ARCHIVISTICS. - It is the discipline that studies the ordering, administration, and preservation of archives, while at the same time teaching how to understand their history, essence, and structure. Given the breadth of its scope, archivistics must necessarily have recourse to the aid of other disciplines, such as paleography, useful for reading ancient scripts; diplomatics, for the classification of documents; sigillography, for the knowledge of seals; the history of law and of institutions, for the juridical interpretation of acts; and finally chemistry, to provide the remedies suitable for the preservation and restoration of parchments and papers.
Archivistics, understood as a body of norms for regulating the movement and life of archives, has a rather remote origin; understood instead as a doctrine for the scientific treatment of the problems inherent to them, it dates back no more than three centuries; in fact, in its modern content, it arises alongside paleography and diplomatics at the end of the 17th century, when discussions on the part of scholars began to converge upon archives.
Having overstepped the boundaries of the purely internal ordering of the material kept in archives, which nevertheless continues to constitute the foundation of the current science, archivistics today directs its particular attention also to the solution of all those problems that fall within the field of the external organization of an archive. It therefore suggests the criteria to be followed in the choice of the site and the building ground; in the construction of the building, in the distribution and arrangement of the rooms, in the systems of lighting and heating thereof; likewise it gives instructions for the furnishing of the storage areas, of the rooms intended for the public, and of the offices. Special care, moreover, archivistics must devote to the maintenance both of the rooms and of the equipment contained therein, prescribing for that purpose a whole series of measures that serve to ensure their hygiene.
The proper object of archivistics remains, however, the internal organization of an archive, for which reason, in the case of an archive already formed, it examines the content in order to arrange it, facilitating its practical use by scholars.
Archival material can be considered from a twofold point of view: formal and scientific. Regarded under the first aspect, it is divided into three categories: parchments, which are those that constitute the most conspicuous holdings of an archive, given their importance and antiquity; volumes, of which the principal types are represented by registers, which contain a copy of the documents dispatched by a body; by cartularies, containing instead a copy of the documents received; by protocols, which contain together the registration of acts both dispatched and received; loose papers, consisting of drafts of letters sent, received, and various enclosures (reports, accounts, plans, etc.), grouped in various ways.
Examined from the scientific point of view, archival material is likewise divided into three categories: documents, acts, and writings, understanding by documents, in the broad sense, any writing that gives us notice of a fact; by acts, those writings that precede and follow a document (e.g. drafts), destined to remain with the office of dispatch and which give an account of the phases through which the handling of an affair has passed; by writings, those writings that do not partake of the nature of the two preceding categories (e.g. correspondence, private letters, accounts, etc.).
The classification of archival material thus made is necessary for the purposes of the ordering carried out on the basis of different systems, whether of material application, such as the chronological and the alphabetical, or based upon the internal study of the subject matter, such as the decimal and the subject-based.
The chronological system, which gathers all writings according to the absolute order of the date, regarded as the principal element, presents drawbacks that are at times serious, which therefore discourage its use. It suffices to cite the fact that not all documents are dated and not all are detached, and the distortion of documents through the loss of connection among various documents that reflect a single affair but are not from the same year. The alphabetical system orders acts according to the initial letter of an index word, which may be a common noun or a personal or geographical name; although it presents a slight advantage over the preceding one, this system too is not without drawbacks, such as, for example, the different spelling under which the same name may sometimes appear. The decimal system of M. Dewey, based on numerical symbols variously combined, lends itself to a theoretical but not a practical arrangement of documents. The subject-based system, rather artificial, distributes the material under determined catchwords.
Once the archival material has been ordered and arranged according to one of the systems just recalled, one proceeds to the formation of the inventory, by which it is intended to offer a complete list of all the parchments, volumes, and loose papers, previously catalogued and numbered, that are found in a given room. Hence derives the practical utility of an inventory, necessary to prove materially the existence of an archival item, for which reason it is useful to divide it into as many sections as those into which an archive is divided. The inventory, which can be drawn up in whole or in part during the very ordering of the material, serves therefore to give a generic indication of what is contained in an archive, and for that very reason refrains from providing a description of the individual items kept, a need which is met instead by the repertory, which in summary offers the consulter specific knowledge of the content of the documents, indicating at the same time in which fonds of the archive documents on a given subject are to be found. However, in every inventory care will be taken to note for each document whether it is an original or a copy, specifying in the latter case its quality, that is, whether it is a simple copy or an illuminated copy, an authenticated copy (vidimus) or a notarial copy, a dispatch or a confirmation.
Contributing to supplement the indications provided by the inventory are the regesta, which supply in summary, for those documents whose importance requires it, their essential features; the regestum, besides benefiting the scholar in his research, also constitutes a guarantee of the preservation of the archival material, by limiting its handling.
In general archives, constituted through the deposits of several special archives, it becomes necessary to compile a single index of the various inventories, regesta, and repertories that provides the scholar with current indications together with the appropriate references to the older ones. An excellent example is offered by the Vatican Secret Archive with the publication of the two volumes of the Sussidi per la consultazione dell'Archivio Vaticano, included in the collection Studi e Testi of the Vatican Apostolic Library, 45 and 55 (Rome 1926 and Vatican City 1931).
Bibliography
Niccolò Del Re