Back Home

Seminar on Records and Archives in Society

Course This Week Past Readings History Archives Projects

Jeff Frederick The Record Group Concept: A Critique Mario D. Fenyo, "The Record Group Concept: A Critique," American Archivist 29 (April 1966): 229-239.   In this article, Mario Fenyo discusses the evolution of the term record group in the United States National Archives and offers some observations about its effectiveness in practice. Fenyo traces the origin of the term to a 1940 chance grouping of words in the Guide to the Material in the National Archives. Within a year the term was in vogue and had earned a specific definition as construed by Dr. Solon J. Buck, later to become Archivist of the United States. Much of the foundational work in creating the use of record groups came from a 1940 committee composed of a variety of individuals including Buck, and a prominent German archivist named Ernst Posner and charged with evaluating existing National Archives' finding aids. Essentially, the committee, spearheaded by Buck, determined that a record group was " a major archival unit established somewhat arbitrarily with a due regard for provenance and to the desirability of making the unit of convenient size and character for the work of arrangement and description and for the publication of inventories." (233) The transition to full adoption of record groups was not instant; Buck himself continued to use the term archival group and records of the committee meetings are incomplete, leading to some confusion about the concept. Nevertheless, registration of distinct record groups was begun under the watch of National Archives Director of Research and Records Description Oliver W. Holmes. The chief of each custodial division within the National Archives submitted lists of proposed record groups arrangements to Holmes who then made additions or deletions. After any number of revisions and negotiations, 109 record groups were identified. By the time of the writing of Fenyo's article, the number of record groups had swelled to 350. Fenyo's criticism focuses on the lack of clear definitions and parameters surrounding the concept of the record group. Believing "no one seems to have an exact idea of what constituted or should constitute a record group," Fenyo demonstrates that significant decisions concerning the construction of record groups were entirely too arbitrary. (234) For example, separate record groups were fashioned if they were judged to be "of sufficient importance and magnitude, as well as separate enough in character, to deserve their own record group." Obviously, these guidelines are extremely subjective and not conducive to systematic or logical practices. Another point of contention is the size of the record group arrangement. The Farmer's Cooperative Service group contains less than one cubic foot of records while the Veterans Administration group has over 76,278 cubic feet of material. These stark differences indicate that the concept of "making the unit of convenient size and character" may need to be quantified or at least clarified. On the whole, Fenyo succeeds in convincing the reader that, in 1966, the practice if not the concept of record groups required some specificity and revision. This article would be best utilized with a contrast of more recent scholarship on the record group which documents the changes in policy and practice since 1966.