Archivists have begun to outline the general application of a postmodern perspective to archival work. Postmodernists emphasize the idea that there is no way to avoid or neutralize the limits of the mediating influences that shape our understandings of our worlds. This postmodern outlook suggests an important new intellectual place for archives in the formation of records, knowledge, culture, and societies. This article aims to contribute more fully to an understanding of how the postmodern view of communication and language throws light on the role of archivists in mediating, and thus shaping, the knowledge available in archives. It concludes with the suggestion that this understanding of the role archivists play will be pivotal in archiving the computerized record.

Increasing interest amongst archivists in the history of records and archives leads to questions about how this historical knowledge may affect archival theory and practice. This article discusses its effect on the concept of provenance by suggesting that it indicates that records have what might be called a societal provenance. The article discusses some of the principal features of societal provenance and some implications for archival theory and practice of this concept. The article provides examples of the place of societal provenance in understanding Aboriginal-Euro-Canadian records by using the 1802-1803 birchbark journal of fur trader Jean Steinbruck, which has a provenance in fur trade society in northwestern Canada, and photographs from the late nineteeth century, which reflect a provenance in the new agrarian and urban society that ended fur trade society in the Canadian West.

This article introduces the approach to Master's level archival education adopted at the University of Manitoba. It is intended as a contribution to the recently renewed discussion of graduate archival education in the UK and Ireland. The author maintains that recent major developments in the accessibility, uses, and very conception of archives powerfully underscore the distinctiveness of archival work. These developments foster continued collaboration between archivists and those in related professions such as records management, but, more importantly, reinforce their longstanding distinctiveness. The article discusses why and how the University of Manitoba has responded to the increasingly complex challenges facing archivists and archival educators in this evolving setting with an archival, conceptual, historical, and research-oriented curriculum.

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