25.Application of archival methodology: The bottom-up and the top-down approach

Form, structure and context of creation are concepts which refer to specific data which both constitute and maintain the record as a record and provide the interpretative framework to their contents. Using these concepts, archival methodology supports both the creation and the interpretation of records. In applying archival methodology, we can choose, as with every system, between two approaches. We can approach the archive either from the elements of which it consists or from the functions that it fulfils or has fulfilled. The first approach is the classic one. An archive is considered to be one physical entity; it is through an analysis of the records and their arrangement in an archive that one attempts to gain an insight into their mutual relationships and thereby into the entire archive and the work processes that have generated that archive. This approach can still be used, especially in the analysis of an archive which has already been created, which is not too extensive and which consists of classic information carriers. Current archival methodology often adopts the position that the provenance (i.e. functional and organisational) context could better be taken as the starting point for the analysis. Thereby one first analyses the mission, the functions and tasks and maps out the actors, their mandates and work processes. On the basis of this model a recordkeeping system is designed or reconstructed. This functional analytical approach is broader than the classic descriptive approach and is also more suitable for the analysis of a dynamic archive or one that has still to be created and for very extensive and digital archives, which cannot be analysed record by record. The classic-descriptive method and the modem functional-analytical method are just opposite approaches, not antagonisms and the same goes for the inductive (bottom-up) and the deductive (top-down) method. The top-down approach does not exclude the bottom-up approach, but presumes it. Research into work processes and their relationships can lead to predictions about records that should have been created, but it is the outcome in practice that has to show whether this prediction is correct. The other way around a reconstruction of the physical structure of an archive leads to predictions about the organisation of the work processes which the archive has generated, but the validity of these predictions must be tested by analysing those work processes themselves. Both approaches must be used complementarily: archivists as all human beings are inclined not to look beyond the end of their noses; archivists, too, are inclined to see what they have predicted.