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Geoffrey Yeo: Research Interests

Currently, my main research interests are:

  • conceptual understandings of records; how records operate; history of record-making and record-keeping ideas and practices; why records are important in human society
  • records' description and contextualization 
  • practical challenges of keeping records and archives in digital environments.

What might we mean when we talk of making or keeping records? In recent years the term ‘record’ – once restricted to English-speaking societies – has been adopted across the globe; records are widely acknowledged as the materials with which archival principles and practices are concerned. However, concepts of records, or of ‘the record’, are more elusive than they first appear, and there is huge diversity in how records, record-making, and record-keeping are perceived.

In academic and professional discourse, records have been variously seen as evidence, as information, as aids to cultural knowledge transmission or to individual memory, as artefacts, as documents or data, and as representations of activities or events. Most archivists and records managers agree that the making of records has close connections to actions undertaken in organizational work or individual life. These connections often influence the ways in which records are kept, the modes of access that are granted to them, and their interpretation by people who encounter and approach them.

Although the connections between records and action have long been recognized, their intricacies are open to further investigation. Deeper understandings of the interrelationships between records and human actions will support more effective ways of managing records and more responsive ways of presenting them to users.

 

Record-making and record-keeping are among the oldest human activities, but the archives and records management profession remains relatively small, and archival science – or archival studies – is still young as an academic discipline. Its concepts and principles have been largely derived from the reflective experience of a small number of leading practitioners and scholars in the 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries, and to a lesser extent from a few cognate disciplines such as diplomatic (the study of documentary form) and information science. Ideas about the characteristics and values of records underpin archival work in the wider world, but many of them reflect perceptions of records as analogue materials and arguably require revisiting in the digital era.

In investigating concepts of records, record-making, and record-keeping, and perceived connections between records and the actions of individuals and organizations, my research interrogates received ideas and proposes new ways of looking at archival concepts and principles. It seeks approaches that offer flexibility in interpretation and an openness to intellectual discourse and debate outside the archives and records management field, as well as providing a theoretical foundation for new practical endeavours in maintaining and using records in digital environments. It builds on modes of thinking developed in disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, linguistics, and cognitive psychology, as well as on archival science.

Conceptual understandings of records; how records operate; history of record-making and record-keeping ideas and practices; why records are important 

Topics I have addressed in my research include understandings of the concept of record and its relations to concepts of evidence, information, persistence, and representation (2007, 2018a); the historical development of the concept of record (2022); the application of prototype theory to conceptual understandings of records and record-keeping (2008); an awareness of records as boundary objects that are shared with, and may have different meanings in, other domains (2008); intersections between records, documents, and data (2011, 2020); the identification and interpretation of records at collective and granular levels (2008, 2011, 2012b); records as vehicles for speech acts (2010a, 2017a); their supposed naturalness or artificiality (2008, 2012a); beliefs and assumptions about their uniqueness, originality, and significance (2010b); and the importance of societal conventions and contexts in interpreting their relationships to human actions and events (2010a, 2018a).

I challenge notions that records are necessarily written documents, that record status is a matter of ‘declaration’ or setting aside, and that the record concept has a fixed boundary (2008, 2011). Even in the digital era, however, records still have distinctive societal roles. They are not simply ‘information assets’ that can be judged purely in terms of the accuracy of their contents. Records are always performative: the creation and communication of a record performs an act, such as issuing an instruction, asking a question, stating a proposition, granting a privilege, or making a promise; and records continue to fulfil a variety of social roles as they are transmitted, encountered, and used across space and time. Like evidence and memory, information is best seen as one of the many affordances that records offer to their users. But the performativity of records means that they are not mere passive sources of information; they function as active agents in human society (2010a, 2017a, 2018a).

While these ideas are necessarily expressed in the language of our own time, the keeping of records is not merely a practice of the present day. Record-making and record-keeping have a long history. The discovery that events in the world can be represented by means of signs or symbols occurred many thousands of years ago, and the first representational records were made by people who lived long before the invention of the technology of writing. Our comprehension of record-keeping concepts, roles, and functions needs to take account of records made and used in the past as well as those of our own era (2021). 

An understanding of records as persistent representations is emerging as a foundation for my thinking on all these topics and for continuing work. Representations can participate in the performance of the actions they represent; their persistence enables the affordances they supply to later users. Moreover, records at elementary level can be – and commonly are – aggregated to form records at higher levels; a user can thus gain access to representations of life and work at many different levels, from any or all of which the user can garner information, evidence, or other affordances of meaning.

Description and contextualization

Representation is a multifaceted and contested notion. In archival literature, it is often associated with the processes or products of description: records represent aspects of life and work, and descriptive systems aim to represent records. New understandings of records have implications for the methods employed to describe records and their contexts and to support access by users. In my research, I address practices of description and contextualization and seek to explore the principles of provenance, respect des fonds, and original order in the light of a representational view of records appropriate for the digital age.

Traditional approaches posit a firm distinction between organic ‘fonds’ and artificial ‘collections’, and treat both fonds and collections as rigid entities whose components must be arranged in a stable manner; but the assumptions that underlie these approaches are now open to dispute. My work on this topic investigates newer and more flexible ways of modelling records and their contexts and presenting them to users (2009, 2012a, 2012b). Classification schemes (‘file plans’), hierarchical finding aids, and the arrangement of records into fixed files and series are all called into question (2012b). I suggest how, in digital realms, we can and should embrace granular or item-oriented approaches that will support contextualization but will also allow users to assemble and reassemble their own aggregations in ways that respond to their differing needs and perceptions (2012b, 2015, 2017b).

Practical challenges

In digital environments, practical challenges for archivists and records managers arise from the vast increase in the quantities of records that are now being generated, from expectations of large-scale retention of digital records, and from the quantities of metadata that are likely to be needed to sustain their preservation and access. Where metadata are concerned, these challenges are magnified by a growing recognition that records often have many adventures during their lives and that different users may interpret them in different ways, and by growing demands for these adventures and reinterpretations to be acknowledged and documented. How can these expectations be met with the limited resources available to records professionals?

My work addresses requirements for documentation of custodial histories (2009, 2012a) and diverse perspectives (2017b), the importance of context to underpin continuing trust in records and archives (2013b), and the need for records professionals to discover and apply new ways of generating metadata (2013a, 2013b). I also argue that archival appraisal must be reconsidered in an age when analytic techniques from the world of ‘big data’ depend on retention and availability of records in large quantities (2018b). Traditional assumptions that only relatively small numbers of records need be preserved indefinitely must now be revisited, but the retention, management, and contextualization of digital records on a more extensive scale will only be possible if we develop and adopt innovative computational methods.

References:

A fuller list of my publications is available here.

My home page is here.

This page was last updated on 13 September 2023.