Afterglow: Conceptions of record and evidence in archival discourse |
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| Authors: | Brien Brothman |
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| Institution: | (1) Rhode Island State Archives and Public Records Administration, 337 Westminster Street, 02903 Providence, RI, USA |
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| Abstract: | In the last ten years, influential voices within and on the periphery of the record keeping community have succeeded in establishing
the preservation of “evidence” as the governing purpose of contemporary archival theory and methods development. Afterglow
offers a critique of the concept of evidence in archival discourse. Its main contention is that one can put records into evidence;
one cannot set out to put evidence into records. The argument rests on the following assertions: (1) current discussions of
evidence rest on a blindness to certain contradictions embedded in claims that record keeping principally involves evidence
keeping, or “evidence management”; (2) a politics of temporality, under which an interplay of disciplinary knowledge claims
and professional interest is discernible, helps to account for the contemporary rhetoric describing the relationship between
“record” and “evidence”, and (3) the late-twentieth century legal, political, and cultural climate, along with the technological
environment, explain the increasing prominence of “evidence” in these knowledge claims and professional ambitions. The essay
concludes with recommendations for addressing these issues.
Thanks go to Terry Cook, Visiting Professor in the Archival Studies Programme, Department of History, University of Manitoba,
and co-editor of this series of essays, for his close reading and detailed comments on this essay. Particularly invaluable
was his knowledge of historical and contemporary archival thinking on the notion of evidence. |
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| Keywords: | concept of record evidence truth |
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