Order As Received: A Foundational Virtual Order for Digital Records Draft: AERI 2010

Archivists pride themselves on the detection and restoration of the “original order” of the archival fonds, which represents most of the time-honored labor of archival arrangement. Digital records’ affordances, however, mean that even in active use they may simultaneously lend themselves to multiple virtual orderings, none of them representing an actual physical ordering of the records on any medium. In this presentation I want to discuss experiments in archiving digital records in a formal “order as received” based upon groupings of digital files on received legacy media prepared by the donor and documented through description of the set of derivative orderings available through the original operating system environment. This practice is designed to capture and describe a specific documented state of the fonds, to provide to the potential user a representation of a stage in archival processing that is normally invisible, and to create a documented basis for other derivative orderings, including those imposed by archivists and even by individual researchers and users. I want to suggest that this kind of archival practice gets us closer to the ability to portray what is really meant by “context” in the digital environment and even to documenting the work practices of records creators and archivists that normally remain tacit. “Original order” in archival practice It is a fundamental article of faith among Western archivists that materials preserved in an archives must be kept in provenance-based groups representing a fonds and where possible should be preserved in what is referred to as “original order.” According to Pearce-Moses’ Glossary, “original order” is defined as: The organization and sequence of records established by the creator of the records....Original order is a fundamental principle of archives. Maintaining records in original order serves two purposes. First, it preserves existing relationships and evidential significance that can be inferred from the context of the records. Second, it exploits the record creator's mechanisms to access the records, saving the archives the work of creating new access tools. In fact, however, most bodies of documentary materials do not arrive at the archives in some perfect “original order,” or at best they arrive in the order in which they were last found, which may reflect any number of events that have happened to the materials since they were created, received an arrangement, were perhaps rearranged in use, and finally were sent to the archives. This is especially true in the case of privately-created personal 1 Richard Pearce-Moses, A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology (SAA, 2005). Accessed from http://www.archivists.org/glossary/index.asp All citations to this work are reachable from the digital version by term.