Native, or natural, plants are those which grow on their own, while domesticated plants are cultivated for a particular purpose. It is beneficial for gardeners to combine both types of plants in their gardens. Archives are much the same.
In the same way the some plants developed naturally to suit their environment, certain kinds of documents develop over the course of our daily lives to help us function – identity documents, bills, and grocery lists. Legal papers, school report cards, and meeting minutes are all created and completed to help us effectively manage our day-to-day activities. These ‘naturally’ occurring documents are intended for use in an immediate (archivally speaking) time-period.
Some documents, however, are created “artificially,” with the future in mind. Not the immediate future like traffic tickets, wills, and pre-nups. Instead, these records are intended for those we may never meet. Published materials, research collections, and recorded oral histories fall into this category. They are created to tell a particular story to a specific audience (descendants or future researchers). These “artificial” documents are created to speak to the future. They may play a part in making history come alive in the present, but that goal seems secondary to the main goal: to make history.
In some archival circles, artificially created documents were once considered somewhat suspect. There is an agenda to these documents. Can you trust an author with an agenda? Well, you can trust that they are relating the world as they see it. Perhaps some future researcher may question some of the facts of their narrative, but their views and opinions have value for understanding how they relate to their environment.
Archives organize the naturally created records that come our way into fonds. Fonds are a body of records created or accumulated by an organization, family, or individual during their regular activities (not to be confused with our records numbering system, also called fonds). When we received artificially created records, we organize them into collections. A collection is a group of materials assembled from a variety of sources. Fonds may contain collections and collections may contain naturally occurring materials.
In some cases, we may group naturally-occurring records into artificial collections. At the South Peace Regional Archives, this includes our Paper Artefacts collection, Photograph collection, and Story collection. We do this with items that come individually with little context at the time, or that we create ourselves, such as the Story collection.
Much like a garden produces best with a variety of plant material, Archives better serve the public with a wide variety of records. A rich harvest of historical records, both natural and artificial, are ready for any researcher at the South Peace Regional Archives.
This article originally appeared in the June 2019 issue of Telling Our Stories.