24.Archival methodology

Archival methodology provides a set of instruments to establish, maintain and analyse the formal quality of process-bound information. It is used to bring about, assess and maintain the bond between the records and the generating work processes. It is aimed at having records play their roles in working processes and at analysing these roles. The quality of process-bound information depends on the quality and the stability of the bond that links content data and generating processes. Only when content data can be retrieved and analysed in an adequate form, in an adequate structure and within the context of its provenance (i.e. only when content data are linked to the relevant metadata) the information provided can have the intended quality. Form, structure and context are sometimes consciously manipulated in order to change the meaning of the contents, but they also have the tendency without deliberate intervention to become detached from the content data that they structure and to which they thereby give significance. Reliable information becomes unreliable information, high quality information degenerates to information of poorer quality; archives degenerate to documentary collections, evidence turns into documentation, documents into loose data. If one wants to prevent such processes to occur, one has to maintain the relationship between content data on the one hand and the form, the structure and the context of the creation of these data on the other, or carefully document the changes that are made to it. At the level of the record this means respect for the form. This is the domain of diplomatic from time immemorial. At the level of the archive this means respect for the structure (the principle of the original order) and the context of creation (the principle of provenance). Respecting form, structure and context of creation means maintaining the relations between the content data, the relations between the records and the relations between the records and the generating functions and processes.