The archival bond is a concept in
archival theory
Archival science, or archival studies, is the study and theory of building and curating archives, which are collections of documents, recordings, photographs and various other materials in physical or digital formats.
To build and curate an ar ...
referring to the relationship that each archival record has with the other records produced as part of the same transaction or activity and located within the same grouping. These bonds are a core component of each individual record and are necessary for transforming a document into a record, as a document will only acquire meaning (and become a record) through its interrelationships with other records.
Description
The concept of the archival bond is primarily associated with the work of
Luciana Duranti
Luciana Duranti is an archival theorist and Professor Emerita on post-retirement appointment in the fields of archival science and diplomatics at the University of British Columbia
The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a Public universi ...
along with
Heather MacNeil, as part of research into the integrity of electronic records. Duranti resumed and extended the concept of ''vincolo archivistico'' (archival bond), first expressed in 1937 by archivist
Giorgio Cencetti of the Italian archival school. This bond emerges from the fact that electronic records are not physically arranged like traditional records. For traditional, analog records, their bond is implicit in their arrangement. But for electronic records, this bond must be made explicit due to the lack of a single sequential order of records in a digital environment.
The archival bond was one of the core concepts of the subsequent International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems (
InterPARES) project and can be found in the InterPARES glossary.
As Duranti notes, the archival bond is not to be confused with the broader term "context" as context exists independently of a record, while "the archival bond is an essential part of the record, which would not exist without it."
See also
*''
Respect des fonds
''Respect des fonds'', or ''le respect pour les fonds'', is a principle in archival theory that proposes to group collections of archival records according to their fonds
In archival science, a fonds (plural also ''fonds'') is a group of doc ...
''
References
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Archival science
Information science