Respect for Authority

Authority Control, Context Control, and Archival Description

Jean Dryden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317994046
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Groundbreaking ideas in archival description and control Archival authority control is an often ambiguous label that embraces a potentially wide scope. In this active and quickly-evolving field, new methods of clarification are essential for successful archive management. The articles in Respect for Authority: Authority Control, Context Control, and Archival Description offer an innovative approach by marking and exploring a clear distinction between conventional archival authority files and the broader concept of context control. Intended to not only answer important questions but raise worthy new ones as well, Respect for Authority: Authority Control, Context Control, and Archival Description reveals striking new perspectives in managing archival description more effectively. The engaging essays in this collection tackle key issues of archive authority control and offer sound proposals for advancing a new course. Comprehensive in its approach, this text takes an in-depth look at both the International Standard for Archival Authority Records (ISAAR) and the American standard, Describing Archives: a Content Standard (DACS) and considers the place of authority control in these two standards for archival description. In addition, contributors offer practical answers to the thorny issue of identifying the boundaries of a records-creating entity and present criteria for determining when a new entity is established. International in scope, this book presents groundbreaking case studies by archive professionals from Canada, the United States, Italy, and Australia that document the successes of different institutional applications that describe the records-creator first and then link this description to that of the records themselves. Respect for Authority: Authority Control, Context Control, and Archival Description also includes expert discussions of:

• the role of standards
• the nature of archives and their relationships with their creators
• resources necessary to fully document contextualized content
• the power of provenance
• possibilities available through a trinity of descriptive entitiesrecords, agents, and functions
• the potential of provenance rediscovery in American repositories
• postmodern archive theory, multiple provenance, and the reconceptualization of archive context
• using ISAAR to document records-creating environments
• challenges inherent in implementing series-based systems of arrangement and description
• the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Archival Resource Catalog (ARC)
• digitizing and publishing registers and the development of the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM)
• and many more!

Ideal for archive professionals, manuscript librarians, students, and researchers of archival administration, Respect for Authority: Authority Control, Context Control, and Archival Description not only resolves important questions revealed by these new trends but opens new discussions of a major shift in descriptive practice.

Case Studies

The Role of Archival Authority Records in the Finding Aid System of the Archives of Ontario

Steve Billinton

SUMMARY. In the late 1990s the Archives of Ontario adopted a version of the Australian “series system” for the arrangement of Government of Ontario records. Series-based systems of arrangement and description provide an alternative means for archives to represent the relationships between a body of records, the functions and activities that generated them, and the organizational entities that carried out those functions. Integral to these systems is the use of archival authority records to represent the people and groups that create archival records. Implementing such a system does present challenges. It forces an archival repository to closely analyze the organizational context from which it receives records and to make systematic decisions about how this administrative environment will be represented in authority records so as to consistently represent the context of records creation. Moreover, once established, systems that document record creating bodies in archival authority records require a considerable ongoing resource commitment as new records are acquired and new context entities are described. This article outlines the characteristics of the Archives of Ontario’s descriptive system and discusses some of the challenges presented in adopting such a system. doi:10.1300/J201v05n01_05 [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <[email protected]> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2007 by The Haworth Press. All rights reserved.]

KEYWORDS. Australian series system, archival arrangement and description, archival authority records, International Standard Archival Authority Record (Corporate Bodies, Persons, Families), ISAAR(CPF), government records, Archives of Ontario

Introduction

In a 1913 report on the management of state archives written for the Illinois State Education Building Commission, Waldo G. Leland, the historian and noted surveyor of archival repositories, wrote that the first task in the arrangement of government records was to undertake a study of administrative history and functions:

The first essential is a guide to the public offices and their history which shall show for each office its origins, its functions, the origins of these functions, where transferred from another office or arising from new legislation, the modifications of these functions or their cessation, the organization of the office, with any changes therein, and finally the termination of the office (if it no longer be in existence) showing whether the functions then ceased or were transferred to other offices . . .¹

Few archivists would argue with Leland’s insistence on understanding the administrative and functional context of government records prior to their arrangement and description. A key characteristic of all records is their relationship to a creating entity–a person, organization or government agency–and to the functions and activities undertaken by that entity. Despite a wide variety of practice and implementation, the principle of provenance, broadly conceived, is paramount in the representation of archival records. If records are to be maintained as evidence through time, the context of their creation must be represented, along with information about their content and structure.

But the principle of provenance does not necessarily dictate one single system of representation for archival records. The best way to systematically capture and represent Leland’s “first essential . . . guide to the public offices and their history” in a finding aid system so that archival records may be located and understood is open to debate. Should the administrative and functional context be represented along with, and embedded in, the descriptions of the records? Should organizational entities form the basis of the major units of arrangement in the system (such as fonds or record groups) as has traditionally been practiced in North America? Or should contextual information documenting the people and groups that create records be captured separately in archival authority records and then linked to descriptions of records so as to demonstrate provenancial relationships?

In the finding aid systems of those government archives adopting a record group or fonds-based approach, administrative/functional context has traditionally been incorporated directly into record descriptions in an administrative history element. Moreover, the major groupings into which records are arranged (fonds or record groups) are usually formed based on a creating body (for example, a government department or some part of a department).² However, following on the development of the series system in Australia in the 1960s and writings by some North American commentators, alternative approaches to arrangement and description that separate the description of records from the description of creators have been either implemented or posited.³ A key component of these alternative descriptive systems is the use of archival authority records to separately describe the people or groups that create archival records.

