Sonderband 2. International Council on Archives. Dritte Europäische Archivkonferenz, Wien 11. bis 15. Mai 1993. Tagungsprotokolle (1996)

3. Session / Séance. Sharing of Experience and Exchange of Staff / Partage d’Expériences et Echange des Personnes - Thibodeau, Sharon: The Pitfalls of Terminology and linguistic Barriers / Pieges de la Terminologie et Barrieres linguistiques (english 207 - français 217)

3. Session/Séance: Thibodeau, Pitfalls of Terminology and linguistic Barriers

contextual information, thereby limiting its usefulness to archivists and researchers. In addition, implementation of such standards tends to foster the repetition of contextual information without ensuring consistency among repeated mentions.

Standards based on a concept of archival description that considers representation of provenance to be an equal partner with representation of records could include rules governing the representation of provenance sufficient to ensure that contextual information is consistently collected and successfully and usefully linked to information about records. Descriptive products resulting from the implementation of such standards would be characterized by fuller, consistently organized information about records creators; information that can be used effectively by archivists and researchers to retrieve pertinent records12. The information could be collected and the representations created and updated independently of the processing of any archival records.

It was the decision of the Ad-Hoc-Commission on Descriptive Standards to base its work on existing Anglo-American descriptive standards13 that led to its adoption of the records-based concept of description. All three of these standards focus on the records, considering provenance to be an attribute of the records rather than an independent entity. As US archivists and their European colleagues continue to recognize the value of independent rather than dependent representation of provenance, they may yet be in a position to demonstrate its viability as a unit of description and revise the concept of description as follows:

(1) the process of linking information about the characteristics and content of an archival entity to information about the activities of its creator and

(2) the results of this process; the creation of representations of original materials and their source for a wide variety of uses by archivists and researchers14.

Defining the Fonds

The object of archival respect since 1841, the „fonds“ took on renewed conceptual prominence when the Ad-Hoc-Commission on Archival Descriptive Standards introduced it as the „fundamental unit of description“ in the Statement of Principles Regarding Archival Description issued for comment in November 1990. The implication that description cannot proceed without a clear understanding of the fonds, has elicited some interesting discussion of this important concept.

There appears to be general agreement that the fonds are records (or archives). Differences of opinion arise, however, when attempts are made to respond to the question: „Which (or what) records?“ Responses vary according to application (or

12 US archivists have been discussing the value of adequately representing the provenance of records since the publication of Richard Lytle’s two-part article, „Intellectuel Access to Archives“, in: The American Archivist 43 (1980) n° 1 and 2, p. 64-75 and 191-207.

See note 6.

14 In the summer of 1993 a team of US archivists will meet at the Bently Library at the University of Michigan to attempt to formulate a full set of rules for capturing information about provenance. These rules would be candidates for adoption by ICA members.

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