Archivist - History of The Profession

History of The Profession

In 1898 three Dutch archivists, Samuel Muller, Johan Feith, and Robert Fruin, published the first Western text on archival theory entitled "Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives". Produced for the Dutch Association of Archivists, it set out one hundred rules for archivists to base their work around. Notably within these rules the principle of preserving provenance and original order was first argued for as an essential trait of archival arrangement and description.

The next major text was written in 1922 by Sir Hilary Jenkinson, the then Deputy Keeper of the British Public Records Office, entitled "Manual of Archive Administration". In this work Jenkinson states that archives are evidence and that the moral and physical defence of this evidential value is the central tenet of archival work. He further outlines his ideas of what an Archive should be and how it should operate.

In 1956, T. R. Schellenberg, who is known as the "Father of American Archival Appraisal", published "Modern Archives". Schellenberg's work was intended to be an academic textbook defining archival methodology and giving archivists specific technical instruction on workflow and arrangement. Moving away from Jenkinson's organic and passive approach to archival acquisition, where the administrator decided what was kept and what was destroyed, Schellenberg argued for a more active approach by archivists to appraisal. His primary (administrative) and secondary (research) value model for the management and appraisal of records and archives allowed government archivists greater control over the influx of material that they faced after the Second World War. As a result of the widespread adoption of Schellenberg's methods, especially in the United States of America, modern Records Management as a separate but related discipline was born.

In 1972, Ernst Posner published "Archives in the Ancient World". Posner's work emphasized that archives were not new inventions, but had existed in many different societies throughout recorded history.

In 1975, essays by Margaret Cross Norton were collected under the title of "Norton on Archives: The Writings of Margaret Cross Norton on Archival and Records Management". Norton was one of the founders of the Society of American Archivists, and wrote essays based on her decades of experience working in the Illinois State Archives.