Teaching

A Course Design for ARST 517

The UBC iSchool course History of Recordkeeping (ARST 517) is a graduate level elective provided to students who are being trained for professional employment as Archivists and Records Managers. The goal of this course is to “provide students with an historical foundation for understanding and analyzing contemporary record-keeping practices.”

The design and content I include is continually evolving, but the following description provides an indication of what to expect in my course syllabus.

Like my own learning style in this field, the learning experience I try to build is exploratory, with guidance to what I think is instructional. The course is retrospective in that it seeks to follow back along the paths which led to present record-keeping regimes. Therefore, contemporary record-keeping concepts and principles, as expressed in standards such as ISO 15489, and the InterPARES model, provide intellectual starting points for a critical historical study. Common archival and RM processes, controls, and practices provide the broad structure of classes. This design helps to get away from the narrative model of a historical survey course, and facilitates introduction of descriptive and explanatory scholarship.

Assignments and lessons include the study of particular historical examples, and provide opportunities for the development of analytical skills.

The geographic scope is shaped by the course goal (addressing the genealogy of the current state of records and archives management). The core historical setting encompasses South-West Asia, the Mediterranean region, and Europe. This area of heterogeneous societies and polities is examined as an interdependent whole, not as a rift between East and West. This core setting is also placed in a global context, especially in regards to the advent of Modernity.

The chronological scope is likewise circumscribed by the retrospective mode of the course. Antiquity is rife with record-keeping history, but presents the student with extreme temporal and cultural distance, fragmentary evidence, and specialized literature. Characteristics recognized as pertinent to our contemporary conceptualizations can be mis-recognized and subject to anachronistic understandings. Therefore, the focus is predominantly on the Early Modern period, antecedents in the Medieval world, and constructions of Modernity.

There are many readings to choose from for this course. I list my current selection of required and additional readings below. A History of Archival Practice, Proctor’s translation of Delsalle’s Une histoire de l’archivistique, is provisional in its content, but provides an outline and global reference framework. Within this framework other readings provide additional content and critical supplements.

Readings

Burak, Guy. “Evidentiary Truth Claims, Imperial Registers, and the Ottoman Archive: Contending Legal Views of Archival and Record-keeping Practices in Ottoman Greater Syria (Seventeenth–Nineteenth Centuries).” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 79, 2 (2016): 233-254.

Burns, Kathryn. “Notaries, Truth, and Consequences.” The American Historical Review 110.2 (2005): 350-379.

Delsalle, Paul. A History of Archival Practice. Translated by Margaret Proctor. Routledge, 2018. (Selections)

El-Leithy, Tamer. “Living Documents, Dying Archives: Towards a Historical Anthropology of Medieval Arabic Archives.” Al-Qantara 32 (2011): 389-434.

Head, Randolph. Making Archives in Early Modern Europe: Proof, Information, and Political Record-Keeping, 1400–1700. Cambridge University Press, 2019. (Selections)

Hubner, Brian. An Administered People, a Contextual Approach to the Study of Bureaucracy, Records-keeping and Records in the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs, 1755-1950. Diss. University of Manitoba (2000). Chapter 3 “Records-Keeping and Records”: 62-91.

Lowe, Graham S. “‘The Enormous File’: The Evolution of the Modern Office in Early Twentieth-Century Canada.” Archivaria 19 (January 1984): 137-51.

Melis, Guido. “The Repository of Memory: The Historical Evolution of Italy’s Administrative Archives.” Archivum XLV (2000): 81-93.

Mangini, Marta. “Tabelliones scribunt de foris: Captions and their Functions in Italian Notarial Records of the Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries.” Manuscripta 60:1 (2016): 1-29.

Meyer, Elizabeth. “Writing in Roman Legal Contexts.” In The Cambridge Companion to Roman Law. Cambridge University Press, 2015: 85-96.

Miller, Thea. “The German Registry: the Evolution of a Recordkeeping Model.” Archival Science 3.1 (2003): 43-63.

