Documentation Beyond Control

This post is part of a series that translates ecological narratives, biological concepts and field notes into analytical tools for libraries, archives, and museums, related to knowledge and memory management. Check all the posts in this section's index.

From Preservation to Exposure

For over a century, archival science and librarianship have defined documentation through an anthropocentric lens: as an intentional act of inscription and control. Records, in this view, originate when a human subject chooses to fix an event in durable form. This juridical conception — rooted in the administrative rationalities of the nineteenth century — underlies the profession's central triad of authenticity, fixity, and integrity.

Such a framework has proved technically productive but epistemically narrow. It assumes that documentation begins with deliberation and that only human agency grants significance to a trace. Against this assumption, an emerging body of thought in critical archival studies and new materialist documentation (Frohmann, Buckland, Briet) invites a reconsideration of where — and in what form — a record begins. If every energetic encounter that leaves a durable mark can be considered inscription, then the act of documentation predates both writing and intention.

Drawing on ecological semiotics and material epistemology, this post proposes a shift from documentation as preservation to documentation as exposure — a model in which records arise from interactions within complex environments, not solely from human command. The result is an ecological theory of documentation grounded in the behavior of light: a recognition that the world has always been recording itself.

Light as the First Archivist

Photosynthesis, understood biologically, is the conversion of radiant energy into biochemical structure. Understood archivally, it is the earliest known instance of record creation on Earth — the transformation of exposure into form. Each leaf is a responsive surface upon which light inscribes contextual data: wavelength, intensity, humidity, atmospheric composition. These variables are materially encoded in pigment ratios and cellular architecture.

This is not a metaphor but an operational analogy. Photosynthesis demonstrates that inscription can occur without authorship or intent. It exemplifies what Suzanne Briet called the "document-as-evidence": a material trace that acquires informational status by participating in a system of relations. The leaf, like Briet's famous antelope, becomes documentary not through symbolic representation but through contextual embeddedness.

In LIS terms, this perspective extends the scope of documentation beyond symbolic expression. It defines the record as any configuration of matter that preserves evidence of interaction. Such a definition realigns the ontology of documentation with ecological reality: records precede recordkeepers.

Distributed Authorship and Post-Provenancial Logics

Traditional archival theory depends on provenance: the principle that contextual meaning derives from a single creator or originating body. Yet in ecological systems, authorship is plural, continuous, and often indeterminate. The "record" of a forest — a decaying trunk, a leaf scar, a mycorrhizal trace — is produced and revised by countless agents: fungi, insects, rain, light, and time.

This vision of distributed authorship opens a model of memory work that moves beyond the classical provenance paradigm. Scholars such as Michelle Caswell, Ricardo L. Punzalan and Eric Ketelaar have articulated the need for relational and participatory approaches to provenance — approaches attentive to collective agency, dispersed authorship, and the ongoing transformations of records. In this light, ecological recordkeeping becomes a material instantiation of those principles: provenance is no longer simply a matter of origin, but of entanglement — a network of relations through which the record continues to evolve and accrue meaning.

For LIS practice, this implies a redefinition of authorship and authenticity. Authority no longer resides in the originating instance but in the coherence of relationships that sustain a record's meaning. A collection, like an ecosystem, remains authentic not because it is immutable, but because its transformations are traceable within a relational network.

Metadata as Matter

Conventional metadata operates as an external, descriptive layer: information added after creation to facilitate organization and retrieval. In ecological systems, by contrast, metadata is intrinsic. Every material form carries within itself the data of its own making. The structure of a leaf records its environmental history: light exposure, water stress, soil chemistry. Its "description" is inseparable from its substance.

This natural model challenges the assumption that metadata must be imposed by an observer. It proposes instead the notion of self-descriptive records — entities that register their context through measurable, endogenous features. In the digital domain, such logic aligns with embedded provenance, self-documenting datasets, and sensor-linked archives.

However, ecology reminds us that such integration is not purely technical. The forest maintains coherence through relational balance, not through external management. Similarly, an information system achieves preservation not by isolating its objects but by embedding them in stable, reciprocal environments. A record's durability, like that of a living organism, depends on interdependence rather than insulation.

