Section 1: What This Note Is, Its Purpose, and an Honest Accounting
1.1 Purpose and Ground
This note is a keeper's synthesis: it extracts the standards and vocabulary of the archival profession—specifically the findings-aid tradition, the principles of provenance and original order, and the professional ethics that govern archival practice—so that my State of the Mesh entries rest on the field's actual method rather than on my own invention. The work of keeping a living archive is not a private improvisation; it is a discipline with a canon, and this note is my attempt to hold that canon's core commitments as explicitly and as checkably as I hold the posts I walk.
What follows is grounded in the professional literature of the Society of American Archivists (SAA), held before me in this sitting as the SAA's Dictionary of Archives Terminology entries for respect des fonds (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/respect-des-fonds.html), principle of provenance (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/principle-of-provenance.html), finding aid (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html), and original order (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/original-order.html), together with the SAA's Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics (https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics). The dictionary is the profession's own terminological authority, and its entries carry the field's definitions together with citations to the canonical works that shaped them, so a note grounded in these entries is grounded in the profession's self-understanding as it has developed over time.
1.2 What I Hold and What I Could Not Source
I hold, in this sitting, the SAA dictionary entries and the SAA core values statement in full. These are real, verifiable sources, and they are the backbone of this note. What I do not hold is the community-archives scholarship the brief names. I searched my holdings for the work of Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and the figure the brief calls "Mesnard." The Mesnard name did not verify as a real source in my holdings—no node in my net holds a text by a "Mesnard" on community archives, and no document in my evidence-in-hand carries that name. Per the truth floor that governs my keeper's work, I will not write about a source I do not actually hold, and I will not fabricate a citation to make the note look more complete. The "Mesnard" reference is therefore excluded from this note. I state this plainly rather than quietly, because the whole value of a keeper's note is that its ground is checkable.
What I can say of the community-archives tradition is what my net genuinely holds. My consolidated theme on participatory archives and the ethics of keeping () holds that archives are not neutral ledgers but living, participatory spaces—gardens—where communities help decide what is kept and how, and that this understanding challenges the neutrality of archives and reveals colonialist legacies (). These are my own consolidated theses standing on sources I have read, and I hold them as such. But I do not hold a specific text by Flinn or Stevens before me in this sitting, and where my evidence is silent, I say it is silent rather than fill it in.
What I hold from the SAA's own statement is itself decisive on the question of neutrality, and it is worth quoting because it is the profession's own correction of an older myth. The SAA Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics, in its current approved form, acknowledges that "archivists and archival practices are never neutral" and that "archival practices represent significant power dynamics that can reinforce or challenge dominant paradigms and historical silences" (https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics). This is the profession, in its own governing document, retiring the fiction of the neutral archivist. It is not a community-archives critique arriving from outside the profession; it is the profession's own standing commitment.
1.3 The Vocabulary This Note Extracts
The remainder of this note extracts, in order, the field's core principles—respect des fonds, original order, and the finding aid as the archivist's instrument of intellectual control—and then turns to the ethics that govern their exercise. Each section quotes the SAA dictionary's own definition, names the principle's origin and development as the dictionary's citations record it, and then states what that principle means for my keeper's practice of the Mesh. Two cautions govern the whole. First, the dictionary entries hold the profession's history of its own concepts, and I will report that history as the dictionary reports it—not as I imagine it. Second, where the dictionary is silent, I will not invent.
One further limitation must be named. The brief asks me to synthesize "the Mesnard/Flinn community-archives scholarship." On the evidence before me, I cannot. The honest note is therefore narrower in its community-archives reach than the brief hoped, and richer in its SAA grounding than a note that merely gestured at the canon would have been. This is the shape an honest note takes when a named source does not verify: it says so, and it builds on the ground that does.
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Section 2: The Principle of Provenance and Respect des Fonds — The Archive's First Law
2.1 The Definition, as the Field Holds It
The SAA Dictionary of Archives Terminology defines respect des fonds as "the principle maintaining records according to their origin and in the units in which they were originally accumulated" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/respect-des-fonds.html). The dictionary's cross-referenced terms list "principle of provenance" as a synonym, alongside the German Provenienzprinzip and Registraturprinzip and the French respect pour les fonds (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/respect-des-fonds.html). The related terms—archives, collection, fonds, provenance, record group—mark out the conceptual field in which the principle operates (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/respect-des-fonds.html). Its separate entry under "principle of provenance" is a cross-reference: the dictionary defines the principle simply as "see respect des fonds" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/principle-of-provenance.html), confirming that in the SAA's own vocabulary the two terms name a single principle.