Posner, Ernst. Archives in the Ancient World. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2003. (Selections)

Russell, Bill. “The White Man’s Paper Burden: Aspects of Records Keeping in the Department of Indian Affairs, 1860-1914.” Archivaria 1.19 (1984): 50-72.

van Berkel, Maaike. “Archives and Chanceries: pre-1500, in Arabic.” In K. Fleet, G. Krämer, D. Matringe, J. Nawas (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Islam (Third Edition) Leiden: Brill, 2013: 24-32.

Wolfe, Heather, and Peter Stallybrass. “The Material Culture of Record-Keeping in Early Modern England.” In Kate Peters, Alexandra Walsham, and Liesbeth Corens (eds), Archives and Information in the Early Modern World. Proceedings of the British Academy. London, 2018: 179-208.

Yeo, Geoffrey. Record-Making and Record-Keeping in Early Societies. Routledge, 2023. (Selections)

Why Recordkeeping and History?

For the student of Archival Studies the development of their historical consciousness takes place not only in mediation between the users of archives and primary sources; important as this is, the documents in their care, and the systems of that care, must themselves be historicized by the archivist, placing on the student a responsibility for acquiring a unique set of perspectives.

The student preparing for the familiar mediator role can rely on an application of mainstream history education, and listening to users. They must continuously learn to recognize the sometimes sensitive histories of individuals, communities, and political conflicts expressed in archival documents in their care: bringing to their jobs a fact-based, but empathic, knowledge. The development of general historical consciousness, beyond memory making, is not an easy thing to accomplish.

We must add to this the archivist’s special responsibility to historicize the records themselves. This takes a few different forms.

Individual documents and aggregates, their creation, storage, use, and preservation or destruction, have histories of their own. This temporal perspective was once captured in the concept of the life-cycle of the record, but which has been enriched by concepts such as continuum and archivality. The essential tasks of the archivist (appraisal, arrangement and description, disposition) are dependent on knowing the origins, functions, and activities of record creators, and preserving in the records themselves evidence of such. This history is a key element for the preservation of record authenticity.

Another historical perspective is also necessary. The products of record creators do not exist in a vacuum. Creators have always existed in particular institutional and legal circumstances which determine their activities and attitudes to document production. The student’s engagement with juridical and administrative contexts broadens understanding of records to include a sociological examination. The reasoning and legal frameworks for making and setting aside records, and the ways it was done, will inform our understanding of the modern concepts, principles and practices of archival science and studies.

Why necessary? Note that the 2024 Final Report to the Association of Canadian Archivists from the Indigenous Matters Working Group assessed as “weak” the 2022 Reconciliation Framework’s recommendation to “understand and acknowledge the colonial roots of mainstream archival theory, policies, and practices.” The present regime of international standards forming professional record-keeping and archival best practices, the terminology, concepts, and theories, have a Western legacy, with roots in the the evolution of the modern state’s particular legal-rational matrix. Pedagogical legacies should not be legitimated by tradition or presumption of historical progress. The student of Archival Science, to engage with contemporary realities and demands on the profession, needs a history of practices and theories to comprehend the present legal and political order determining records and archives.

Also, those engaged in designing and managing record-keeping systems are embedded in that order, and yet may be unaware that the litany of tools at their disposal have pasts from which they might learn. One of the general conclusions which may be drawn from histories of record-keeping practices is separateness: the practical isolation of record-keepers and preservers over time and space; continuities and borrowings are present, but dis-connections, locked-in novelties, and reinvention are frequent characteristics. New perspectives can generate better practices.

The various applications of historical perspective compliment and combine in building and maintaining record-keeping systems, and archival services. For instance, recognizing, explaining, and addressing gaps in the holdings of archival institutions relies on investigating how, and why or why not, records were created and preserved. It relies on communication of that information to users by thoughtful description and re-description. It relies on a social science of record-keeping histories.

A Course Design for ARST 517

Readings

Recommended Readings

Why Recordkeeping and History?

Further Reading