Heritage Curation

The professional discipline of family-scale curation, the archival traditions it inherits, and the standard under which a curated collection becomes a Sondage-Certified Primary Source.

For an explanation for how and why this page is constructed see AI on this Site.

Heritage Curation is the professional discipline of selecting, arranging, and describing the materials of a single life or family, including letters, photographs, documents, recordings, objects, and digital files. The discipline draws on archival science, records management, the theory of significance, genealogy, and the digital preservation standards. Under the Sondage Standard, a certified Legacy Collection Curator conducts the Seminar on the Trove within it. This page sets out the scholarly and professional sources of the discipline and the use Sondage makes of each. The argument for the discipline is made at Embodied Provenance and in The Sondage Review.

Archival Theory: Jenkinson, Respect des Fonds, and the Society of American Archivists

Archival theory is the body of principle that defines what a record is and what its keeper owes to future readers. Heritage Curation takes its intellectual base from this tradition.

The English archivist Hilary Jenkinson, in A Manual of Archive Administration (1922), held that the authenticity of archival holdings rests on unbroken and accountable custody. His archivist is a custodian of the records, not an interpreter of them. Sondage keeps Jenkinson's requirement of an accountable professional and separates attestation from custody. The certified Curator signs. The Senior Fellow holds.

The principle of respect des fonds, formulated in French archival practice in the nineteenth century and adopted in the American tradition in the twentieth, holds that the records of one creator are kept separate from the records of another, because the context of creation is part of what an archive preserves. Sondage extends the principle to the distinction between human and synthetic creators. The instrument is the Generative Information Package, which holds generative material in a structurally separate location within the archive.

The Society of American Archivists, founded in 1936, maintains Describing Archives, A Content Standard (DACS) and the core principles of the American profession. Sondage's curatorial standard is written to be compatible with this vocabulary and adapts it from institutional accession to family-scale collections.

Professional Bodies in Personal History, Photo Organizing, Records Management, and Genealogy

Family-scale curation has been organized through several professional bodies, each certifying or representing one part of the work.

The Association of Personal Historians, active from 1995 to 2017, represented personal history as a practice distinct from biography, oral history, and genealogy. Modern Personal Historians and adjacent communities have continued that work since its dissolution.

The Photo Managers, formerly the Association of Personal Photo Organizers, is the professional body for photo organizing and certifies practitioners in it.

The Institute of Certified Records Managers and ARMA International, formerly the Association of Records Managers and Administrators, hold the professional standards of records management, including retention, disposition, and chain of custody. Sondage draws on these standards and adapts them from institutional to family-scale collections.

The Board for Certification of Genealogists and the Association of Professional Genealogists are the principal American professional bodies in genealogy, a discipline that enters curatorial work when family research produces a collection rather than a research report.

The Legacy Collection Curator certification is open to practitioners formed in any of these fields. It adds a published outcome standard, the Sondage-Certified Primary Source, to the practice each already certifies.

The Theory of Significance: Significance 2.0, Yeo, and Harris

Significance, in collections practice, is the set of criteria by which material is judged worth keeping, describing, and preserving. The most developed published framework is the Australian Significance 2.0 (2009), written by Roslyn Russell and Kylie Winkworth for the Collections Council of Australia. It sets four primary criteria (historic, artistic or aesthetic, scientific or research, and social or spiritual significance) and four comparative criteria (provenance, rarity or representativeness, condition or completeness, and interpretive capacity). Sondage adapts the framework to family-scale holdings. In a Seminar on the Trove the resulting criterion is called Trove-Worthy, and it is recorded in the signed Statement of Significance that closes the Reflection phase.

The British archival theorist Geoffrey Yeo has defined records as persistent representations of activities, a definition he set out in The American Archivist in 2007 and developed in Records, Information and Data (2018). Sondage takes from Yeo the view that a photograph or letter is significant as a representation of human activity and not only as an object.

The South African archivist Verne Harris, in Archives and Justice (2007) and related work, has written on what archives exclude, including absent and silenced records. Sondage draws on Harris in requiring that what is released from a collection be recorded along with what is kept. The corresponding dispositions in the Seminar on the Trove are Hold and Release.

Embodied Provenance and Content Authenticity Standards

Embodied Provenance is the second of Sondage's Three Foundational Commitments. It establishes authenticity through a documented human chain of custody. In Heritage Curation it takes the form of the Curator's signed attestation of how a collection was examined, judged, and assembled.

The performance theorist Diana Taylor, in The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), distinguished the archive of enduring documents from the repertoire of embodied transmission. Sondage reads the distinction as support for the position that a record's legibility depends on the people who can attest to it.

