A System of Their Own: Records Creation and Recordkeeping in Canada’s Department of External Affairs in the 1920s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores aspects of the political-legal-constitutional context of Canada’s Department of External Affairs. Specifically, it traces some of the changes made to the department’s records creation and recordkeeping systems in the 1920s, initiated by an increased responsibility for the conduct and administration of Canada’s foreign affairs activities. Underlying this analysis is a recognition that by striving to understand the historical and organizational context of External Affairs, users and archivists are also able to achieve a more complete understanding of the records that were created at that time. In this way, the article contributes to a much broader archival discourse, which centres on encouraging the study of the history and context of archival records. RÉSUMÉ Cet article explore les aspects du contexte politique, légal et constitutionnel du ministère des Affaires étrangères du Canada. Spécifiquement, il trace des changements qui ont été apportés aux systèmes de création et de gestion de documents du ministère pendant les années 1920, mis en place suite à un accroissement des responsabilités dans la conduite et l’administration des activités des affaires étrangères du Canada. Soustendant cette analyse est la reconnaissance qu’en essayant de comprendre le contexte historique et organisationnel des Affaires étrangères, les utilisateurs de documents et les archivistes sont aussi mieux en mesure d’atteindre une compréhension plus complète des documents qui ont été créés à cette époque. Ainsi, cet article contribue à un discours archivistique beaucoup plus large, qui est centré sur l’incitation à étudier l’histoire et le contexte des documents d’archives.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".