Diplomatics as a methodological perspective for archival knowledge organization

Abstract

Knowledge organization is usually discussed in the Library and Information Science community, but it is a concept rarely applied to archival science. It occurs, among other things, due the fact that until the late twentieth century the discipline did not recognize information as its object of study, studying only the record and the archive. Archival science began to consider information asits object of study when in 1988, in North America, the authors Couture, Ducharme, and Rousseau, proposed the use of the terms “organic information” and “nonorganic information”, defining the former as one created and received by a physical person or entity in the course of a practical activity, and the latter as one contained in bibliographical records, replacing therefore the concepts of archival and bibliographic records, in archival science research.