n.the interrelationships between a record and other records resulting from the same activityDuranti 1988, 353Since such collections are almost always literary in nature and constituted by autonomous items—that is, not linked by an archival bond—they tend to be organized and described like books. Hence, there is little of the day-to-day commerce between archivists and librarians working in the same institutions that exists in many institutions in North America . . .Guercio 2001, 248The creation and accumulation of archival records is always the creation of the reciprocal relationships, since records take part in, are the results of, a flow of activity. The records system is thus constituted by a complex of interrelated records and includes within its essential components the ensemble of their relationships. Such relationships (the archival bond) are stable and not arbitrary (even if not necessarily unimodal in each component) insofar as they are consequences of the means of the creation and accumulation of records determined by the creator for organizational and functional reasons.Gilliland-Swetland 2002, 197, fn. 2Records can be described as authentic in the sense that these are the same original records that were transferred to the archives and that their integrity has not been compromised in any undocumented way since they entered into the archival bond.Gilliland 2014a, 122Archivists were concerned that the “art” of archival practice, and the value-added aspects of manual description that included the hindsight of the archivist on events associated with the records, as well as the connections that might be made to other records and descriptive information held by the archives (i.e., integrating the records being described into the archival bond), necessitated manual description.Duff and Haskell 2015, 50While this method of accessing records provides direct, unmediated access (as in cases such as the social media site Flickr), it may obscure the context of records’ creation and use. Unless contextual metadata is provided, it may break the archival bond that the traditional description protects.Hohmann 2016, 17At the same time, he [Hilary Jenkinson] maintained—and with logic consistent with the pronouncement of the principles in the first place—that when some records and not others are kept, the archival bond within the aggregation is ruptured, and, by virtue of the archivist making deliberate choices to speak to posterity, impartiality is undermined.Larson 2020, 9An archival perspective on Big Data, with its emphasis on accountability, is particularly pertinent for governments, where Big Data needs to have a clear relationship, or archival bond, to other government records so that it can provide evidence of past acts and facts.InterPARES 2020a[archival bond] The network of relationships that each record has with the records belonging in the same records aggregation.Trace 2021, 357–358At the most basic level, a tension resides in our understanding of the nature of the record. In the analog world, objects live firmly in place. The archival bond is evidential. Sedimented in the filing process, records are connected to each other and to their origins. In the digital realm, archivists have tried to slough off this material reality, particularly as it relates to the archival fonds.Keane 2024, 10–11A fundamental consideration is the loss of the “archival bond” in online environments, referring to the contextual relationship among records stored together or in close proximity. Force suggested that the archival bond is “shaky at best,” in online environments because the order of digital objects can be dynamic. Even with finding aids and sidebar text with digital icons, understanding the relationship among materials is not fluid, unlike “sitting down with a folder and smoothly going through pages.”
Notes
Italian archivist Giorgio Cencetti proposed the concept of the archival bond in his article “II fondamento teorico della dottrina archivistica [The Basic Theory of Archival Science],” Archivi 6, no. 1 (1939): 7–13.
