MA, School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, 2002

The investigation analyzed the implementation and application of the Swedish National Archives' new Process-Oriented Archives Description Model to activities of the hierarchical, function-oriented and decentralized university organizations. The basic reason why a new archive description has evolved is because documents are becoming more and more digital. It requires a new interpretation of how evidence is secured for their reliability and authenticity, and a new way of looking at provenance, for the purpose of describing and searching electronic documents. The new archive description model's logical structure is based on business processes. The relationship between the new archive description and a function-oriented organization's activities can be seen from the different outlooks of processes between archive activities and activities of the organization. It is also reflected in the modification that all universities have made ​​of the new archive description model to be more flexible and pragmatic to fit a function-oriented organization. The relationship between provenance and process-oriented archive description is mainly the link between documents and business processes that produce them. For that reason, provenance with greater clarity fulfills the Archives Act and the Freedom of the Press Act. But provenance is often undermined by the identification and mapping of processes and by the classification of documents. A consequence for the introduction of process-oriented archive description is that both archival description and the role of the archivist have been recognized of a higher importance in the organization today. There are also other types of records and information issues that have been identified and considered. This is a two years master’s thesis in Archival Science.