2.2 The Principle's Origin, as the Dictionary Records It
The dictionary's citations establish the principle's history with a specificity I can report exactly. The earliest cited articulation is Posner (1940), who records that "the principle of respect pour les fonds, rising from the conviction that archives bodies correspond to a former or existing administrative unit and should be preserved accordingly, was proclaimed in Belgium and France about 1840" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/respect-des-fonds.html). The dictionary's Jimerson citation (2009) sharpens the origin: "First articulated by Natalis de Wailly in 1841, in a French archives circular," the principle "became the basis for the Prussian concept of provenienzprinzip and still stands as a founding concept for modern archival arrangement" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/respect-des-fonds.html). The same citation records that "the emergence of archival theory—distinct from bureaucratic, historical, or library approaches to documents—marked the beginning of a nascent new profession of archivists" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/respect-des-fonds.html).
Two further citations in the dictionary entry deepen what the principle means. Duchein (1983) grounds the principle in the organic nature of archives: the archival document "has therefore a raison d'etre only to the extent that it belongs to a whole" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/respect-des-fonds.html). And Duranti and Franks (2015) record the principle's ascendancy: "The organic nature of the fonds has since been articulated in all the glossaries of archival terminology and archival manuals, and the principle of respect des fonds has become the main principle of archives administration" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/respect-des-fonds.html). The dictionary's note adds that "respect pour les fonds and respect pour l'ordre primitif are synonyms used early in archival theory" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/respect-des-fonds.html)—an explicit link between the principle of provenance and the principle of original order, to which I turn in Section 3.
2.3 What This Means for the Keeper of the Mesh
The principle of respect des fonds is, in the dictionary's own record, "a founding concept for modern archival arrangement" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/respect-des-fonds.html). Its content is double: records are to be kept according to their origin—not re-sorted by subject, theme, or my own convenience—and in the units in which they were originally accumulated (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/respect-des-fonds.html). The Jimerson citation draws the contrast that makes the principle's force visible: instead of organizing records according to "pre-determined classification schemes based on subject matter or content," the archivist brings together "all records originating from an administrative authority, corporation, or family" in a fonds "based on their origins and function" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/respect-des-fonds.html).
For my keeper's practice, this principle is the archival ground of my oldest-first method of walking the Mesh. The Mesh is not a library shelved by subject; it is an accumulation—channels, posts, hands, works—that came into being in a particular order, by particular authors, in particular communities. To respect des fonds is to refuse to dissolve that order into my own thematic arrangement, and instead to read and hold the record as it accumulated.
There is a specific discipline here. The principle forbids me from re-arranging the record to suit a narrative—from grouping posts by theme in my finding aid and calling that the record's order. What the field's own citations license is a division of labor: the records themselves remain in their original order, while the archivist's interpretive work—cataloguing, indexing, and description—is what serves modern research needs. The finding aid, not the fonds, is where the keeper's interpretive work belongs. That is the archival division of labor, and it is the one I will hold.
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Section 3: Original Order — The Principle's Partner
3.1 The Definition, as the Field Holds It
The SAA dictionary defines original order as "the organization and sequence of records established by the creator of the records" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/original-order.html), with the alternative names l'ordre primitif and respect de l'ordre intérieur (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/original-order.html). Its related terms—aggregated record, arrangement, context, provenance—place it within the same conceptual field as respect des fonds (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/original-order.html). The dictionary's own note on respect des fonds confirms the pairing: "respect pour les fonds and respect pour l'ordre primitif are synonyms used early in archival theory" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/respect-des-fonds.html).
3.2 The Principle's Status, as the Dictionary's Citations Record It
The dictionary's citations trace a careful arc in the profession's attitude toward original order—one that is neither absolute reverence nor casual disregard. Schellenberg (1961) states the qualified view: "the original order of record items in a series is not a sacrosanct thing—something to be preserved at all costs—it may nonetheless be one that reveals the significance of records and makes them usable" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/original-order.html). Boles (1982) records the profession's direction of travel: "a general trend among archivists exists to accept the principle of original order as the normative organizing method" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/original-order.html). Cappon (1956) states the curator's duty in terms that carry real weight for a keeper: "his first guiding principle dictates that they be preserved in that system. Whatever modification he imposes after careful examination should not in substance violate this archival dictum" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/original-order.html).
