Arhivska teorija i tehnologija

Sažetak

Many believe that information technology caused strong changes to contemporary
society with which there can be few comparisons in the past. It is assumed that the
influence of technology on the way in which people communicate, produce and use the
information they find around themselves has never been greater and that it can be compared with the creation of literacy itself. It is claimed that the technological product is
the very basis of communication, not only a material form in which it is realized - like a
group of characters recorded in a certain media - and that its roots are defined by the very
meaning and content of the message, or rather communication. If this is so this would
signify for archival theory that with the new document forms their nature, or rather, their
meaning in a specific social environment, can change as well. Researching into these
changes and the consequences which they can have for the existing theoretical and
methodological principles has for a long time been the most important subject of
discussion within the archives community. Is this a question of technological adjustment
or a change of paradigm?
For some time it was seriously debated whether with the appearance of new forms of
documents, for which the interdependence of the physical and logical structure
characteristic of the traditional documents is now questionable, what was also brought to
question was the principle of provenance, one of the basic postulates of the archival theory
from the very beginning and the postulate on which the whole archives methodology of
work was built. Although there is no consensus about what the term provenance means and
what it encompasses today this question can be considered solved in principle: the debate
has led to a (re)affirmation of the principle of provenance and most of the related
postulates.
A reaffirmation has also taken place with regards to the traditional techniques of
analyzing documents and archival aggregations. Specific problems which are rooted in
certain characteristics of the so-called electronic documents can be resolved by tools
developed for the needs of diplomatical analysis, which has even led to them being built
into the functional characteristics of the system which are used for controlling electronic
documents. The First major difference between traditional and electronic documents
which was considered obvious was used for the separation of the document characteristics
that are dependent on the technology and media from the document concept in which
archival theory is primarily interested. The document is simultaneously the means, the
product and the recording of the communication which is equivalently composed of the
content, the (logical) structure and context independently of the manner and media on
which the message was recorded. The same document can be realized (and transferred) in
different technological surroundings. This high technological dependency of the
electronic documents has led its functional ity, not its form and formal characteristics, to be
considered its important element.
The model of archives functions which was known earlier has lived through certain
changes. There is no consensus about whether archives will in the future still be
recognized as institutions in which archival records are preserved or whether this is, in fact,
desirable. The so-called “post-custodial” archivistics brings a significantly different order
into the value-based hierarchy of archives functions. What can be observed is a tendency
for most of these functions to be scattered along the whole life-cycle of the document and
that they be carried out outside the archives to a great degree, which opens the question of
the role of archives in the future and the intellectual contents and identity of the
profession.