ABSTRACT
Archivists’ resistance and mistrust is sometimes attributed to the nature of the medium (sound recordings and, now, video recordings), which is so different from paper. These professionals are said to have reacted in the same way that some now are reacting to machine readable archives. On a deeper level, some of the reluctance that archivists have felt with respect to oral sources is tied to the clash between the definition of traditional archival science, which still underlies their practices, despite some exceptions,1 and the characteristics of oral testimony. In effect, the basic principles of traditional archival science were articulated in the nineteenth century in tandem with the growth of a ‘positivist’, ‘empirical’ historiography that pretended to be more exacting, that was concerned with political, diplomatic and military issues. The method on which the system is founded is based on textual criticism applied in particular to official documents and inspired by methods previously developed in diplomatics.2 Research, it is held, must be based on reliable documents that are subjected to exacting criticism. In this way, it can reveal ‘facts’ to which one can assign, if not certainty, at least a high probability of truth.
