Business records

Common law practices recognize a characteristic of modern documentation that also governs archiving practices: Records in modern societies are most often created in the normal course of operation of every organization (governmental or non-governmental), and the evolved "best practices" of organizational record management prescribe certain features of how those records are arranged. Archival practices universally are built on the principle that original creation arrangement and order is the form in which documents should be retained in storage. Hence, archivists do not go around making "logical" connections from disparate materials as a matter of routine.
This practice seems to be understood infrequently by those outside of law, or library/archival science, or the historical profession. The language of the law is precise and accurate about the principle:

Records of regularly conducted activity [include]: A memorandum, report, record or data compilation in any form, of acts, events, conditions, opinions, or diagnoses, made at or near the time by, of from information transmitted by, a person with knowledge, if kept in the course of a regularly conducted business activity, and if it was the regular practice of that business activity to make the memorandum, report, record or data compilation... [Federal Rules of Evidence, Rule 803, Hearsay - Exceptions]

One legal gloss explains this further. If a document possess these characteristics, it is defined as, and may be admitted into evidence as a business record:

- Business activity: it is kept in the course of a regularly conducted business activity, which includes business, institution, association, profession, occupation, and calling of every kind, whether or not conducted for profit; can be activity of an individual as long as it is done and the records are kept regularly.

- Routine record: it has to be the regular practice of the business activity to make the document.

- Timely: it was made at or near the time of the event that it records.

- Business duty or Person with knowledge: it must be made by a person with knowledge of the recorded event or information and that person with knowledge must have acted in the regular course of business, or have had a business duty to report.

Another legal commentary argues that a business record is "credible because it is economically inefficient to keep false business records."

Historians rely on the stable characteristics of modern record keeping, whether they know it or not, in writing source-based history. When issues are contentious they may rely on additional measures to vouchsafe a conclusion, such as searching for corroboration in other documentation or in more general indicia, such as memoirs and diaries, correspondence, or any news sources that may be relevant. Most historians consider themselves informed and competent users of archival materials, because knowledge of the principles governing the organization of archival materials is indispensable to any successful survey of materials relevant to a topic. Ignorance of archival principles leads to ignorance of where even to find documentary historical materials.

How do we know?

If nothing else, a historian today is distinguished from others trawling the past by a specific relationship to sources, that is, to documents understood most broadly. Interest in the excitement or color of past events is admirable and, one might hope, central to the day to day business of historical research, but in itself that is chronicling, mere antiquarianism. All history writing has a certain measure of chronicling; if a historian cannot get even the basic chronology right, then the rest of the work might be properly considered suspect as well. But there's still more that the historian must get right. There is context and significance (and sometimes, even more stickily, 'cause and effect'), which are the most vigorously contested terrain. I will argue in future posts that these things can matter, sometimes a lot. (That old axiom, that academic squabble are so nasty because the stakes are so low, makes up for ignorance with an abundance of pithiness.) In almost all these instances, historians fight not about facts but about sources. Hence, the study of history is foremost the study of sources and necessitates consideration of epistemology, weight, and perspective. Sources are everything.
Wie es eigentlich gewesen, at Ranke's insistence, is rarely within reach for the historian. The most document-rich and familiar periods or subjects -- even those in which the participants and witnesses still draw their share of oxygen and can inform the researcher -- are (eigentlich) accessible only through some process of imagination. But that's quite a different topic. What matters here is that documents are the foundation of historical imagination. Pity the sub-Saharan African specialist, or the specialist in pre-Columbian civilization? Not necessarily, for every artifact created by a human is a document, and each speaks a fact of some sort -- if only it can be read.