Between archival science and information architecture

Abstract

Archival science, information science, records management, and information management are allied sciences. Recently, there are tendencies to merge them into information science, recognising, that despite some differences, every field copes with information. It is a big simplification of the problem, and searching for direct roots of information science in works of archives is another understatement, because this approach does not see archival science as grown from practical works of archives and having explicitly separate research object, which are archives and archival materials. Not contesting fair arguments for seeing archival science as one of information sciences, it must be stressed, that only one of its divisions – archival information resulted from arrangement and description of archival materials – is a research object shared with information science. The situation is similar with records management, that was born on the ground of studying works of offices and records circulation, from creation until their destruction or archiving permanently. Regardless of modern information and communication technologies, that substantially influenced methods of creating and passing on records, and other office works, as well as the way archives perform their functions, the specific nature of archival science and records management, that previously determined their autonomy, still remains. The cooperation with specialists of information science, with information architects is possible in accordance to practice – which is records management and archival information on the Web.

Keywords

• archiwistyka, zarządzanie dokumentacją, nauka o informacji, architektura informacji