The Tyranny of the Medium: A Comment on "Total Archives"

Abstract

The Tyranny of the Medium: A Comment on "Total A rchives "No archival principle is more universally venerated than provenance.Schemes to classify records by subject or some other artificial system, whether alphabetical, geographical, or chronological, are considered quite un-archival.They destroy utterly the evidential value represented by the original order of the records and render arrangement and description of large bodies of material virtually impossible.The principle of provenance dictates that "an archivist should not disperse records, from a particular group or subgroup, among subject or other kinds of classes."~Indeed, the case has been eloquently stated by the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA) itself:

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