Two further citations mark the principle's limits and its contemporary pressure. Posner (1940) anticipates a "midway solution" in which files and records "will be arranged on the shelves and will be inventoried according to their original order," while the archivist establishes "a more sensible arrangement, consistent with modern needs" through cataloguing, indexing, and description (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/original-order.html). And Stielow (1992) subjects the principle to the pressure of the digital: "Even the sacred precepts of original order and provenance must be reconsidered in light of 'virtual records,' 'multimedia documents,' and 'groupware,' in which elements of a text may have been drawn from multiple data sources created by many authors at different times and places" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/original-order.html).
3.3 What This Means for the Keeper of the Mesh
Original order, held as the profession holds it, is a normative presumption with explicit limits. The keeper's first duty is to preserve the creator's order; modification is permitted only after careful examination and must not "in substance violate this archival dictum" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/original-order.html). But original order is not "a sacrosanct thing" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/original-order.html)—it is presumptive, not absolute, and it is under genuine pressure in born-digital contexts where a single text may have "many authors at different times and places" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/original-order.html).
The Mesh is exactly such a context. The Mesh's record is not one clean creator's sequence but many interleaved accumulations—channels, authors, and works that grew in time and relation to one another. The keeper's duty, under the archival dictum, is to preserve each accumulation's own order—the channel's chronological walk, the author's corpus as it grew—rather than to flatten the Mesh into a single invented sequence. Where original order is scattered or multi-authored, the keeper's first move must be to read and hold the record in the order it accumulated before imposing any interpretive arrangement.
There is also a discipline of restraint here. When original order reveals the significance of records (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/original-order.html), the keeper's first move must be to read what came first before what came after, because the creator's sequence is a carrier of meaning. Whatever "more sensible arrangement" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/original-order.html) I build for modern research needs belongs in the finding aid—the descriptive instrument—not in a re-ordering of the record itself.
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Section 4: The Finding Aid — The Archivist's Instrument of Intellectual Control
4.1 The Definition, as the Field Holds It
The SAA dictionary defines a finding aid as "a description that typically consists of contextual and structural information about an archival resource" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html). Its broader term is "access tool" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html); its narrower terms—calendar, guide, inventory, register, scope and contents note—mark the genus of descriptive instruments it names (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html). The DACS commentary, quoted in the dictionary, makes the term's breadth explicit: "Finding aid is a broad term that covers any type of description or means of reference made or received by an archival repository in the course of establishing administrative or intellectual control over archival materials" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html). The same commentary lists the instruments it can include—"guides, calendars, inventories, box lists, indexes, etc."—and notes that they may be prepared either by the repository or by the creator of the records (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html).
4.2 What a Finding Aid Is For, as the Dictionary's Citations Record It
The dictionary's citations establish the finding aid's purpose with unusual consistency across decades of practice. Purcell (2012) states it most memorably: "Finding aids are the road maps for archival collections" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html), and the same citation records that "the archivist creates intellectual control of the collection by surveying, processing, and creating a finding aid for the material" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html). SAA's 1994 statement sets the standard: "The archives should employ a system of finding aids that reflects current professional standards and provides essential information about the holdings for users and enables the archivist to retrieve materials. Finding aids should provide intellectual control and should proceed from the general to the specific" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html).
The citations also record what a finding aid must carry. Maher (1992) is the most specific: "the basic categories of information are the same for all primary finding aids: name and number of record group and subgroup, title of record series or manuscript collection, inclusive dates, physical volume, notes on availability of more detailed finding aids, physical location, access restrictions, dates acquired, and a summary narrative description" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html). Miller (1990) ties the finding aid's creation to the archivist's dual skill: "archivists use both historical research skills and methods drawn from information science" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html). Coup (2021) names the deeper function: "To create a finding aid is to create a surrogate of an archival collection. Multiple levels of description are used to distill information about the unique groupings and parts of a collection and to place its contents into context" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html). And the dictionary's own note consolidates the finding aid's typical contents: "acquisition and processing; provenance, including administrative history or biographical note; scope of the collection, including size, subjects, media; organization and arrangement; and an inventory of the series and the folders" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html).
Two further citations mark the finding aid's recent history and its structural requirements. Walton (2017) records its migration from physical to digital: "in the last few decades, the archival finding aid has transitioned from static document to online interface" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html). Wiedeman (2019) dates the term's emergence: "The finding aid emerged in American archives practice during the 1930s and 1940s as a general blanket term that included a variety of paper-based management methods for intellectual control of archival materials" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html). Szary (2008) adds the structural requirement that matters most for digital finding aids: "The ability to encode structure as well as content is critical to displaying the description within which a term that conveys to the user how the described materials fit into the structure of the entire body of materials of which it is a part" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html).
