n.PROH-vee-nee-ENTS-prihn-zeepan archival principle stipulating that records of one administrative unit be kept separate from any other based on origin and contextSchellenberg 1965, 90The principle of provenance, a European contribution to the American archival profession, stems from the French principle of respect des fonds, which provides that records from similar types of institutions should be grouped into fonds. The French principle was made more precise and restrictive in application by Prussian archivists, who formulated the Provenienzprinzip, the equivalent of the modern principle of provenance.Schellenberg 1996, 174Paragraph 2 of the [Prussian State Archives] regulations stated the fundamental principle, based on the French principle of respect des fonds, that “the arrangement of the records in the Secret State Archives is to proceed according to the provenance of their constituent parts.” This Provenienzprinzip simply provided that the main divisions within the State Archives were to be formed by separating the records originating with the various administrative units of the government. The regrouping of records from different agencies into subject-matter categories was thus recognized as an impractical procedure, particularly since the volume of records was being transferred was greatly increasing.Sweeney 2008, 194The whole of the records created and accumulated by an agency, institution, organization, or individual is known as the fonds of that creator. Many writers refer to the principle of respect des fonds—respecting the records of a single creator by not intermingling those records with the fonds of others—as an equivalent of provenance. The dictionary gives the Dutch equivalent of provenance as herkomstbeginsel and the German as Provenienzprinzip.Bundesarchiv 2018Das Provenienzprinzip (von lat. provenire, “herkommen”) ist ein archivisches Ordnungsprinzip auf Grundlage von Herkunft und Entstehungszusammenhängen [an archival principle of order based on origin and context].Meissner 2019, 6This principle was refined somewhat in 1881 in a regulation introduced by the State Archives of Prussia, which established the related principles of provenienzprinzip and registraturprinzip, the former declaring that all records, including the major components of a fonds, are to be grouped and maintained according to the administrative units that created them, and the latter holding that the records comprising any given administrative unit should be maintained in the order that they were registered by the agency that created them.
