THIS BOOK OFFERS a selection of papers from the Seventh International Conference on the History of Records and Archives (I-CHORA 7), which took place in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, from July 29 to 31, 2015. I-CHORA was established in 2003 as a biennial conference series to encourage and promote interdisciplinary research into the history of records, recordkeeping practices and recordkeeping institutions. Conferences to date have taken place in Toronto; Amsterdam (twice); Boston; Perth, Australia; London; and Austin, Texas, each attracting between 100 and 130 scholars and professionals from around the world.

According to the organizers of the first I-CHORA, ‘the impetus for the conference came from the archives community’, which felt the ‘need for greater sophistication in conceiving the history of records to address the issues of human communicative practices and the artefacts themselves as material and social products’ (Craig et al., 2005, 2–3). It was evident from the outset that investigating the origins and evolution of archival ideas and practices, documentary forms and structures, and recordkeeping methods and technologies not only supported archival work and archival thinking but also had a much broader and all-encompassing relevance in that the history of archives is the history of culture. Thus, throughout the years, the conference series has increasingly been promoting an interdisciplinary approach to the study of record making and keeping in different historical contexts.

By entitling this book Engaging with Records and Archives: histories and theories, which was also the theme of I-CHORA 7, we wanted to emphasize another characteristic of this conference series; that is, the strong belief shared by all conference organizers and participants that engaging in scholarly research around histories and theories of archives and records is essential to ‘develop the maturity and self-awareness of those who work with records’ (Craig et. al., 9). Today, more than ever before, this suggests that everyone, not only archives specialists, would benefit from a deeper and better informed engagement with archival objects and practices as they become increasingly engrained in our daily lives, from the pervasiveness of archival materials on the web, to the use of archive-based knowledge in all sciences, to the uncertainty about the preservation of our digital memories that we may all experience sooner or later.