TY - JOUR
T1 - Documentary genre and digital recordkeeping
T2 - Red herring or a way forward?
AU - Oliver, Gillian
AU - Kim, Yunhyong
AU - Ross, Seamus
PY - 2008/12/1
Y1 - 2008/12/1
N2 - The purpose of this paper is to provide a preliminary assessment of the utility of the genre concept for digital recordkeeping. The exponential growth in the volume of records created since the 1940s has been a key motivator for the development of strategies that do not involve the review or processing of individual documents or files. Automation now allows processes at a level of granularity that is rarely, if at all, possible in the case of manual processes, without loss of cognisance of context. For this reason, it is timely to revisit concepts that may have been disregarded because of a perceived limited effectiveness in contributing anything to theory or practice. In this paper, the genre concept and its employability in the management of current and archival digital records are considered, as a form of social contextualisation of a document and as an attractive entry point of granularity at which to implement automation of appraisal processes. Particular attention is paid to the structurational view of genre and its connections with recordkeeping theory.
AB - The purpose of this paper is to provide a preliminary assessment of the utility of the genre concept for digital recordkeeping. The exponential growth in the volume of records created since the 1940s has been a key motivator for the development of strategies that do not involve the review or processing of individual documents or files. Automation now allows processes at a level of granularity that is rarely, if at all, possible in the case of manual processes, without loss of cognisance of context. For this reason, it is timely to revisit concepts that may have been disregarded because of a perceived limited effectiveness in contributing anything to theory or practice. In this paper, the genre concept and its employability in the management of current and archival digital records are considered, as a form of social contextualisation of a document and as an attractive entry point of granularity at which to implement automation of appraisal processes. Particular attention is paid to the structurational view of genre and its connections with recordkeeping theory.
KW - Genre
KW - Recordkeeping continuum
KW - Structurational theory
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=77349088939&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s10502-009-9090-5
DO - 10.1007/s10502-009-9090-5
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:77349088939
SN - 1389-0166
VL - 8
SP - 295
EP - 305
JO - Archival Science
JF - Archival Science
IS - 4
ER -