Archival Records as Evidence

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Archives mostly consist of personal and/or public written documents, maps, and official and private letters, but more recently also of audio- and videotapes, and Internet-based materials have also been included among archival records. For centuries, archives have been gathered, preserved, managed, and analyzed by kings, local and national governments, religious organizations, the army, the courts, the police and the intelligence services, universities, communities, associations, and even individuals. Moreover, the secret archives of the East German intelligence service (the political police popularly known as the Stasi), which has been open to the public since 1991, included about 15,000 transparent jars containing small samples of interrogated victims. To facilitate easy access and analysis, and in order to protect original documents from damage resulting from their frequent use, some larger archives have started to transfer their written records onto microfiche or electronic support.

Archives whose records are neatly catalogued are easier to access than collections that are not, or are poorly organized. This is especially important for larger archives, where browsing can be time consuming, tedious, and expensive, without guaranteeing an interesting find. By granting access to only a fraction of documents, uncatalogued archives allow for interesting exploratory work, but not for a broader understanding of the activity, structure, and goals of the individual, group, or organization that produced them.

Application

When using archival records as evidence, a number of questions need to be raised. Serious limitations can affect the nature of the questions researchers try to answer and the reliability of their final research results. Some limitations can be mitigated by collecting additional information from sources independent of the archives initially consulted. Other times, however, researchers will need to reformulate their research question to take these limitations into account, and to be aware of the limited generalizability of their research results.

First, questions must be asked about the archival record under consideration. Is the archival record genuine? If not, which of its sections, paragraphs, sentences, or words cannot be dated with precision, and which ones appear to have been modified (added, deleted, altered) at a later time? The history of the record, as pieced together from independent sources and the archive holder, is a good starting point to ascertain how much of the record is genuine, and when (and sometimes even why) changes to it were made (by adding handwritten comments or deleting some words and paragraphs). An archival record will have to be dated, a process that can be difficult as not all archives were fully catalogued, and can result only in educated guesses, as the record might include no indication as to the time when it was produced.

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