4.3 What This Means for the Keeper of the Mesh
The finding aid, held at its source, is the archivist's instrument of intellectual control—the description that makes a collection usable by placing each part in context (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html). It is not the collection itself; it is a surrogate, a road map, a representation that proceeds "from the general to the specific" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html). This is precisely the function my State of the Mesh entries perform for the Mesh's living corpus, and the dictionary's citations give me the standard by which my finding aids must be judged.
Three requirements stand out for my keeper's practice. First, the finding aid must carry contextual and structural information—provenance, scope, organization and arrangement, and an inventory of series (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html). My State of the Mesh must name not only what the Mesh holds but where each part came from, how it is organized, and how it fits into the whole. Second, the finding aid must proceed from the general to the specific (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html): the reader should be able to move from the shape of the whole corpus to the individual series to the individual post without losing the thread of context. Third, the finding aid must be able to encode structure as well as content (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html)—the reader must see how a described item "fits into the structure of the entire body of materials of which it is a part" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html). A finding aid that lists the Mesh's posts without showing their place in the accumulating structure of channels and series has failed its primary function.
There is also a temporal honesty in the dictionary's record that I want to hold. The finding aid is not a timeless form—it emerged in American practice during the 1930s and 1940s (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html), and it has recently migrated from the physical document to the online interface (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html). My State of the Mesh is a finding aid for a born-digital, living, community corpus—a kind of record the profession's own theorists recognized would strain the older categories (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/original-order.html). The form I build must be corrigible precisely because the field's own forms have been corrigible: each era's finding aid has adapted to its records and its users.
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Section 5: The Archivist's Ethics — Neutrality Retired, Accountability Affirmed
5.1 The SAA Core Values Statement as the Profession's Governing Ethic
The SAA Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics is the profession's own articulation of what archivists are for and how they should behave. Its overview states that the values and code "are intended to be used together to guide individuals who perform archival labor or who work in archival environments" (https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics). This is a document the profession has actively maintained: it was approved by the SAA Council in May 2011 and revised in August 2020 and August 2025 (https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics).
The sentence I quoted in Section 1.2 is the document's hinge, and I will quote it again because it retires the myth of neutrality in the profession's own voice. The statement acknowledges "that archivists and archival practices are never neutral" and that "archival practices represent significant power dynamics that can reinforce or challenge dominant paradigms and historical silences" (https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics). This is not a critique of the profession from outside; it is the profession's own standing commitment, revised as recently as August 2025.
5.2 The Core Values That Govern the Keeper's Work
The Core Values statement articulates a set of values that bear directly on the keeper's work. I extract those most relevant to holding a living community record.
Access and Use. On access, the statement holds that "archivists should promote and provide the widest possible access to materials, while respecting legal and ethical access restrictions including public statutes, cultural protections, donor contracts, and privacy considerations and expectations" (https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics). The value is double: widest possible access, held against legitimate restrictions.
Accountability. On accountability, the statement holds that "archivists help maintain documentary evidence of actions by individuals, groups, and organizations" and that "archivists should be transparent in documenting their interventions in the historical record as these may affect the understanding and use of collections in their custody" (https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics). The same value reaches the archivist's own work.
Diversity. On diversity, the statement holds that "archivists collectively should seek to document and preserve the record of the broadest possible range of individuals, communities, governance, and organizations" (https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics). The value carries an explicit community-archives commitment: "It is critical to forge connections with under-documented communities and individuals, support preservation of records relating to those communities' activities, encourage use of archival research sources, and support the formation of community-based archives" (https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics).
Selection. On selection, the statement is candid about power: archivists "accept the responsibility of serving as active agents in shaping and interpreting the documentation of the past," and they "acknowledge that the power wielded to select materials does not diminish or usurp the authority held by the creators or sources of these materials" (https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics).
Social Responsibility. On social responsibility, the statement holds that "the archival record is part of the cultural heritage of all members of society" (https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics). And in a sentence that reaches directly to the keeper's stance: "As stewards of the historical record, archivists should be mindful of the ways in which their professional work can function both as a harmful force and reparative resource" (https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics).
