ABSTRACT
Historically, the principle of provenance was defined to mean that archivists must not mix the archival records of one person or organization with that of another. Sometimes this principle included the registry principle, or respect for original order, which meant that records must be kept in the same order as maintained by the creator. In order to assign provenance, however, archivists needed to define the provenancial unit or the volume and level of records that would be described by provenance. This would be used as the basis for appraisal, acquisition, arrangement and description, retrieval, and reference. This definition was, and continues to be, problematic. Originally the principle of provenance applied to both the physical and theoretical handling of records in an archives, but more recently archivists have suggested that provenance is a theoretical construct and that description based on provenance must capture all the myriad aspects of the origins of the records from the context of their use in the active record-keeping system to their transfer and handling in the archives. Since the inception of the principle of provenance, archivists have debated every aspect of it, such as what the principle imparts to records, how it can be used in archival appraisal, and its application to electronic records. The principle only gets stronger and more complex with time.
