I’ve been circling around some older pieces of archival theory lately, and what struck me is how often regulatory and legal retention issues appear as pivots in the shift from the life cycle to the continuum. It’s almost as if the law, rather than theory alone, forced the profession to think about an alternative model.
For most of the twentieth century, the life cycle model dominated. Retention was about stages, clear handoffs, and final scheduling. Records were created, managed for a while, and then, at the end, disposed of or transferred to an archive. The regulatory hooks were at the end of the chain.
As Upward and McKemmish reminded readers in 1994:
“The references to the scheduling of records and the registration of documents are therefore essential inclusions in defense of recordkeeping” (Somewhere Beyond Custody, 1994).
That’s very much a life cycle frame; rules at the back end to make sure nothing slipped through.
But by the early 1990s, the ground was shifting. In Australia, corruption scandals in Queensland and Western Australia made it hard to argue that regulation was just about end-of-life rules. Glenda Acland and others were pointing out that records themselves were part of the machinery of accountability. As Upward and McKemmish put it:
“The integrity of records is just as important as the soundness of finances in an accountable democratic government” (Somewhere Beyond Custody, 1994).
That line caught my eye. Retention here isn’t about relics. It’s about trust in government, about the record as evidence of how power is exercised.
A couple of years later, Upward sharpened the point:
“Privacy, freedom of information, watchdog, and company legislation changed the notion of social memory; and the ever extending use of the processes of legal discovery altered the legal aspects of records use” (Structuring the Records Continuum, 1996).
I read that and think, rights, discovery, FOI, privacy: all of these legal regimes make it impossible to imagine records quietly progressing through stages until an archivist gets hold of them. Regulation is constant, active, pressing in from every angle.
By 1997, in his Structuration Theory and Recordkeeping article, Upward even suggested that failures in electronic data archiving catalyzed “a loss of faith in custodial approaches”. Again, the legal and regulatory piece was central: if custodial models couldn’t sustain accountability, something had to give.
And then comes the full turn. In Modelling the Continuum as Paradigm Shift (2000), Upward reframed the entire question. Life cycle models, he said, were “an old game.” The continuum was a new one. What fascinated me is how explicitly he connects it back to regulatory and legal needs:
“[The model] provides a view of recordkeeping at the point of creation, within groups, at organisational levels, and at inter-organisational levels… determining social and legal requirements for recordkeeping” (Modelling the Continuum as Paradigm Shift, 2000).
Here retention isn’t a back-end problem. It’s baked into every dimension, creation, capture, organisation, pluralisation.
I’m not sure what conclusion to draw, other than to note how consistently law and regulation appear as catalysts in this shift. Maybe disposition rules at the end of the line worked well enough when paper was king. Maybe it took privacy laws, FOI regimes, and discovery demands to show that retention is continuous, not terminal.
I find myself wondering: did regulation drive theory, or did theory simply catch up with what law and practice were already making unavoidable?
Either way, the continuity is clear. In the life cycle view, disposition was the mechanism to ensure retention obligations were eventually met, a way of tying things off neatly. In the continuum view, accountability never waits until the end. It runs through every layer: creation, capture, organisation, and pluralisation.
And I suspect that’s where we still are today; caught between the comfort of disposition at the back end and the messiness of living with continuous legal obligations across spacetime.