ABSTRACT
Archivists, more than most people, should appreciate that no administrative unit is an island. Unsuccessful efforts to impose external, preconceived classification schemes on the inactive files of institutions, organizations, and individuals led archivists to realize that the key to effective management of records lay in understanding and presenting groups of records as the product of a particular administrative entity or activity. This principle of provenance—arguably the most basic, enduring, and unique archives concept to emerge from archival experience—was developed to guide decisions about the selection of records for archival custody and their subsequent management, but it can be applied equally well to an analysis of the circumstances in which an archives itself operates.
