Page 23 - DLIS006_INFORMATION SOURCES AND SERVICES

Information Sources and Services

Notes
(a) Accessibility of the Documents. The documentary series must be available to the
public under optimum conditions of organisation to allow orderly consultation
within a reasonable time.
(b) Continuity of the Records. The documentary series must have temporally continuous
records to ensure that there were no floods that eluded system recording.
Discontinuity problems can arise at the time the documents are produced or due to
subsequent accidents or destruction.
(c) Reliability of the Documents. The documents must come from a highly reliable
source, precluding in so far as possible errors of interpretation, translation or
transcription.
Two Criteria have to be met in Order to Ensure the Reliability of a Document: firstly,
the scribe, or recounter of the record, has to have been a contemporary witness of
the facts recounted; secondly, the documents must be originals (copies or transcriptions
must be identified as such and treated with the utmost prudence).

(d) Objectivity of the Information. The person or group creating a documentary record
must be objective and impartial.

Applying these criteria places from the outset a substantial limitation on the documentary
series; that must be consulted systematically and completely. The criteria are fulfilled in
the series of ledgers of minutes or resolutions of local authority and ecclesiastical governing
bodies. These can be supplemented by diaries and books of memoirs from private sources.
Documents of this type allow continuous reconstructions spanning some five to seven
centuries, even though this involves handling hundreds of volumes of original manuscripts.

Printed Sources
Historical research work which aims to be exhaustive in gathering references to flooding
must naturally have recourse to various types of printed sources. Such sources can never
replace the completeness and quality of the original documentary sources. However,
their usefulness lies in providing a chance of fast access to prior research work and the
results of previous partial data gathering work. Local or regional historiography is usually
a useful source of preliminary information, since it indicates the documentary sources of
best quality and provides diverse information on the characteristics of a river and river
basins in general; sometimes, depending on the sensitivity of the author to environmental
themes, these works are of such quality that they permit a complete chronology of flooding
events to be built up. We must nevertheless insist on the need to use these sources at
preliminary level only, and to take advantage of what they say to achieve best access to
the documentary sources.
Questions:

1. Analyse the case and write down the case facts.
2. Explain the term printed Sources in this case study.

Source: http://www.ica.csic.es/dpts/suelos/hidro/images/chapter_13_phefra.pdf
1.6 Summary

A “source” is anything that provides you with information. There are mainly two types of
information sources. They are: documentary and non-documentary.

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