The Four Paradigms of Archival History
Iván Székely · Journal of Information Technology Research · 2010
With an information-centered approach, four successive paradigms can be distinguished in the multi-millennial history of archives. Alongside enduring elements of continuity, new key features, functions and impacts appear, which fundamentally change the role and ideology of archives. In the archival systems designated as entitlement-attestation, national, public, and global, their primary and new objectives, key institutions, specialists and target audience as well as applied information technologies and characteristic problems show significant differences. This study includes the most important characteristics of these respective archival paradigms in one coherent system, with brief reference to the evolution of two major memory-preserving institutions: the library and the museum.