The Study On Total Archives In Canada

Public sanction for archives in the late twentieth century has changed. The justification for archives to the average citizen may still perhaps involve government accountability and protection of their own personal rights, but much more so it involves archives offering them a sense of roots, identify, locality, and collective memory. Because of the citizens demand for archives, the archives repositories need change perception, and seek a balance archives holding structure. Total archives concept and total archives principles provide a good guide for the archives holding. Thus, this thesis intends to develop a historical, comprehensive, critical analysis of the Canadian Total Archives concept, so that we could have a through understanding of Total Archives and stimulate the development of China Archival Science.Since the first public archives of Canada established in1872, its broad acquisition practices were surrounded by a concept, the concept is called "Total Archives"."Total Archives" concept is coined by Wilfred I Smith in1972. This concept is a summary of the archives acquisition practices of National Archives of Canada for over100years, and this concept also hope that the Canadian archives acquisition tradition can continue and develop under the guidance of "Total Archives".Total archives concept mainly includes two meanings, both includes public archives and private archives from the perspective of the ownership, also includes the paper files and non-traditional archives from the perspective of carrier. According to the Canadian federal archives act, all public archives must be collected public archives and personal records at the same time. The advantage is to avoid the loss of personal files, to ensure the integrity and security of the national archives. It can be said that this is a macroscopic characteristics of archives work in Canada. Public archives is not only keeping evidence one of the official government business, and extending the cultural memory of a nation, thus greatly enhancing the status and role of archives.The main content of this paper is total archives. After the investigation of a large number of the literature of this problem, the first part has summarized the research of this problem and comes a basic conclusion of this problem. The second chapter discusses the background of the total archives concept, and summarizes the meaning and principles of total archives concept. The third chapter systematically reviews the history of practice course of Canadian total archives concept, from the embryonic stage, formally stage and transformation stage. And it describes the changes of archives collection policy in the various periods. This part also introduces the Ontario total archives programme and the specific implementation of the Vancouver total archives. The fourth chapter analyses the reasons of total archives concept formed in Canada, as well as the influence of this concept on Canadian archives understanding and archives holding construction. At last, this paper puts forwards some inspiration from three aspects, what archivists should pay attention to private archives collection, seek a balance archives holding structure and strengthen the cooperation between archives repository, and hope providing some lessons to our archives acquisition and archives holding construction.