From the earliest annals of recorded civilization, archives have served personal and public, practical and symbolic uses. According to the type, value, and significance of the documents, the responsibility of maintenance might fall to scholars, religious figures, or minor government administrators.
The archival profession can be traced as far back as ancient Mesopotamia (ca. 2400 B.C.). Early clay-tablet archives led to early Egyptian archives migrating to Europe and into ancient Greece and Republican Rome. The Vatican archives, primarily relating to incoming financial or legal matters, have been traced back to the third century. In Europe during the Middle Ages, as feudal kingdoms consolidated into nations and laws began to be codified, precise record keeping became increasingly necessary and prevalent. Gradually, the changing circumstances of European society and governments effected the manner in which records were used and preserved. By the time of the French Revolution it was widely accepted that records were critical because they protected the rights of the people, and that such records must be available for public scrutiny and use. Prior to the French Archives Nationales, all European and English archival collections existed solely for official use and were not generally open to the public. The 24th of June, 1794 marked the French revolution in terms of archival access and perceptions of what archives were for a society began to change. The early 19th century revealed new European archival institutions. Library professionals took intellectual and organizational control of the archives by the end of the 19th century, and new cataloging standards (ones specific to archives) began to be developed.
[Principles specific to archives were also developed including the idea of the collection as a whole. "This principle recognized that the context in which a document originally existed adds information to the contents of the document itself. In archival collections, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" (Hannestad, 1991). The "Sybelian Regulations" established the principle of provenance: the "respect for every original order, for every original designation." With its strict regard for the sanctity of the original order, this principle is also known as the "principle of original order." Under this principle, it was no longer sufficient to merely maintain records of similar origin as a single collection, but was now necessary to return the records to their original filing structure.]The first settlers in America brought with them the knowledge and practice of precise record-keeping. Records of marriages, births, and baptisms were saved by the Church, and often by individual families as well. Hunters and trappers listed their business transactions, merchants kept track of sales, homemakers and famous figures alike wrote letters, diaries, and memoirs, land titles were recorded and filed away for safe-keeping, and as settlements grew into towns and territories, civic documents increased. After the Revolutionary War, the first Continental Congress acknowledged that it was expected to keep official records on behalf of all citizens, and followed the practices they had learned in Europe. In 1791, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the first of its kind, was formed to "preserve the manuscripts of the present day to the remotest ages of posterity." Similar local and national organizations soon followed, many concerned with collecting the private papers and memorabilia of famous individuals in addition to official documents.
Slowly, as more independent historical societies and archival repositories were created, they began to be even more concerned with the most efficient ways of preserving their materials. By the early 1800s one Ohio society developed a manner of protecting its holding in "air-tight metallic cases, regularly numbered and indexed, so that it may be known what is in each case without opening it." But each archive had its own system of organization and storage, with varying degrees of success. It wasn't until the end of the nineteenth century that common archival theories and practices were shared among many separate societies and associations, ultimately leading to the formation of a distinct archival profession in the United States. The American Historical Association, created in 1884, took as its major focus the development of standardized systems of archival organization, by helping to foster interaction between the various independent archives. The AHA spawned several subgroups such as the Historical Manuscripts Commission, the Public Archives Commission and, in 1909, a Conference of Archivists. This latter group met annually and worked to establish new archives and to promote and improve those already in existence. During the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration created the Historical Records Survey and the Survey of Federal Archives, and then, in 1934, Congress established the National Archives as an independent federal agency.
No comments:
Post a Comment