the "origin or source of something; information regarding the origins, custody, and ownership of an item or collection". As a fundamental principle of archives, provenance refers to the individual, family, or organization that created or received the items in a collection. In practice, provenance dictates that records of different origins should be kept separate to preserve their context. As a methodology, provenance becomes a means of describing records at the series level. The principle of provenance Describing records at the series level to ensure that records of different origins are kept separate, provided an alternative to item-level manuscript cataloguing. The practice of provenance has two major concepts: "respect des fonds", and "original order". "Respect des fonds" rose from the conviction that records entering an archive have an essential connection to the person or office that generated and used them; archivists consider all the records originating with a particular administrative unit (whether former, or still existing) to be a separate archival grouping, or "fonds", and seek to preserve and describe the records accordingly, with close attention to evidence of how they were organized and maintained at the time they were created. "Original order", refers to keeping records "as nearly as possible in the same order of classification as obtained in the offices of origin", gives additional credibility to preserved records and to their originating "fonds". Records must be kept in the same order they were placed in the course of the official activity of the agency concerned; records are not to be artificially reorganized. Records kept in their original order are more likely to reveal the nature of the organizations which created them, and more importantly, of the order of activities out of which they emerged. Not infrequently, practical considerations of storage mean that it is impossible to maintain the original order of records physically. In such cases, however, the original order should still be respected intellectually in the structure and arrangement of finding aids. Practices before the emergence of provenance Following the French Revolution, a newfound appreciation for historical records emerged in French society. Records began to "acquir[e] the dignity of national monuments", and their care was entrusted to scholars who were trained in libraries. The emphasis was on historical research, and it seemed obvious at the time that records should be arranged and catalogued in a manner that would "facilitate every kind of scholarly use". To support research, artificial