archives have existed to serve administrators wishing to preserve a record of transactions. As long as administrative transactions remained an informal process based on personal trust, there was little need for proof or evidence that the transaction had taken place. The need to document transactions and to communicate information about those transactions to others led to the invention of writing and the creation of archives. To retrieve the documents and to communicate information about them to users, archivists created descriptions which could serve asrepresentations of the original transactions and related records preserved in their archives. Consequently, archives have evolved, together with libraries and other documentation centres, as an essential part of the chain of human communication