1. While honoured to be invited by the editors of this journal to offer for this inaugural issue my views on the state of archival science, the short time-frame involved renders this paper a personal reflection rather than a sustained piece of original research. I have drawn on such research as I have previously done and as has appeared elsewhere, and indicated this in subsequent notes, from which sources much fuller citations can usually be found. The present work remains an essay on archival science and postmodernism; there is no pretense of having researched exhaustively all that has been written on the subject, even in the English language. I wish to thank Tim Cook of the National Archives of Canada for useful comments on this essay, as well as the helpful input from two anonymous reviewers forArchival Science; any errors and all interpretations remain my own.
2. On positivism and archives, see Verne Harris, “Claiming Less, Delivering More: A Critique of Positivist Formulations on Archives in South Africa,”Archivaria 44 (Fall 1997): 132–141; as well as, implicitly at least, all the sources by archivists writing about the post-modern revolution and its impact on the profession, many of which are outlined in note 13 below. Special attention is drawn to the thorough critique of positivist formulations of archival theory and archival science by Preben Mortensen, “The Place of Theory in Archival Practice,”Archivaria 47 (Spring 1999): 1–26.
3. See Terry Cook, “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift”Archivaria 43 (Spring 1997): 17–63 (a shorter, and less complete version is also published as “Interaction of Archival Theory and Practice Since the Publication of the Dutch Manual,”Archivum (1997): 191–214); the essay was reprinted in P.J. Horsman, F.C.J. Ketelaar, and T.H.P.M. Thomassen (eds.),Naar een nieuw paradigma in de archivistiek. Jaarboek 1999 Stichting Archiefpublicaties (′s-Gravenhage 1999), 29–67. Both orginated as a plenary address to the Thirteenth International Congress on Archives held in Beijing, China, in 1996. I used the “paradigm” term once before, in a precursor article almost two decades earlier, to suggest that renewed research and sustained scholarship by archivists into the history and context of records, as opposed to the professional focus then on methodological and technological issues, would allow archivists and, more importantly, users of archives to discover knowledge and humanist understanding in the sea of information in archival holdings; see Terry Cook, “From Information to Knowledge: An Intellectual Paradigm for Archives,”Archivaria 19 (Winter 1984–1985): 28–49.
4. On archivalisation and its exposition by Jacques Derrida inArchive Fever, see Eric Ketelaar, “Archivalisation and Archiving,”Archives and Manuscripts 27 (May 1999): 54–61; and (without the term) Tom Nesmith, “Still Fuzzy, But More Accurate: Some Thoughts on the ‘Ghosts’” of Archival Theory,”Archivaria 47 (Spring 1999): 136–150; as well as many of the sources in note 13 below on the postmodern archive. The fullest published analysis of Derrida by an archivist is Brien Brothman, “Declining Derrida: Integrity, Tensegrity, and the Preservation of Archives from deconstruction,”Archivaria 48 (Fall 1999): 64–88.
5. Cook, “From Information to Knowledge: An Intellectual Paradigm for Archives,” 49.