An isolated document says little. A letter without its sender, a photograph without the project that gave rise to it, a contract without the file that explains it lose most of their meaning. Respect des fonds is the rule that protects that meaning: it requires each document to be kept within the whole it comes from. It is the oldest principle of modern archival science, and the most constant.
Fonds or collection?
Everything starts from a distinction.
- A fonds is the whole of the records that one person, natural or legal, created or received in the course of their activities. It forms organically: nobody put it together, it results from its creator’s work itself.
- A collection is an artificial assemblage of documents gathered according to a chosen criterion (a theme, a medium, an author), whatever their provenance. It results from an intention — a collector’s — or from chance.
Both are described with ISAD(G), and Memory Atlas offers both levels at the root of the tree. But they are not handled in the same way: in a fonds, the order of the documents and the relations between them are information in their own right; in a collection, it is the collector’s choice that carries meaning.
The practical consequence: identifying the creator is the first step of any processing. The creator gives the fonds its name, its reference code, its context (ISAD(G) element 3.2.1, Name of creator(s)) and, often, its access rules.
A principle born in 1841
In France, the principle was formulated by Natalis de Wailly, an archivist at the Archives du royaume, in the ministerial instructions of 24 April 1841 on the arrangement of departmental archives. Until then, documents were readily arranged by subject: everything about forests together, everything about taxes together, whatever their origin. The result: groupings that looked coherent, but in which nobody could tell any longer who had created what, or why.
The 1841 rule reversed the perspective: documents were no longer arranged by the subjects they dealt with, but by their origin. It has since been taken up and refined everywhere, up to the international standards of the International Council on Archives.
Three principles in one
Respect des fonds breaks down into three requirements.
Respect for provenance
The archives of one creator are kept together, without mixing them with those of another. Two fonds that deal with the same subject remain two fonds. If an artist kept her father’s papers in her studio, those papers form a separate whole, even if they are stored in the same boxes.
Respect for the integrity of the fonds
A fonds forms a whole. Avoid dispersing it — selling the correspondence to a collector and giving the notebooks to a museum makes both harder to understand. Any appraisal is decided and recorded (element 3.3.2, Appraisal, destruction and scheduling information), and you resist the temptation to “complete” the fonds with items from elsewhere, even on the same subject.
Respect for original order
Within the fonds, the order established by the creator is maintained, or restored if it has been disturbed. The order in which a photographer filed her contact sheets says something about her method; replacing it with alphabetical order erases that information.
When there is no original order
The principle has its limits, and archivists know them. Many fonds arrive in disorder: moving boxes, hard drives filled over the years, files mixed up by heirs. The original order is then lost, or never existed.
In that case, you do not invent an arbitrary order: you rebuild the groupings from the creator’s activities. What were the main areas of their work? What functions did their documents serve? The resulting arrangement scheme still respects provenance and integrity, even if it can no longer respect the original order. Failing that, you fall back on neutral criteria — chronological, geographical, numerical, alphabetical or thematic — and say so in the description (element 3.3.4, System of arrangement).
What matters is to document your choices: a researcher reading the finding aid must be able to tell whether the order in front of them is the creator’s or the archivist’s.
Several creators in one fonds
A studio fonds often contains documents created by others: an agency, an assistant, an association the artist chaired. There are two solutions:
- when the other creator is closely linked to the main creator and its documents form a coherent whole, they become a sub-fonds;
- when its documents are intertwined with the main creator’s activity, they are left in place and the particular creator is stated in the description of the series or file concerned.
The Memory Atlas guide example follows the second case: in Léa Martin’s fonds, the “Commissions” series was created by the Studio X agency, for which Léa worked. The documents stay in Léa’s fonds, in their place, but their creator is given at series level.
In Memory Atlas
Several features of the application directly reflect respect des fonds:
- the creator is inherited: declared at fonds level, it applies to all descendants, and a series can override it locally, as “Commissions” does with Studio X;
- moving a branch to another fonds asks for confirmation: moving units from one fonds to another changes their provenance, and Memory Atlas points this out before doing it, along with the reference codes that change (Build the tree);
- the system of arrangement and the archival history have their ISAD(G) elements (3.3.4 and 3.2.3), to document the order adopted and the history of the fonds.
With the principle established, it remains to put it into practice: that is the job of the arrangement scheme, which organizes a fonds from its main series down to the item. Next: Building an arrangement scheme.
Further reading
- Conseil international des archives, ISAD(G) : Norme générale et internationale de description archivistique, 2nd edition, 2000, in particular the glossary and the rules for multilevel description.
- Direction des Archives de France, Dictionnaire de terminologie archivistique, 2002: entries “Fonds”, “Provenance”, “Respect des fonds”.
- Jean Favier (ed.), La pratique archivistique française, Direction des Archives de France, 2008.