The Death of the Fonds and the Resurrection of Provenance: Archival Context in Space and Time
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While the concepts of the fonds, respect des fonds, and provenance were initially useful in Canada to offset ad hoc approaches to arrangement and description, the intellectual reality of provenance and the physical reality of the records have become so intertwined over time that the essential distinction between the creator and the created has been lost. The Rules for Archival Description, for example, establishes an approach to the fonds that does not allow for the description of virtual bodies of records, accumulated over time and scattered over space. To reassess the concept of provenance, the author examines the use of the term in archaeology and museology. Adapting these definitions to the archival context, the author argues that archivists should describe the records that remain and explain the history of the creator, their records and how they came to be in that institution. Archivists should expand the existing elements in RAD "for immediate source of acquisition" and "custodial history" and focus on a new vision, not of respect des fonds, but of respect de provenance, which would encompass creator history, records history, and custodial history. Archival descriptions should encompass all these elements, so that archivists offer the broadest possible contextualization of records and, at the same time, become more accountable for their own actions and more transparent about the management of the records in their care. Archivists should abandon the concept of the fonds, since that idea labels records as something they cannot be, ignoring the reality of their existence over time and space. RÉSUMÉAlors que les concepts de fonds, respect des fonds et provenance furent d'abord utilisés au Canada afin de contrebalancer les approches ad hoc de la classification et de la description, la réalité intellectuelle de la provenance et la réalité physique des documents sont devenues tellement entrelacées que la distinction essentielle entre ceux-ci et leur créateur a été perdue. Les Règles pour la description des documents d'archives, par exemple, prescrivent une approche pour le fonds qui ne permet pas la description d'ensembles virtuels de documents, accumulés à divers moments du temps et dispersés en divers lieux. Afin de réévaluer le concept de provenance, l'auteure examine l'utilisation de ce terme dans les domaines de l'archéologie et de la muséologie. En adaptant ces définitions au contexte de l'archivistique, elle soutient que les archivistes devraient décrire les documents qui subsistent, écrire l'histoire de leur créateur et de l'ensemble des documents créés et, enfin, décrire comment les documents ont été acquis par leur institution. Les archivistes devraient en fait étendre les éléments existants des RDDA pour la « source immédiate d'acquisition » et l'« historique de la conservation » et mettre l'accent sur une nouvelle façon de voir qui ne serait pas celle du respect des fonds mais du respect de la provenance, comprenant l'histoire du créateur, l'histoire des documents et l'historique de la conservation. La description des documents d'archives devrait comprendre tous ces éléments, ce qui permettrait aux archivistes de replacer les documents dans le contexte le plus large possible et, dans le même temps, de devenir plus responsables pour leurs décisions et plus transparents dans la gestion des documents dont ils ont la garde. Les archivistes doivent abandonner le concept de fonds parce que cette idée caractérise les documents comme ils ne pourront jamais être, en ignorant la réalité de leur existence dans le temps et l'espace.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | low |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Other About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | low |
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.059 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.033 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".