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Unit 1: Documentary Sources of Information

Self Assessment Notes

Fill in the blanks:
18. The .............................. sources of information are live sources which are extremely important
in the process of communication.

19. .............................. officers provide particularly the preliminary information needed to put
a firm on the right track.
20. .............................. is a means of communication of information through broadcasting and
telecasting or a combination of these two for the masses.

Case Study Study of Flood Events from Documentary Sources

istorical investigations aiming at a high level of completeness have to consider
the question of very large-scale access to manuscript document collections. When
Hit comes to environmental information, the chance of finding a news item about
a phenomenon could extend to any type of document from a country’s documentary
heritage, so that the deployment involved in a complete, exhaustive investigation would
surpass the capacity of an individual investigator or of a research group. The documentary
collections potentially containing climatic information are: (a) Local Government collections:
municipal council archives with all the subject-matter lying within the jurisdiction of the
local authorities in past times. (b) Central (state) government collections: subject archives of
various types, such as administrative, fiscal, military, public works, legal and diplomatic
archives. (c) Church collections: archives kept by the various hierarchical levels of the
Catholic Church in its territorial administration, such as episcopal, diocesan, parish or
monastic archives. (d) Private collections: archives kept by noble families, records of family
agricultural holdings, archives kept by liberal professionals and corporate archives.
(e) Notarial archives: archives containing records of the relations between natural and legal
persons in relation to their assets (cessions, sales, donations, assignments, rights) and
conflicts deriving therefrom.
An initial selection would have to look at those collections with information about the
day-to-day lives of human communities and all the problems affecting them. Accumulated
experience to date suggests that better results are to be expected of local authority collections,
local ecclesiastical authorities (parishes and particularly cathedral chapters or convent/
monastery communities) and, lastly, private documentary collections. Once an analysis of
the historical content has been carried out, the locations to which the study should be
applied have to be chosen properly. In the light of the physical characteristics involved in
a study of floods, the location to be studied must lie sufficiently close to a river course,
which is relatively easy in that in historical times technological limitations meant that
populations were obliged to run significant risks in order to obtain hydraulic power and
water for industrial and agricultural production processes. That is, their vulnerability to
flooding risk makes these sites optimum locations for research.

Documentary Series
The selection of documentary sources to which the gathering work should be applied is
based on the following criteria:
Contd....

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