I’ve started the formal study of records management this term, and we’ve quite reasonably started with definitions and some history. One of my first readings mentioned—and at first I assumed this was tongue-in-cheek, but it turned out not to be—that every generation of records managers must develop its own metaphysics of records. Records management, as a discipline, evolved from archival practice, which itself seems to have evolved from the necessities of an increasingly bureaucratic legal system, and has gone through a series of identity crises since its origins in the first half of the twentieth century. There are ongoing arguments about what a record even is, let alone how to manage one in any given context, and for what purposes. The discussions go from the dully practical implications of housing large volumes of paper to invoking the conceptual properties of spacetime, sometimes in the same paper. It’s utterly bonkers.

Among the most fascinating aspects of records management I’ve run across—and this whole post is a bit of a “drawn on the back of a napkin in a pub” kind of explanation, and is not to be taken as super rigorous—is how culturally specific the very concept of the record is. And I don’t mean that each culture has its own idea of what a record is—though of course memory making and keeping is definitely culture and context-dependent—I mean that the very concept of “records” as artifacts with particular evidentiary functions separate from artifacts with other functions barely exists outside … [continue reading] “The Metaphysics of Records”