Building an integrated digital archives (Part II)
Abstract
Integration is at the heart of the archival endeavour. You can read most archival methods (appraisal, arrangement and description, access) as being fundamentally about integration: the task of creating a coherent archives that incorporates disparate recordkeeping systems. Sue McKemmish contends that records are ever in a state of ‘becoming’.1 The continuum model suggests that the same is true for archives, that we are constantly re-creating archives as we integrate new records and recordkeeping systems with them over time. With paper records, this integration happened above the ‘item’ layer through the documentation of ambient and provenancial context (that is, descriptions of series, functions and so on). With digital records, we have an opportunity to support much deeper integration.
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