Records out and archives in: early modern cities as creators of records and as communities of archives

Abstract

Cities in Italy, Germany and England experienced in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a scriptural revolution. The city registers served the functional and archival memories of the city and its citizens. The creation, storage and use of records were social and cultural practices, embedded in and constituting communities of memory. The records were re-organized and re-used, repositioning the text in time-space within different communicational spectra. Records created and maintained by cities in early modern history were archives, the city archives were records.

Archives in Portuguese public policies: a steady place

“…As previously stated, the need for archive policies became significant primarily with the advent of information and communication technologies (Couture, 1998). The International Council on Archives and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization published a compilation of archival laws in the 1970s, revealing gaps in regulations worldwide (Couture, 1998; Ketelaar, 1985). When such data were updated in 1982, no significant differences were discovered: most countries remained without an archival law and relied on general administrative regulations (Couture, 1998).…”

“The only way we knew how:” provenancial fabulation in archives of feminist materials

“…In archives of feminist materials where records are created, shaped, interpreted, re-shaped and re-created across wide and unprecedented contexts of access and use, containment to a discrete creator or creating contexts becomes an impossible, even laughable, task. Eric Ketelaar characterizes this range of creatorship as “activation.” He suggests that “every interaction, intervention, interrogation, and interpretation of a record, by creator, user, and archivist is an activation of that record…All these activations are acts of co-creatorship that participate in determining the record’s meaning” ( 2010 , p. 203). Indeed, concepts of “co-creation” and “community creation” have been taken up by a number of other archival theorists working to problematize and provoke the nature of records creation (Hurley 2005 ; Bastian 2006 ; Iacovino 2010 ; Caswell 2014b ; Douglas 2018 ).…”

9.1 Introduction: New perspectives for the history of archives

“…Their function is determined by the ways in which they are 'activated' by their users, as Eric Ketelaar has written. 13 Their impact depends upon the ways in which people incorporate them into their daily activities. The history of archives should take this point seriously and follow the myriad ways in which people lived with archives.…”