Citations

Existing Citations

  • context (9-10): The contexts of records include not only the actions in which records are involved and the persons connected with them, but also the wider environments in which records are created and maintained. These wider environments include, but are in no way limited to, the functions of workgroups, organizations and nuclear and extended families; they also extend to the broad societal, legal, cultural and physical contexts in which individuals, families, partnerships, workgroups, communities and organizations operate. Nor is context confined to a moment or moments in time; behind every one of its aspects lies a complex web of prior events, occurrences, actions and situations, an evolving sequence of historical contexts for what we perceive as the contexts of the present day. As South African archivist Verne Harris has said, ‘there is no end to a search through this terrain’;61 context is infinite, and every context has contexts of its own. In practice, if archivists and archival institutions seek to document context, they have to decide what levels of context are most relevant to their needs or the needs of their users; this means making decisions about what to emphasize and what to ignore, decisions that will inevitably privilege some aspects of context above others. (†412)
  • provenance (p. 5): Broadly speaking, the principle of provenance requires records and archives to be managed in a way that secures and preserves knowledge of their origins and the circumstances of their creation. (†773)
  • record (p. 2): Records are another kind of inanimate object that we trust. A record is a representation of a past activity that we can use to obtain evidence, or reinforce memory, of what happened in the past. In general, as far as trust is concerned, our attitude to records is not very different from our attitude to taxis, alarm clocks or e10 notes. We use them when we need them; we are aware that records can sometimes be fraudulent or unreliable, but in practice we do not always take the trouble to verify the records we use. (†771)
  • transparency (5): In a blog post in 2009, Weinberger claimed that ‘transparency is the new objectivity’. More specifically, he argued that the role in ‘the ecology of knowledge’ once served by the unattainable goal of objectivity is now served by transparency. Transparency, he said, allows us to see how a resource was formed. It prospers in a linked medium such as the Internet because links let us see the connections between a resource and the ideas and values that informed it, and this in turn gives grounds for trust; it gives us reasons to have confidence in Internet resources in the way that claims about objectivity once did for paper materials. ‘What we used to believe because we thought [an] author was objective’, Weinberger affirmed, ‘we now believe because we can see . . . the sources that brought her to that position’. (Yeo, citing: Weinberger, “Transparency is the New Objectivity.”) (†407)
  • trust (footnote 3): Trust is a famously elusive and contentious concept, but for the purposes of this paper it can be broadly characterized as a state of confidence in some person or thing, or an expectation that some person or thing will prove worthy of confidence. The Oxford English Dictionary offers definitions of trust as ‘confident expectation of something’ and ‘confidence in or reliance on some quality or attribute of a person or thing, or the truth of a statement’. For fuller discussion of different understandings of trust, see Blomqvist, “Many Faces of Trust” and McKnight and Chervany, “Meanings of Trust.” (†405)
  • trust (2): On a daily basis, we find that we trust others. If we get into a taxi we trust the driver to take us where we have told him we want to go; we trust that he knows how to drive the taxi safely and that other drivers can also be relied on to drive in a careful manner so that he (and we) will not be involved in an accident. […] In general, as far as trust is concerned, our attitude to records is not very different from our attitude to taxis, alarm clocks or €10 notes. We use them when we need them; we are aware that records can sometimes be fraudulent or unreliable, but in practice we do not always take the trouble to verify the records we use. "... Trust is a matter of risk assessment: if the risk is low enough, we will decide to trust the object or artefact concerned. But usually we are not conscious that we assess a risk; we are simply getting on with our lives. (†406)
  • trust (p. 2): Trust is a matter of risk assessment: if the risk is low enough, we will decide to trust the object or artefact concerned. But usually we are not conscious that we assess a risk; we are simply getting on with our lives. (†770)
  • trust (p. 3-4): It is often thought that trust issues in cyberspace mostly relate to social computing or ecommerce (how far can I trust the person I am chatting with or buying from?), but there are also concerns about software applications (can I trust software not to behave maliciously?) and about the data and information that are purveyed to us in the digital realm. Suspicions about the latter can arise partly because of the absence of many of the cues we rely on in assessing non-digital information, partly because of the increased scope for deception and partly because of the ease with which it is now possible to publish information that seems to be unsubstantiated, mistaken or improbable. (†772)