Before arranging anything, you need to know what you are arranging. The question sounds naive, yet it decides everything else: what you keep, how you order it, what you describe and who will be able to consult it. This article sets out the definitions on which the following ones build.
A legal definition, and a very broad one
In France, the French Heritage Code (code du patrimoine), art. L. 211-1, defines archives as all documents, data included, whatever their date, place of storage, form and medium, created or received by any natural or legal person, public or private, in the course of its activity.
Three ideas follow from this definition:
- The medium does not matter. A handwritten letter, an email, a negative, a RAW file or a spreadsheet are archives on the same footing.
- Age does not matter. A document becomes an archive as soon as it is created, not after thirty years in a cardboard box.
- The activity matters. What makes an archive is its link with the activity of whoever created or received it. That link gives it its value as evidence and as testimony.
By extension, the word also names the service that keeps the documents and the building that houses them.
What is not an archive
The definition is broad, but it does not cover everything a studio, an office or a family accumulates. Four categories regularly raise questions.
Works. A painting, a sculpture or a signed exhibition print belong to a collection, not to an archival fonds. Between the two, the line is open to debate: a sketch on the back of an invoice, a color proof for a poster, the video of a rehearsal. One question helps decide: was the document made to be shown, or to prepare, organize or keep a record?
Documentation. These are sources gathered to keep informed, without having been produced by whoever gathered them: subject files, photocopies of articles, other artists’ catalogues. They inform, but prove nothing about the activity of the person who brought them together. Sometimes, though, they form part of an archival file: the press article filed with the contract for an exhibition belongs to it, and is not separated from it.
Printed matter. Books and journals go to the library. A flyer or a festival program that the artist slipped into a project file stays there, on the other hand: its presence in that place is what carries meaning.
Objects. A studio stamp, a fabric sample, a promotional USB stick: where they belong is decided case by case, often according to the link they keep with a file.
These distinctions are not quibbles over vocabulary: they determine who describes what, following which standard (ISAD(G) for archives, cataloguing standards for printed matter and works) and with which identifier (a reference code for the archive, an inventory number for the work).
Public archives, private archives
The Heritage Code distinguishes two statuses.
- Public archives (art. L. 211-4) result from the activity of the State, local authorities, public institutions and other public-law bodies. They are inalienable, their destruction is controlled and access to them follows time limits set by law.
- Private archives (art. L. 211-5) are all the others: those of a person, a family, a company, an association, a studio.
Status is judged document by document: a private fonds may contain public records (the copy of an order, the report of a committee the artist sat on). It will matter on the day the fonds enters an institution, because the conditions set at accession (gift, deposit, purchase, dation) will govern access to private archives. We will come back to this in a future article.
The three ages of a document
In the 1960s, the archivist Yves Pérotin described the life cycle of a document in three stages:
| Age | State | What you do with them |
|---|---|---|
| Current records | active: used for work | kept close at hand, in working order |
| Intermediate records | semi-active: no longer used, but may be needed | kept for their retention period (contracts, invoices, rights) |
| Permanent records | inactive: no longer of practical use | appraised: destruction, or permanent preservation for their historical value |
For an artist or a small organization, this scheme has a practical virtue: it is a reminder that appraisal is not left to the chance of a house move. For each type of document, you decide how long it remains useful and what will become of it afterwards — what the ISAD(G) standard calls the final disposition (element 3.3.2).
Why keep archives?
French Heritage Code (code du patrimoine), art. L. 211-2, gives two reasons, which hold well beyond public archives:
- evidence: documents make it possible to establish rights. The day a publisher disputes a reproduction permission, it is the signed letter that settles the matter;
- memory: they make it possible to write history. The stages of a project, abandoned or not, survive only in the papers and files that accompanied them.
A photographer who finds, in ten minutes, the date and terms on which she assigned the rights to an image is using her archives as evidence. A researcher who, twenty years later, reconstructs the genesis of her best-known series is using them as memory. Both uses justify the same work.
What to keep?
Rather than a list of documents, three questions to ask of each group of records:
- Does it prove something? A commitment, a payment, a permission, a date. If so, it is kept at least as long as that evidence may be needed.
- Is it the only one to say so? A draft whose final version exists elsewhere has less value than the only trace of an abandoned project.
- Does it shed light on a way of working? Trials, successive versions, exchanges with collaborators show how the work was done, and that is often what researchers come looking for.
A document that meets none of the three can, as a rule, go without regret. The others still have to be organized: what follows begins with the principle on which all arrangement rests, respect des fonds.
In Memory Atlas
The example followed by the user guide is that of Léa Martin, a photographer who describes thirty years of studio archives. Her repository contains a fonds — her archives — and not a collection: everything in it was created or received by her in the course of her activity. Her works appear in it only through the documents that accompany them (research, negatives, scans, working prints).
Further reading
- Code du patrimoine, book II, articles L. 211-1 to L. 211-5, on Légifrance.
- Direction des Archives de France, Dictionnaire de terminologie archivistique, 2002, on FranceArchives.
- Association des archivistes français, Abrégé d’archivistique, 4th edition, 2020.
- The site’s glossary, “Archival practice” section.