative- and juridical-based theory of records, this paper draws upon research from other disciplines, such as sociology, in order to place records and record keeping within a framework that allows for an understanding of their social nature. In particular, the goal is to determine the underlying social factors that directly influence and shape the creation and keeping of records and to begin to understand how these factors manifest themselves in the construction of the record.

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  56. Work conducted by the author as part of the International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems project (InterPARES) indicates that this is not always so. An analysis of one of the InterPARES case-study interviews revealed rich data on a number of issues relating to record creation in the digital environment. The case study examined was of a dataCAD® system of a small American architectural firm where one individual, a partner in the firm, was interviewed. Themes that emerged from the case study related to three main areas: how organizations viewed their own records and how these perceptions are modified by outside influences; the factors that influence the way that records are created and formatted; and how electronic records and paper records are perceived to be similar and how they are perceived to be different. The report, “Applying Content Analysis to Case Study Data: a Preliminary Report”, is available online as an appendix to the Final Report of the Authenticity Task Force at http://www.interpares.org

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  1. Department of Information Studies, University of California Los Angeles, Box 951520, 90095, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Ciaran B. Trace

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Trace, C.B. What is recorded is never simply ‘what happened’: Record keeping in modern organizational culture. Archival Science 2, 137–159 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435634

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