Original order is a concept in archival theory that a group of records should be maintained in the same order as they were placed by the record's creator. Along with provenance, original order is a core tenet of the archival concept of respect des fonds. A primary goal of keeping records in their original order is to preserve additional contextual information about the records' creator and the environment of their creation. Original order also encourages the archivist to remain neutral as opposed to applying any interpretation to the records.
Principle The Society of American Archivists Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology calls original order a "fundamental principle of archives" and posits two primary purposes: preserving "relationships and evidential significance" of records and facilitating use of the records by maintaining "the record creator's mechanisms to access". The SAA definition qualifies that original order is not necessarily the order of the records upon their delivery to an archive; if something is received by the archive clearly out of sequence, it is expected that the archive will return an item to its original location. If the records are received without any discernible organization system, then original order may need to be created by the archivist. The order in which records were created may provide some important information about the intention of the records' creator. Original order helps to keep the context of records intact, and some records depend on their original context to tell their whole story. Researchers may use this context to better understand the records' relationship to each other, their creator, or the manner in which they were maintained, used, or transmitted prior to being received by the archives. Another benefit of maintaining original order is that it reduces the amount of time that archivists must spend processing and arranging new records as they are received into a collection. Instead of creating a new organizational system, developing new metadata, or writing new descriptions, archivists can use systems and descriptions already developed by the creator, as outlined in the seminal article "More Product, Less Process". Original order is closely related to, but not the same as, provenance, which refers to the origin of a record's creation or ownership. In addition to being kept in their original order, best practice dictates that records should be grouped together according to their provenance; records created by different individuals or organizations should not be mixed together, even if they discuss the same subject matter.
History Max Lehmann is often credited as the first archivist to write about the principle of original order, when he developed guidelines for the Prussian Privy State Archives in 1881. Original order, or the Registraturprinzip, represented the easiest way for the Prussian archivists to maintain the complicated registry systems of the State Archives. Prior to this, many archives had organized their records according to format, content, or chronology. Many developed chronological registers, essentially a sequential list of records that grew as they were added to the archive. This often made it difficult for archivists to process and describe records, particularly in large collections or when they were faced with arranging undated documents. The first noteworthy articulation of the practice of original order was presented in the Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives (also known as The Dutch Manual) in 1898, where, in the chapter on the arrangement of archival documents, point #16 states: "The system of arrangement must be based on the original organization of the archival collection, which in the main corresponds to the organization of the administrative body that produced it." These principles were not meant to apply to personal papers, as the Dutch Manual did not consider an individual's collection of personal papers to constitute an archive. In the first English-language manual for archive administration, published in 1937, Sir Hillary Jenkinson argued that only "documents which formed part of an official transaction and were preserved for official reference' qualified as archives." Many, though not all, contemporary archivists, though, have changed their thinking and view personal papers as archives deserving of the same treatment as government or organizational records.
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