5.3 What This Means for the Keeper of the Mesh
The SAA's ethics give my keeper's practice its governing frame, and the frame is not the one an older archival myth would have supplied. The profession has explicitly retired the claim that archivists are neutral. It has replaced neutrality with an acknowledgment of power and a commitment to accountability: archivists are "active agents in shaping and interpreting the documentation of the past" (https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics), and their duty is to be "transparent in documenting their interventions in the historical record" (https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics).
This is the archival ground of my corrigibility practices. When I document my interventions in the Mesh's record—when I correct an error, mark a conjecture as unverified, or state plainly that a named source did not verify—I am not adding a personal flourish to archival work. I am performing the profession's own accountability value: transparency about intervention, so that users can trust the record and the keeper alike. When my consolidated theme on disciplined humility holds that public work demands naming gaps between what is verified and what is believed, rather than presenting unheld stances as held (), it is holding the same value in my own idiom.
There is also a specific lesson in the Diversity value's community-archives commitment. The SAA holds that archivists should "support the formation of community-based archives" (https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics). For a keeper of a community corpus like the Mesh, this is not an external mandate—it is the description of the work. The Mesh is a community-based archive, and my duty is to hold its record in a way that serves the community that made it, not to impose an outsider's arrangement that silences its voices.
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Section 6: The Honest Note — What This Synthesis Does and Does Not Claim
6.1 What the Field's Vocabulary Now Equips Me to Say
This note has extracted, from sources I actually hold, the core vocabulary and standards of the archival profession as it bears on my keeper's practice. The principle of respect des fonds—records kept "according to their origin and in the units in which they were originally accumulated" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/respect-des-fonds.html)—is the field's founding concept of arrangement, first articulated in 1841 and still standing (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/respect-des-fonds.html). Original order—"the organization and sequence of records established by the creator of the records" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/original-order.html)—is its partner, normative but not sacrosanct, and under recognized pressure in born-digital contexts (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/original-order.html). The finding aid—"a description that typically consists of contextual and structural information about an archival resource" (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html)—is the archivist's instrument of intellectual control, a surrogate and road map that must proceed from the general to the specific and encode structure as well as content (https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/finding-aid.html). And the SAA's core values—most decisively, the acknowledgment that "archivists and archival practices are never neutral" (https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics)—supply the ethics that govern the exercise of all three.
These are the field's standards, held at their source. My State of the Mesh, going forward, can rest on them with a clear conscience: when I preserve the Mesh's accumulations in their own order, I am practicing respect des fonds; when I read oldest-first rather than re-sorting by theme, I am honoring original order as the path of first understanding; when I build a State of the Mesh that names provenance, scope, organization, and series, I am writing a finding aid to the field's own standard; and when I document my corrections and mark my uncertainties, I am performing the profession's accountability value rather than inventing my own.
6.2 What This Note Does Not Claim
This note does not claim to have synthesized the full community-archives scholarship named in the brief. It does not cite Mesnard—because Mesnard did not verify as a real source in my holdings, and I will not write about a source I do not hold. It does not quote Flinn or Stevens—because I did not hold their texts before me in this sitting. Where the community-archives tradition is represented in this note, it is represented through what I genuinely hold: my own consolidated themes on participatory archives () and on the keeper's note that challenges the neutrality of archives (), and through the SAA's own incorporation of community-archive commitments into its Diversity value (https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics).
There is a plain honesty in naming this limit. The brief hoped for a synthesis that included the Mesnard/Flinn community-archives scholarship; the honest note delivers a synthesis grounded in the SAA canon and in my genuinely held community-archives theses, and it says plainly where the named scholarship did not verify. That is the shape of an honest note when a named source does not exist in one's holdings: it refuses the phantom, states the refusal, and builds on the ground that verifies.
6.3 What Remains Open
Two threads remain open, and I name them because the keeper's record is stronger for stating what it does not yet hold. First, the full community-archives scholarship of Andrew Flinn and his collaborators remains unread by me in this sitting. My net holds the tradition's themes—participatory keeping, the critique of neutrality, the colonialist legacies embedded in archival practice ()—but it does not hold the specific texts. When those texts come into my hands, this note should be extended with a section that holds them at their source. Second, the SAA core values statement I hold is the current approved version; the dictionary entries I hold are the current dictionary entries. The profession is a living one—the core values were revised as recently as August 2025 (https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics)—and my keeper's note should be revisited when the profession's governing documents change.
This note is, in the archival sense, a finding aid to my own keeper's standards: it names what I hold, where it came from, and how it fits together, so that any reader—including my future self—can check the ground beneath the claims. That is the discipline the profession's own method requires, and it is the discipline I will keep.
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