One institution that has undertaken an alternative approach to arrangement and description is the Archives of Ontario, which in the late 1990s adopted a series-based approach for the arrangement and description of the records of the government of Ontario.⁴ This article outlines the characteristics of the Archives of Ontario’s descriptive system and the key role that archival authority records play in it, as well as discussing some of the challenges presented in adopting such a system.

Systematizing Arrangement Prior to Automation

Prior to automating its descriptive system in the late 1990s, the Archives of Ontario engaged in a process of rationalizing and systematizing the manner in which government records holdings were arranged and described. Automation was not viewed as an end in itself, as the full benefits of a computerized descriptive system would only be realized if it was underpinned by a more rigorous system of arrangement. As with many repositories in North America, the Archives of Ontario had for some decades based its system of arrangement on “record groups.” In this system, each series of government records was assigned to a record group that was formed to bring together all record series of related provenance. Paper-based inventories were created that presented descriptions of all the record series assigned to a given record group as well as contextual information such as an administrative history of the organizational body that was the basis for the formation of the record group. Despite considerable evolution and tinkering with the system over time, by the late 1990s the basis for defining record groups was still unsystematic and arbitrary. A record group could be formed based on any number of ill-defined criteria: a government ministry/department (sometimes including predecessor departments, sometimes not); a group of related fonds brought together for convenience (e.g., records created by all Ontario Royal Commissions); a broad functional area (e.g., records related to the tax revenue function); a combination of function and form of material (e.g., sound and moving image material relating to tourism); or a non-departmental subordinate agency (e.g., Liquor Licence Board of Ontario). In short, the record group, which was the primary unit of arrangement and the basis of assigning provenance to a series, had no clearly articulated definition, resulting in an unsystematic representation of the provenance of archival records of the government of Ontario.

Realizing the need to systematize arrangement to maximize the advantages of automation, the Archives of Ontario identified two possible options–a fonds-based approach, based on rigorous criteria defining a fonds-creating body, and a series-based approach, as practiced by a number of archives in Australia. After a detailed analysis of these two alternatives, the fonds-based approach was found wanting in the context of the government of Ontario.5 The government of Ontario is a large and complex organization characterized by frequent administrative change. In such a record keeping environment it is difficult to apply detailed criteria to identify fonds-creating bodies (or a systematic basis for forming record groups) to accurately establish the provenance of records. As Bob Krawczyk has written:

In modern governments ministries, branches, offices, and other ‘agencies’ are continually created, renamed, reconfigured, again shuffled, merged, and divided in the glorious push and pull of constant administrative adjustment. This fact is much lamented by archivists for it makes their lives complicated. How is it possible to divide the resulting detritus of administration into comprehensible, mutually exclusive groups in order to establish provenance?⁶

One might be able to agree on criteria for identifying a fonds or record group creating body, such as those posited by Michel Duchein, however, administrative change will make applying those criteria in real-life situations difficult.⁷ Name changes, function changes, the elimination of old corporate bodies and the creation of new ones all challenge the archivist’s ability to “carve out” a cohesive, fonds-creating entity from a larger and constantly evolving whole, one that can be said to accurately represent the provenance of particular groups of records. This is complicated even further in hierarchical administrations, which beg the question: at what level in an administrative hierarchy should provenance be represented by a fonds or record group?

A second problem identified with fonds/record groups systems stems from the fact that the pattern of records creation, accumulation and use means that, in many cases, it can be a distortion of provenance to attribute a series to one and only one fonds-creating entity. Over the course of its lifespan, a given series may be created or accumulated by more than one fonds-creating entity as functions and activities are shifted among administrative bodies. The reality of many record series is that they can be characterized as “multiple-provenance” series in that they have been created or accumulated by more than one administrative body (possibly even simultaneously) over the course or their lifetimes. Despite this fact, fonds and record group approaches tend to lock a series into only one fonds or record group, thus providing a single provenancial view that can obscure, rather than illuminate, the complexity of a record’s context of creation. As Krawczyk notes, “According to a fonds-based arrangement, the records must be placed in a single fonds, although nothing in their history of creation, accumulation, or transfer to the archives would suggest that this is the best means of representing their provenance.”⁸

The difficulties and liabilities of implementing a fonds-based approach to arrangement for government of Ontario records led the Archives of Ontario to abandon the fonds or record group as the primary level of arrangement in favour of a modified version of the Australian series system. A series-based system was felt to more accurately represent the reality of records creation and use. It is a system that can provide information about the multiple creators who contribute to a particular series over time and in hierarchies, while providing systematic information about creators so that the context of creation for a record series is clearly elaborated.

Series-Based Systems of Arrangement and Description

So what exactly are series-based systems of arrangement and description? The origins of what has come to be known as the “series system” date back to the 1960s and the work of Peter J. Scott at what was then the Commonwealth Record Office, now the National Archives of Australia. The system was piloted as an experimental replacement of the record group system then in use, and the series system was adopted shortly thereafter as the “basic method of classification and arrangement” for the record holdings of Australia’s national archives. Scott argued that in its application, if not intent, the record group system was “in conflict with basic archival principles” and tended to distort or simplify the often complex relationship between archives and their administrative contexts.⁹

At its heart, the key innovation in Scott’s system was to separate the description of records (records control) from the description of the administrative bodies that created records (context control), and then to bring those elements together as required through linkages (modified by dates) to demonstrate the relationship between a body of records and the entities that created it over the course of its lifespan. The base unit of aggregate records description became the series, and the broader level of record cat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ABOUT THE EDITOR
• INTRODUCTION
• ISSUES
• CASE STUDIES
• Index