Chris Halonen
Faculty of Information Studies
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
E-mail: christopher.halonen@utoronto.ca

Ethnographic Studies of Office Work
and Their Implications for Archivists

ALISE 1996 Research Grant Report and Contributed Papers Session
Wednesday, February 12, 1997, 5:30pm - 7:00pm

The archivist's mission to identify, preserve and make available records of enduring value presupposes a knowledge of the relationship between records and the events which led to their creation and use, and the ability to explicate this relationship from a reading of the records themselves. This relationship is rarely discussed explicitly in the archives literature and archivists' implicit view of this relationship has never been investigated empirically within the discipline. Since the 1960s, however, the role of records has been occasionally addressed in research on the sociology of organizations and more recently in ethnographic studies by information systems researchers. These studies challenge common-sense accounts of records as neutral documentation of events by showing how their meaning is inextricably linked to undocumented work practices of the people who create and use them, and to the contingencies of daily events. An understanding of these practices and events is necessary before one can fully understand the records themselves. This essay argues that archivists can develop a fuller understanding of the role of records--and thus of archives--in organizations by carrying out ethnographic studies of how workers in organizations create and use records in their everyday work.

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