Suppose I give you a box that contains invoices, letters, photographs, meeting minutes and project documentation. How might you organize it? One way is to sort records by type: put all photographs together, all letters together, all financial material together. The final groupings could be very neat and orderly. But what information about the context in which the records were created and used has been lost in that process? Did these materials once comprise a single large file, or perhaps two or more? The process of sorting them into separate buckets by type obscures the context in which they once belonged.
Before making such decisions in the records you manage, consider this small exercise in analyzing the arrangement of a group of records. What can you learn about this record group’s arrangement from the names of the folders and their existing structure? When were they created? Who created them? Who is the subject of much of the material? In what order were the records originally filed or arranged? Did someone place all of their files in a folder entitled “Community Hall Renovation?” and include there the correspondence, invoices, construction plans and photographs that documented a single activity? Take a photograph of the boxes’ folder arrangements and write a sentence or two describing what is the arrangement and why it looks the way it does. It is in this activity that you will have first encountered the concept of provenance.
Provenance is the concept of keeping records associated with the individual, family, organization, or event that created them or for which they were created. For example, if two people collect clippings from the newspapers about local events, you need not file them together just because their subjects are similar. Both sets may be useful in their own context, but each set may reflect a different set of interests, tasks or goals of its creator. By recording provenance, you ensure that records that might not belong in a particular group don’t get mixed in with other records, or that records that do have similar subjects in different collections don’t become mixed into one collection by mistake.
Original order is the principle that, if possible, you keep records in the way that the creator arranged them. If original order isn’t discernible, try to figure out the system the creator followed (such as a numeric filing order) and re-create the arrangement if you can, or create new series that reflect how the records were once used and related to each other. The principle of original order means that an archivist will recognize the use of numbering or date-based folders, yearbooks, project folders or alphabetical arrangement to file records, or the use of particular file paths on a computer, all of which reflect the creator’s organization scheme. Archivists don’t need to retain everything in its original condition (the accidental “pile” or folder or folder with an unclear title), but they do want to know if there’s a system to it that should be preserved, or if there’s a relationship among the records that might be better understood in that original arrangement. For example, you might recognize and keep together a series of drafts, reviewed drafts and final versions of documents and arrange them chronologically.
The tricky part, for an inexperienced archivist, is to decide whether the arrangement you see is an original order or not. How do you recognize a relationship between records, when it might appear to be a collection of loose papers with an apparent relationship to one another, that you don’t yet recognize or can’t find anything in it to tell you anything about them? You can’t just decide, based on one example, that everything should be filed the same way. You need to see a pattern. You might recognize that three or more items (for example, a series of correspondence folders, each folder titled by client or project, or by year) reflect a common relationship. You might not see enough evidence to suggest that all the loose papers are filed by project and so you decide not to organize them in any particular order. When you have questions, write down your questions and your provisional answers (such as, “These records appear to be a project series” rather than “The records are arranged by project”) for future reference, when you know you need more time to look into the matter.
At the end of this process, after you have collected information about provenance and the original order of records, you create a collection arrangement that preserves that information. Keep records together, or sort them into different series by creator if you need to. Keep them in series if possible. Give them titles. You may not want to give them a new title unless it’s necessary to identify the new series. Create codes that give you information about how to reference and retrieve particular parts of your records system and give you the location of records within the archives. This is an important exercise because it provides a workable model: you don’t necessarily have to organize a collection perfectly, you just need to be able to describe your records as much as possible, and be able to retrieve records you want to use.