An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials – in any medium – or the physical facility in which they are located.
Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime, and are kept to show the function of that person or organization. Professional archivists and historians generally understand archives to be records that have been naturally and necessarily generated as a product of regular legal, commercial, administrative, or social activities. They have been metaphorically defined as "the secretions of an organism", and are distinguished from documents that have been consciously written or created to communicate a particular message to posterity.
In general, archives consist of records that have been selected for permanent or long-term preservation on the grounds of their enduring cultural, historical, or evidentiary value. Archival records are normally unpublished and almost always unique, unlike books or magazines, of which many identical copies may exist. This means that archives are quite distinct from libraries with regard to their functions and organization, although archival collections can often be found within library buildings.
A person who works in archives is called an archivist. The study and practice of organizing, preserving, and providing access to information and materials in archives is called archival science. The physical place of storage can be referred to as an archive (more usual in the United Kingdom), an archive (more usual in the United States), or a repository.
The computing use of the term "archive" should not be confused with the record-keeping meaning of the term.
Etymology
The English word archive is derived from the French archives (plural), and in turn from Latin archīum or archīvum, the romanized form of the Greek (arkheion). The Greek term originally referred to the home or dwelling of the Archon, a ruler or chief magistrate, in which important official state documents were filed and interpreted; from there its meaning broadened to encompass such concepts as "town hall" and "public records". The root of the Greek word is (arkhē), meaning among other things "magistracy, office, government", and derived from the verb (arkhō), meaning "to begin, rule, govern" (also the root of English words such as "anarchy" and "monarchy").
The word archive was first attested in English in the early 17th century, and the word archivist in the mid-18th century, although in these periods both terms were usually used only in reference to foreign institutions and personnel. Not until the late 19th century did they begin to be used widely in domestic contexts.
The adjective formed from archive is archival.
History
The practice of keeping official documents is very old. Archaeologists have discovered archives of hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of clay tablets dating back to the third and second millennia BC in sites like Ebla, Mari, Amarna, Hattusas, Ugarit, and Pylos. These discoveries have been fundamental to learning about ancient alphabets, languages, literature, and politics.
Archives were well developed by the ancient Chinese, the ancient Greeks, and the ancient Romans (who called them Tabularia). However, those archives have been lost since documents written on materials like papyrus and paper deteriorated relatively quickly, unlike their clay tablet counterparts. Archives of churches, kingdoms, and cities from the Middle Ages survive and have often kept their official status uninterruptedly to the present. They are the basic tools for historical research on this period.
England, after 1066, developed archives and archival access methods. The Swiss developed archival systems after 1450.
The first predecessors of archival science in the West are Jacob von Rammingen's manuals of 1571. and Baldassarre Bonifacio's De Archivis libris singularis of 1632.
Modern archival thinking has some roots dating back to the French Revolution. The French National Archives, which possess perhaps the largest archival collection in the world (with records going as far back as 625 A.D.), was created in 1790 during the Revolution from various government, religious, and private archives seized by the revolutionaries.
In 1883, French archivist Gabriel Richou published the first Western text on archival theory, entitled Traité théorique et pratique des archives publiques (Treaty of Theory and Practice of the Public Archives), in which he systematized the archival theory of the respect des fonds, first published by Natalis de Wailly in 1841.