Concepts of Record (2): Prototypes and Boundary Objects

Abstract

118T h e A m e r i c a n A r c h i v i s t , V o l . 7 1 ( S p r i n g / S u m m e r 2 0 0 8 ) : 1 1 8 -1 4 3Web addresses cited in this article were accessed on 18 October 2007. Concepts of Record (2): Prototypes and Boundary Objects Geoffrey Yeo A b s t r a c tThis paper argues that, within the recordkeeping community, perceptions of records are subject to the "prototype" effects identified in recent psychological studies. Archivists and records managers perceive certain records as prototypical, while other records are more distant from their mental prototypes. Prototype effects apply both to item-level records and to record aggregations. Moreover, the boundaries of the record concept are fuzzy, and some records are "boundary objects" shared with other communities. The characterization of records as persistent representations embraces nonprototypical records as well as those more central to the concept.T his paper offers a further exploration of the concept of a record. It examines a pair of theories from the worlds of psychology and sociology and investigates their application to professional understanding of the record concept. It builds on the author's paper published in the Fall/Winter 2007 issue of American Archivist, 1 which discussed the challenges of defining records in terms of evidence or information; suggested that evidence, information, and memory are probably best seen as affordances that records provide to users; and offered an alternative characterization of records as persistent representations of activities.The psychological theory of prototypes attempts to provide an explanation of how concepts and categories are understood, and how membership of a category is assessed. It can be applied to almost any complex conceptual category and is used here to examine how writers and practitioners within the archives and records management community perceive different types of records. This paper also investigates the fuzzy boundaries of the record concept and explores the sociological notion of boundary objects. It demonstrates the

Boundary objects in information science

“…The concept of BO has been welcomed in diverse research communities, for instance, in management (Kuhn, 2002), archival science (Yeo, 2008), development studies (Green, 2010), economics (Langenohl, 2008), education (Emad & Roth, 2009), document studies (Lund, 2009), and library and information science (Albrechtsen & Jacob, 1998), while enjoying particular popularity in information systems and computer supported cooperative work research (CSCW) (Lee, 2007;Lutters & Ackerman, 2007), among others. An equally broad variety of research artefacts from physical objects to concepts and activities have been analytically interpreted as boundary objects (for an incomplete overview of artefacts, see Table 1 and Figure 1).…”

“…The roles of physical and conceptual artefacts as informative socio-material forms in the practices of sharing, disseminating, reusing, and exchanging information, with a specific focus on how specific artefacts can support and serve multiple, multi-faceted communities and allow users to engage in situated, distributed, and social information work. Examples include Frohmann (2004a) on the coordinative capacity of documents, Yeo (2008) on the roles of (archival) records, Van House (2003) and Worrall (2015) on the capacity of ICTs to serve multiple communities, Lutters and Ackerman (2007) (2015) on digitization as the making of digital resources of non-digital documents. 4.…”

“…classification, abstract understanding of information vs. situated and practiced information; non-informative capacities of informational artefacts like documents in the work of Frohmann, 2004a) and critiques and redefinitions of them (e.g. in the work of Albrechtsen and Jacob 1998;Jacob, 2001;and Yeo, 2008). Figure 2: Schematic illustration of some of the uses of artefacts, practices, and concepts as boundary objects to explicate relations and influences.…”

Democratising or privileging: the democratisation of knowledge and the role of the archivist

“…It is algorithms that control who sees what in defined news spaces with their lists of most-shared and most-commented features. To read Michael Lewis is to understand the power of anonymous trading algorithms in the almost completely digitised and machine-led world of the financial markets which so calamitously collapsed in -2008(Lewis 2014). The algorithm is, quite simply, an active gatekeeper / privileger, filtering information for dissemination.…”

Specimens as Records: Scientific Practice and Recordkeeping in Natural History Research

“…As Yeo says, "the purpose of many representational systems is to provide surrogates for things that are unavailable or difficult to access." 44 In Grinnell's case, the difficulty lies in modeling aggregates of organisms and environmental factors, with the additional problem of having to do this at different points on the evolutionary time-scale. The system of specimens, notes, and maps allows for this representation.…”