Levéltári Közlemények, 93. (2022)
Angol nyelvű összefoglalók
Abstracts Balázs István Bényei THE CHANGING CONCEPT OF THE DOCUMENT FROM THE 19TH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT DAY The transition from traditional paper-based records management to the widespread use of electronic records has also meant a sharp paradigm shift for archives, which has necessarily entailed a reassessment of certain archival theoretical issues. At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, one of the main questions of archival theory concerned the nature of archival material, i.e. the definition of what should be archived. From an archival point of view, the concept of a document was thus narrowed down to material of an archival nature, i.e. material created or retained by an institution in the course of its activities. The emergence and relative spread of new reproduction processes, accompanied by technical progress, led relatively quickly to the idea that, in addition to written texts readable on paper in the narrow sense, data sets recorded on other types and media should also be considered as documents. The notion of document was thus gradually extended to other information carriers, in which the unity of data and carrier constituted the document proper. The development of computer technology, its everwider use and its specific features have fundamentally challenged the earlier concept of the document. In electronic data management, the close unity between the medium and the data is broken down, so that the notion of them as an organic unit is no longer suitable for capturing the essence of the digitally existing document. The notion of the document as a unit of information and medium, among other criteria, has now become an internationally accepted norm in archival literature. A more recently developed theoretical approach sees the document as a fixed set of data, independent of its carrier and linked to a document creator. 326