Documentation as Ecology

If light functions as the first archivist, then documentation must be understood as an ecological process rather than a bureaucratic one. The classical operations of archival science — creation, appraisal, preservation, and access — find their functional equivalents in biological systems, revealing that the principles governing life and those governing memory are not merely analogous but structurally aligned.

Creation corresponds to exposure and photosynthesis: the transformation of energy into material form. Appraisal mirrors decomposition — a selective process that does not destroy but refines, retaining what can be metabolized by the system. Preservation is realized through circulation: continuity achieved not by isolation but by adaptive exchange among interconnected elements. Finally, access takes the shape of participation, for meaning in living systems emerges only through relational interaction.

This framework does not romanticize nature; it extracts from it methodological guidance. Ecological recordkeeping demonstrates resilience through diversity, redundancy, and adaptability — the very qualities absent from centralized, preservationist infrastructures that depend on uniform standards and rigid hierarchies.

In practical terms, this ecological perspective encourages the development of modular and regenerative archival systems: repositories that evolve with use, metadata schemas that accommodate transformation, and appraisal policies that treat loss not as failure but as renewal. It aligns naturally with the records continuum model and with current post-custodial and community-based approaches that emphasize sustainability, plurality, and distributed agency. Such a reorientation does not dismantle archival science; it situates it within the broader metabolism of living systems — where the archive, like the forest, survives not by remaining unchanged, but by learning to breathe.

Reframing Professional Practice

Reconsidering documentation as an ecological process forces a corresponding shift in professional identity. The work of librarians, archivists, and information managers has long been framed through custodial metaphors — protection, stability, control. However, if memory operates through exposure, interaction, and transformation, then the professional task is not to guard against change but to manage it intelligently.

In this model, preservation becomes a question of environmental design rather than defensive endurance. The goal is to maintain the conditions under which traces can continue to form, circulate, and adapt, not to arrest them in artificial permanence. Cataloguing and metadata creation, traditionally conceived as descriptive acts, become instead exercises in mapping relationships: tracking provenance, transformation, and reuse across temporal and material contexts. Access, too, changes meaning. It is no longer the end of the archival chain but part of its metabolism: the moment when records re-enter circulation and generate new traces of their own.

Professionally, this perspective demands humility and precision rather than control. It accepts that records, like organisms, will age, degrade, and recombine, and that managing those processes requires contextual judgment, not universal standards. The archivist or librarian becomes less a custodian of static integrity and more a designer of continuity — one who builds systems capable of surviving through adaptation.

This reframing does not abandon the principles of preservation, authenticity, or accountability; it grounds them in a different epistemology. Stability arises not from freezing the record but from sustaining its network of relations. In that sense, information work aligns with ecological stewardship: both concern the maintenance of environments where diversity, transformation, and resilience coexist without collapsing into chaos.

Reading the Leaf

The recognition that documentation operates as an ecological process does not call for mysticism, but for methodological realism. Light, decay, and circulation are not metaphors; they are processes through which information takes form, mutates, and persists. Accepting them as conceptual anchors means grounding archival and library work in the same logics that sustain life: exposure, relation, and transformation.

If the archive has long been treated as a fortress against time, this perspective reframes it as a system embedded in time: a structure whose integrity depends on its ability to evolve. Memory, like matter, endures through circulation. To document, therefore, is not to freeze meaning but to sustain the conditions that allow meaning to continue emerging.

The leaf is not a symbol: it is evidence. It demonstrates that recording occurs wherever form interacts with force, and that permanence is not a prerequisite for continuity. In professional terms, this lesson translates into an ethics of adaptability: one that treats loss, revision, and recombination as intrinsic parts of informational life.

Such realism does not weaken librarianship or archival practice; it redefines their horizon. Stability is not achieved by resisting transformation but by designing for it. The task ahead is to build systems capable of surviving through change — systems that, like living matter, remain coherent precisely because they are never still.

  This entry mirrors the chronicle "Light as Record," a narrative reflection on the same theme.