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How can an organization ensure that its records are trustworthy evidence of what happened, while also making them usable for future decisions, accountability, and memory? This question has driven a century of debate in records and information management (RIM). The answers have shifted dramatically, from a vision of the archivist as a neutral custodian of organic evidence to a multidimensional model that accommodates digital records and, more recently, to a critical perspective that asks whose records survive and whose stories are silenced. The frameworks that emerged do not form a simple succession; they coexist, narrow each other's scope, absorb each other's principles, and remain in productive tension.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the dominant answer came from the British archivist Sir Hilary Jenkinson. His Manual of Archive Administration (1922) laid out what became known as the Jenkinsonian Custodial Theory. For Jenkinson, a record was not a document selected for its historical interest; it was an organic by-product of activity, created in the normal course of business and preserved without interference. The archivist's role was custodial: to receive records passively, maintain their physical and moral integrity, and make them available for use. The archivist was not to judge what was worth keeping. Selection would corrupt the record's impartiality.
Jenkinson's framework rested on two principles that became foundational for archival practice: provenance (keeping records from different creators separate) and original order (preserving the arrangement the creator gave them). These principles were designed to protect the evidential value of records—their ability to testify to the transactions that produced them. For decades, this custodial model defined what it meant to be an archivist. It was a framework built for a world of paper records, stable organizations, and a clear boundary between the creating office and the archival repository.
Even as Jenkinsonian theory dominated archival discourse, a different approach was taking shape in mid-century records management. The Records Lifecycle Model emerged from the practical pressures of government agencies and corporations drowning in paper. Unlike the Custodial Theory, which focused on permanent preservation, the Lifecycle Model divided a record's existence into stages: creation, active use, semi-active storage, and final disposition (either destruction or archival retention). The key innovation was appraisal—the deliberate decision about which records had continuing value and should be kept, and which could be destroyed.
This was not a clean break from Jenkinsonian thinking. The Lifecycle Model coexisted with the Custodial Theory for decades, and in many ways it narrowed the older framework's scope. Custodial principles of provenance and original order remained the gold standard for records that reached the archive. But the Lifecycle Model argued that most records never needed to reach the archive at all. Appraisal, not passive receipt, became the central professional act. The archivist was no longer a neutral custodian but an active manager of value. The Lifecycle Model dominated organizational records management through the 1980s, especially in the United States and Australia, because it offered efficiency: it told institutions when to move records to cheaper storage and when to throw them away. Yet its linear, stage-by-stage logic assumed that a record's meaning was fixed at creation and that its journey was a one-way trip from active use to either destruction or permanent preservation.
By the 1990s, the limitations of the Lifecycle Model had become acute. Electronic records did not sit still in stages. They were updated, migrated across systems, and used simultaneously by multiple actors in different contexts. The linear pipeline could not capture this. Australian archivists Frank Upward, Sue McKemmish, and others developed the Records Continuum Model as a direct challenge to lifecycle thinking.
The Continuum Model replaced the single timeline with four intersecting axes: create, capture, organize, and pluralize. A record could be created for one purpose, captured into a system, organized for broader access, and pluralized into multiple cultural or institutional contexts—all at the same time. The model emphasized that records have multiple purposes (evidential, transactional, cultural, memory) that coexist rather than unfold in sequence. It was designed from the start for digital environments, where a record's context is not fixed at creation but is continuously reshaped.
Crucially, the Continuum Model did not discard the insights of the Custodial Theory. It absorbed the principles of provenance and original order, but reinterpreted them. Provenance was no longer just about the original creating office; it became a layered concept that could include the systems, processes, and communities that shaped the record over time. The Continuum Model preserved the Custodial commitment to evidence while rejecting the Custodial passivity and the Lifecycle's linearity. It offered a framework that could handle the complexity of digital records, and it quickly became the dominant theoretical model in archival science, especially in Australia, Canada, and parts of Europe.
Just as the Continuum Model was gaining traction, a very different challenge emerged from Critical Information Studies (CIS). Where the Continuum Model asked how to manage records across multiple contexts, CIS asked whose records are managed at all. Drawing on postcolonial theory, feminist critique, and critical race studies, CIS scholars argued that recordkeeping is never neutral. The decision to keep a record, the categories used to describe it, and the institutions that house it all reflect power structures. Official archives have historically excluded the records of marginalized communities—Indigenous peoples, colonized societies, workers, women, and dissidents.
CIS does not replace the Continuum Model; it coexists with it in a state of productive tension. The Continuum Model provides a sophisticated technical and conceptual architecture for managing records across time and space. CIS insists that this architecture must be interrogated for its political effects. Who gets to create a record? Whose records are captured into official systems? Whose stories are pluralized into the historical record? CIS scholars have championed community-based recordkeeping, Indigenous data sovereignty, and the decolonization of archives. They argue that the archivist's role is not just to manage evidence but to repair historical exclusions and support multiple, sometimes conflicting, memory traditions.
This framework has transformed the field's understanding of appraisal. Where the Lifecycle Model saw appraisal as a technical judgment of value, CIS sees it as a political act that determines whose past will be remembered. Where the Custodial Theory claimed impartiality, CIS reveals that impartiality is itself a position that reinforces the status quo. The two leading frameworks today—the Continuum Model and Critical Information Studies—thus divide the field between them. The Continuum Model is best at guiding the design of recordkeeping systems, especially digital ones, and at articulating the multiple purposes records serve. CIS is best at exposing the power dynamics embedded in those systems and at advocating for inclusive, participatory approaches to memory.
What do these leading frameworks agree on? Both reject the idea that records have a single, fixed meaning determined at creation. Both see recordkeeping as an active, ongoing process rather than passive preservation. Both recognize that context is layered and that records serve multiple communities, not just the originating organization.
Where they disagree is on the primary goal of recordkeeping. The Continuum Model, in its dominant interpretation, prioritizes evidential integrity and organizational accountability. It asks: how can we ensure that records are reliable, authentic, and usable across time and space? Critical Information Studies prioritizes social justice and pluralism. It asks: how can recordkeeping support marginalized communities in telling their own stories and asserting their own rights? These are not incompatible, but they pull practitioners in different directions. A government archives implementing the Continuum Model might build a technically excellent system that still excludes Indigenous perspectives. A community archive informed by CIS might prioritize self-representation over formal evidential standards.
Meanwhile, the older frameworks have not disappeared. The Lifecycle Model survives in compliance-driven records management, where regulatory requirements for retention and destruction still follow a stage-based logic. The Custodial Theory's principles of provenance and original order remain embedded in digital preservation standards, even as the theory's broader claims about archival neutrality have been largely abandoned. The field today is characterized by productive pluralism: different frameworks suit different problems, and the most sophisticated practitioners draw on all of them.
Over the course of a century, records and information management has moved from a narrow concern with preserving paper evidence to a broad engagement with digital complexity, multiple contexts, and social justice. The Jenkinsonian Custodial Theory gave the field its foundational principles of evidence and integrity. The Lifecycle Model introduced efficiency and appraisal, coexisting with and narrowing the Custodial vision. The Continuum Model replaced the Lifecycle's linearity with a multidimensional architecture while absorbing Custodial insights about provenance. Critical Information Studies then reframed the entire enterprise by foregrounding power and exclusion, creating a lasting tension with the Continuum's evidential focus. The result is a field that is richer, more contested, and more aware of its own political stakes than ever before.