Afterglow: Conceptions of record and evidence in archival discourse

Abstract  In the last ten years, influential voices within and on the periphery of the record keeping community have succeeded in establishing the preservation of “evidence” as the governing purpose of contemporary archival theory and methods development. Afterglow offers a critique of the concept of evidence in archival discourse. Its main contention is that one can put records into evidence; one cannot set out to put evidence into records. The argument rests on the following assertions: (1) current discussions of evidence rest on a blindness to certain contradictions embedded in claims that record keeping principally involves evidence keeping, or “evidence management”; (2) a politics of temporality, under which an interplay of disciplinary knowledge claims and professional interest is discernible, helps to account for the contemporary rhetoric describing the relationship between “record” and “evidence”, and (3) the late-twentieth century legal, political, and cultural climate, along with the technological environment, explain the increasing prominence of “evidence” in these knowledge claims and professional ambitions. The essay concludes with recommendations for addressing these issues.