A birthday card, a receipt for rent, a handwritten recipe, and a picture of a house we didn’t recognize may have little in common as subjects, but they can share a home if they were all made, sent, kept by the same person. The idea of provenance in archives is to maintain that link between records and the creator and often that link will tell us more than a subject-based description would.
Place 10 copied or non-sensitive records from a single personal collection on a flat, uncluttered workspace. Take note of who created or received each record and what the record tells you about the activities it reflects. How do these records seem to connect with one another? If a letter from a landlord, a payment receipt, and a photograph of an apartment all relate to the tenant’s housing activity, for example, a subject arrangement might place the letter with correspondence, the receipt under finance, and the photo within photographs. Such a subject arrangement would obscure the link to a particular person and their activities.
Records don’t have to remain in the exact place that they were originally filed in to be maintained according to provenance; the concept only prohibits records from a particular creator from being intermingled with records from another creator. Imagine a box of papers from two members of a family. Both individuals may have created or kept a school certificate, medical records, and travel documents. Placing each person’s records under broad subject headings would hide which records are connected to a particular person’s activities, and therefore make it more difficult to interpret them. We maintain provenance when the records from each person are kept separate, rather than being mixed with records created by a different person.
The original arrangement is often an indication of the provenance of a collection, but the original order and provenance are not the same thing. Original order is determined by the arrangement of records in the creator’s original file, whereas provenance focuses on the source of the records. A personal collection may arrive without any obvious arrangement of original files and folders. However, you can still often determine provenance with this type of collection by looking at such information as the name(s), handwriting, address(es), date(s), and recurring activities of the creator. If necessary, you may impose a practical series arrangement on the collection, provided you make note that it was impossible to maintain the original order of the collection.
Often, when first arranging personal collections, individuals find it difficult to see beyond individual records in order to determine the larger relationship between records. A single photograph might appear simply to be a photo of a building in which case it could easily be miscategorized, until you look for a nearby letter explaining that the photo is of a workplace. A notebook may not seem connected to a group of invoices until you identify names and dates suggesting that they both come from the same small business. Describe creator, date range, type of record, and activities when you can identify that evidence, and don’t try to invent a connection just to make the arrangement seem more tidy or complete.
One way to test a possible arrangement is to ask yourself, “If I were to remove this file, what information is I’d be losing?” Can you identify the creator? Can you explain why it should be in the given collection, or within a series? If you removed the file from the collection and placed it with a group of records according to a different subject arrangement, what might get “lost” within the connection to its immediate records? This turns a philosophical question about archival principles into a more pragmatic and useful decision making tool. If you can identify not only what the record is about, but whose activity the record reflects, then it will begin to serve its role as an archival arrangement principle that maintains the real world context and meaning of the original records.