Since the late twentieth century, the impact of new forms of document production as well as the huge growth of information technologies has led information professionals to rethink the traditional archival concepts and principles expressed in old Archival Science manuals. In this context, the Canadian scientific archival production can be highlighted. It gave the country the status of fertile ground for discussions on Archivistics and led to the “reshaping” of traditional archival principles and, as a consequence, (re)defined concepts, methods and criteria for the creation, maintenance and use of documents in electronic and traditional environments. In the 80’s, especially, a new paradigm was enunciated in the area and three approaches have emerged: Integrated Archival Science, enunciated by the Québec group which proposed the reintegration of the discipline through document vital cycle and a proximity with Information science due to the incorporation of the term organic information; Functional Archival Science or Postmodern Archival Science, enunciated by Terry Cook which proposed the renewal and reformulation of Archival Science principles and concepts, adopting the Post Modernist current as background; and Contemporary? first enunciated in Italy by Paola Carucci and deeply developed and reformulated in North America by Luciana Duranti which aims, through Diplomatics studies, to establish criteria for records critics, ensuring the diplomatic method a safe place in Contemporary Archival Science. Considering such scientific scenarios, this paper aims to establish a comparative discussion between the epistemological foundations of these three Canadian Archival approaches while emergent perspectives to build a contemporary archival discipline capable of facing the new processes of production, organization and use of recorded organic information.
Archival knowledge organization; Integrated archival science; Functional archival science; Contemporary diplomatics
