page_title: Provenance
section_title: Archives
hierarchical_section_title: Provenance / Archives
caption_attribution_description: English: BRA stamp on a historic document indicating that it has been processed by the Records Preservation Section of the British Records Association. The number (1852) provides a record of its earlier provenance.
context_page_description: Provenance is the chronology of the ownership, custody or location of a historical object. The term was originally mostly used in relation to works of art but is now used in similar senses in a wide range of fields, including archaeology, paleontology, archives, manuscripts, printed books, the circular economy, and science and computing.
  The primary purpose of tracing the provenance of an object or entity is normally to provide contextual and circumstantial evidence for its original production or discovery, by establishing, as far as practicable, its later history, especially the sequences of its formal ownership, custody and places of storage. The practice has a particular value in helping authenticate objects. Comparative techniques, expert opinions and the results of scientific tests may also be used to these ends, but establishing provenance is essentially a matter of documentation. The term dates to the 1780s in English. Provenance is conceptually comparable to the legal term chain of custody.
context_section_description: Provenance – also known as "custodial history" – is a core concept within archival science and archival processing. The term refers to the individuals, groups, or organizations that originally created or received the items in an accumulation of records, and to the items' subsequent chain of custody. The principle of provenance (also termed the principle of "archival integrity", and a major strand in the broader principle of respect des fonds) stipulates that records originating from a common source (or fonds) should be kept together – where practicable, physically; but in all cases intellectually, in the way in which they are catalogued and arranged in finding aids. Conversely, records of different provenance should be preserved and documented separately. In archival practice, proof of provenance is provided by the operation of control systems that document the history of records kept in archives, including details of amendments made to them. The authority of an archival document or set of documents of which the provenance is uncertain (because of gaps in the recorded chain of custody) will be considered to be severely compromised.
  The principles of archival provenance were developed in the 19th century by both French and Prussian archivists, and gained widespread acceptance on the basis of their formulation in the Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives by Dutch state archivists Samuel Muller, J. A. Feith, and R. Fruin, published in the Netherlands in 1898 (often referred to as the "Dutch Manual").
  Seamus Ross has argued a case for adapting established principles and theories of archival provenance to the field of modern digital preservation and curation.
  Provenance is also the title of the journal published by the Society of Georgia Archivists.
caption: Stamp on a historic document, showing that it has passed through the hands of the Records Preservation Section of the British Records Association, a rescue service for archival material: the number indicates its earlier provenance
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image Software": "Microsoft Windows Photo Viewer 6.1.7600.16385", "Image DateTime": "2018:03:11 23:08:48", "Image ExifOffset": "2200", "Image Padding": "[]", "EXIF Padding": "[]"}