In Search of a Theory of Private Archives: The Foundational Writings of Jenkinson and Schellenberg Revisited
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Archivists of private fonds often blame the absence of private archives from our professional literature on Sir Hilary Jenkinson and T.R. Schellenberg, whose influential works cast archival theory in English in the mould of the archives of national governments. But a careful reading of Jenkinson and Schellenberg shows that they said much about private archives and, in effect, denied archival status or character to what was called, in their day, historical manuscripts. In drawing a clear their ideas about private archives, its relationship to government archives, and the applicability of their concepts of authenticity, evidence, and value to private archives. Though some of their ideas have not aged well over the intervening years, many of the characteristics of private archives that troubled them still reverberate in the Canadian archival community today, with our present emphasis on accountability and heritage. The article concludes that their thinking about private archives still offers a starting point today for the further development of the theory of private archives. RÉSUMÉ Les archivistes de fonds privés ont souvent blâmé Sir Hilary Jenkinson et T. R. Schellenberg, dont les oeuvres influentes ont circonscrit la théorie archivistique de langue anglaise aux archives de gouvernements nationaux, d’avoir exclu les archives privées de notre littérature professionnelle. Cependant, une lecture attentive de Jenkinson et de Schellenberg révèle qu’ils ont beaucoup écrit au sujet des archives privées et, qu’en effet, ils ont nié le statut ou le caractère archivistique de ce que l’on appelait à l’époque des manuscrits historiques. En faisant une distinction claire entre les documents d’archives et les manuscrits, ils ont contribué – peut-être sans le vouloir – à la définition des caractéristiques théoriques des archives privées. Cet article examine leurs idées par rapport aux archives privées, la relation entre les archives privées et gouvernementales, ainsi que l’applicabilité aux archives privées de leurs concepts d’authenticité, de preuve et de valeur. Même si certaines de leurs idées paraissent maintenant démodées, plusieurs caractéristiques des archives privées qu’ils considéraient problématiques à l’époque continuent aujourd’hui de résonner dans la communauté archivistique canadienne, avec l’accent que nous plaçons actuellement sur l’obligation de rendre compte et le patrimoine. Cet article conclut que leurs idées au sujet des archives privées offrent encore aujourd’hui un point de départ pour le développement continu d’une théorie des archives privées.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".