A Foundation for Archival Engineering

Abstract

Archives comprise information that individuals and organizations use in their activities. Archival theory is the intellectual framework for organizing, managing, preserving and access to archives both while they serve the needs of those who produce them and later when researchers consult them for other purposes. Archival theory is sometimes called archival science, but it does not constitute a modern science in the sense of a coherent body of knowledge formulated in a way that is appropriate for empirical testing and validation. Both archival theory and practice are seriously challenged by the spread and continuing changes in information technology and its increasing and increasingly diverse use in human activities. This article describes problems with and controversies in archival theory and advocates for a reformulation of concepts to address the digital challenge and to make the field more robust, both by addressing the problems and by enriching its capabilities by adopting concepts from other fields such as taxonomy, semiotics and systemic functional linguistics. The objective of this reformulation is to transform the discipline on the model of modern scientific method in a way that engenders a new discipline of archival engineering that is robust enough to guide the development of automated methods even in the face of continuing and unpredictable change in IT.

‘Having everything, possessing nothing’: archives and archiving in the digital era

“…The digital archive has been studied from many perspectives. Archival studies explore the transformation of analog archives through digitization (Manoff 2004), seeking ways to "address the digital challenge" (Thibodeau 2022). Media archaeology views the digital archive as a technological apparatus that leads to epistemological changes (Ernst 2013), while a semiotic perspective explores the production of meaning in various manifestations of the archive (Dondero et al 2021).…”

Dynamic Semiosis: Meaning, Informing, and Conforming in Constructing the Past

“…CPT has been applied in archaeology [9], smart learning [10], and in enriching archival theory [11,12]. The remainder of this article extends CPT from a general model of the main elements that frame constructing the past to address how information is interpreted and produced in the process.…”