The current technical standards for content authenticity address the file. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) develops cryptographic assertions that can be embedded in media files. The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) defines provenance metadata, including a Digital Source Type value for synthetic media. The Library of Congress, in Content Authenticity and Provenance in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2026), called on libraries, archives, and museums to respond. Sondage's curatorial standard is compatible with these instruments and adds the human attestation they do not supply. The argument is set out in The Sondage Idea in The Sondage Review.

Digital Preservation Standards: OAIS and OCFL

Two standards govern the long-term preservation of digital collections and form the technical base of a Sondage archive.

The Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model, ISO 14721, is the conceptual model for long-term digital preservation. It defines the Submission, Archival, and Dissemination Information Packages (SIP, AIP, DIP). The Sondage Generative Information Package (GIP) is an extension to this package family.

The Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL) is a community specification for storing digital objects in a form that is software-independent and self-describing. Sondage archives are built to it, so that a collection remains readable without the platform that produced it.

The architecture is supplied by Sondage. The collection is delivered into the Senior Fellow's sole keeping under Non-Custodial Sovereignty, and the Vanish Protocol follows accession.

How Sondage Applies Heritage Curation

A certified Legacy Collection Curator conducts the Seminar on the Trove within the tradition of Heritage Curation. A four-week Reflection phase opens onto a six-month curatorial engagement organized around Survey, weighing, winnowing, and inscription. The Curator brings the methodological frame. The Senior Fellow brings the judgement of what the materials mean.

The engagement produces a Sovereign Trove, signed under the Curator's certification, delivered with a Stewardship Guide, and held by the Senior Fellow under the Three Foundational Commitments. It closes with Witnessing. The full engagement is described at the Seminar on the Trove.

The certification is held by the Curator and travels with the Curator's practice. The course of study is described at the Legacy Collection Curator course page.

The Lineage

The selective citational base of this page. Each entry names the work or institution and its contribution to the discipline Sondage practices.

The Archival Tradition

Hilary Jenkinson. A Manual of Archive Administration. Clarendon Press, 1922. The archivist as accountable custodian, and custody as the ground of authenticity.

The principle of respect des fonds. Formulated in nineteenth-century French archival practice and adopted in the American tradition in the twentieth century. The records of one creator are kept separate from those of another.

The Society of American Archivists. Founded 1936. The American professional body that maintains Describing Archives, A Content Standard (DACS).

The Heritage Curation Field

The Association of Personal Historians. Active 1995 to 2017. The professional body for personal history as a practice distinct from biography, oral history, and genealogy.

The Photo Managers (formerly the Association of Personal Photo Organizers). The professional body for photo organizing.

The Institute of Certified Records Managers and ARMA International. The professional bodies of records management, whose standards cover retention, disposition, and chain of custody.

The Board for Certification of Genealogists and the Association of Professional Genealogists. The principal American professional bodies in genealogy.

The Theory of Significance

Roslyn Russell and Kylie Winkworth. Significance 2.0, A Guide to Assessing the Significance of Collections. Collections Council of Australia, 2009. The most developed published framework for assessing the significance of collections.

Geoffrey Yeo. Records, Information and Data, Exploring the Role of Record-Keeping in an Information Culture. Facet Publishing, 2018. Records as persistent representations of activities.

Verne Harris. Archives and Justice, A South African Perspective. Society of American Archivists, 2007. Archives and accountability, including absent and silenced records.

The Philosophical Frame

Diana Taylor. The Archive and the Repertoire, Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2003. The archive of enduring documents and the repertoire of embodied transmission. See also Bioacoustic Provenance.

Preservation and Provenance Standards

The Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model. ISO 14721. The conceptual model for long-term digital preservation and the source of the information package family.

The Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL). The community specification for software-independent, self-describing storage of digital objects.

The Library of Congress. Content Authenticity and Provenance in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, A Call to Action for the Libraries, Archives, and Museums Community (2026). The institutional statement of the archival challenge of the synthetic age.

The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) and the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC). The principal bodies developing provenance and labeling standards for digital media. See also Bioacoustic Provenance.

The American Alliance of Museums. The American professional body whose standards and ethics form the museum context of curatorial judgement.

Continued in the Sondage Review

The Sondage Review extends this material in essays on Embodied Provenance, the Generative Information Package, the Authentication Horizon, and the discipline of significance in family-scale curation. The founding essay on the GIP is The Sondage Idea.

The Legacy Collection Curator curriculum is the structured course of study by which independent practitioners in this domain certify into the Sondage Guild.