The Archival Knowledge Organization: some renewal perspectives from the Canadian scientific approaches

Abstract

Since the late twentieth century, the impact of new forms of document production as well as the hugh growth of information technologies, have led the information professionals to rethink the traditional archival concepts and principles expressed in old Archival Science manuals. In this context, it highlights the archival scientific Canadian environment which gave the country the status of fertile ground for the discussions on Archivistics. It led to the “reshaping” of traditional archival principles and, as a consequence, (re)defined concepts, methods and criteria for the creation, maintenance and use of documents in electronic and traditional environments. It was especially by the 80’s that a new paradigm was enunciated in the area, and from it, three approaches have emerged: Integrated Archival Science, enunciated by the Québec group; Functional Archival Science or Postmodern Archival Science, enunciated by Terry Cook and; Contemporary Diplomatics, first enunciated in Italy by Paola Carucci and deeply developed and reformulated in North America by Luciana Duranti. Considering such scientific landscape, this paper aims to establish a comparative discussion among the epistemological foundations of these three Canadian Archival approaches as a contribution to emergent perspectives to build a contemporary archival discipline which can be able to face the new organic information processes of creation, organization and use.