Audit How an Archive Was Assembled
Distinguish absent records from absent experiences using a complete fictional collection history.
Supplied materials
- Original fictional factory archive collection note: “In 1970 the curator received the manager’s 1910 output reports from the company office. One worker’s 1910 letter was donated by a family in 1980. The office had discarded shift rosters before donation; no payroll files were offered. No survey of workers was collected.” Inventory: 12 output reports and one worker letter. This is invented provenance, not an account of a real factory.
Learn the idea
An archive is shaped by record creation, retention, donation, and selection. Its surviving contents are not necessarily a balanced sample of every experience. Trace the supplied collection history before interpreting gaps. Here office output reports survived through an institutional donation, while one personal letter arrived separately and rosters were explicitly discarded.
Missingness can have a documented explanation without proving what the missing records would have shown. Discarded rosters explain why this collection lacks shift schedules; they do not establish whether schedules were fair or unfair. One letter preserves one worker’s voice, not every worker’s view. A research account should state the collection’s limits and identify other potential records without inventing their survival or content.
- List the surviving record groups, donors, and donation dates.
- Identify a documented loss and an unoffered record group.
- Explain why twelve managerial reports do not mean twelve independent worker perspectives.
- Write a limitation and specify an alternative record type that could address it if located.
See the method in action
“Managerial output reports dominate this archive because the office donated them. The sole worker letter arrived from one family, so it is an individual account. Rosters were discarded, and payroll files were not offered. The archive cannot establish worker-wide schedules or pay; another surviving roster or payroll collection could help, but none is supplied.”
Check your reasoning
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See the answer and explanation
The collection note says payroll files were not offered; pay amounts remain unestablished.
The collection history explains non-inclusion. It does not supply payroll contents or justify conclusions about actual pay.
Take it further
Changed provenance: payroll files were offered but the curator excluded them as outside the exhibit’s theme. Model reasoning: “The gap now arises from selection rather than non-offering. I would describe that selection and ask about access to the excluded files; I still would not claim any pay result without their contents.”
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