Detail from letter sent by George Williamson of Cambridge, Massachusetts, to his sister Marjorie Williamson on January 13, 1904. Its primary use was communication between brother and sister. Providing an entertaining Illustration for this definition is a secondary use of this letter. (Courtesy of Harvard University Archives, HUM_126_017)n.any purpose to which a record is put that is not the initial purpose for which it was createdHodnefield 1944, 128The term “archives” has been used so extensively to designate records that it would seem impractical to limit its use to depositories. Better would be to consider its primary use as referring to the records and its secondary use as referring to the establishment.Pérotin 1966, 367–368The users of the records being different, the uses are not the same and to such a degree that the successive uses can be measured—nothing forbidding it theoretically—to show the variations of usefulness or lack of it by time function for the same archival document. The superimposition on the same graph of the generally descending curve of primary use (administrative), of the generally ascending curve of secondary use (historical), and of the breaks in time that represent various regulations—availability to the public and so forth—can help to determine the dates of disposals, the duration of the second age of documents, and other things as well.Hedstrom 1991, 336Many current institutional practices undermine retention, preservation, and secondary use of electronic records; and most are inefficient, non-standard, and difficult to reverse.Danielson 1993, 366Ancient church sacramental records, originally generated out of a concern for souls, acquire an entirely different and unintended significance when analyzed by modern sociologists. Such unpredictable secondary uses differentiate archival reference work from most library reference services.Wosh 2000, 277Processing should raise questions concerning the contextualization of documents within a broader informational environment, the primary and secondary uses of historical documentation, the application of theoretical archival principles to a real collection, appraisal methods and concerns, and the ways in which one standardizes descriptive information, to cite just a few obvious examples.Noonan and Chute 2014, 212It seems the IRB releases are often very narrow and no one is advocating and negotiating for public access and/or secondary uses of the data that enable research replication or creative reuse.Gilliland 2014a, 176–177As introduced in chapter 1, the role of archives in many settings is traditionally a custodial one in which the archives takes physical custody of noncurrent but still valuable institutional records and thenceforth is responsible for preserving the physical and intellectual integrity of those records and making them available for secondary use.
Detail from letter sent by George Williamson of Cambridge, Massachusetts, to his sister Marjorie Williamson on January 13, 1904. Its primary use was communication between brother and sister. Providing an entertaining Illustration for this definition is a secondary use of this letter. (Courtesy of Harvard University Archives, HUM_126_017)
n.
any purpose to which a record is put that is not the initial purpose for which it was created