Bastian proposes the concept of a community of records, starting from a new concept of provenance. Tom Nesmith recently defined provenance as consisting of
The societal and intellectual contexts shaping the action of the people and institutions who made and maintained the records, the functions the records perform, the capacities of information technologies to capture and preserve information at a given time, and the custodial history of the records.
According to Bastian,
the records of a community become the products of a multitiered process of creation that begins with the individual creator but can be fully realized only within the expanse of this creator’s entire society. The records of individuals become part of an entire community of records.
Communities, she argues, are defined through the relationship between actions and records, the actions creating a mirror in which records and actions reflect one another.
A community of records may be further imagined as the aggregate of records in all forms generated by multiple layers of actions and interactions between and among the people and institutions within a community.
And further on she writes (resounding Giddens’ argument that recorded information is both an allocative resource and an authoritative resource)
Records, oral or written, become both the creators as well as the products of the societal memory of a community.