1 Archival Science in the Cloud Environment: Continuity or Transformation? Luciana Duranti Abstract. Archival science as a self-contained system of knowledge is challenged by the issues presented by the digital environment, especially the increasing popularity of the Cloud as a place to store archives. Is the move to the Cloud a new form of postcustodialism? Does it require a paradigm shift in the way in which we think about archives? Will archival science need a complete transformation or will rather ensure our ability to address the challenges presented by the Cloud by maintaining its integrity and continuity? The author examines these questions and proposes her answers. Introduction Archival science can be regarded as a system inclusive of theory, methodology, practice, and scholarship, which owes its integrity to its logical cohesion and to the existence of a clear purpose that rules it from the outside, determining the boundaries in which the system is designed to operate. At the same time, this system has a disciplinary character, in that it encompasses the rules of procedure that discipline the search of the archival scholar and the knowledge so acquired, and which are determined by archival theory and methodology. Thus, archival theory—the whole of the ideas about what archives are, and archival methodology—the whole of the ideas about how to treat them, govern the entire system of archival science. These ideas were originally derived from Roman law and were developed over the centuries through their integration with philological and historical disciplines, without losing their core meaning and foundational intent. Up to the end of the 20 th century, the ideas that a) archives hold in trust the world documentary heritage and guarantee the reliability of documents as witnesses of action; b) archival material is the natural, authentic, impartial, interrelated and unique by-product of human activities; c) antiquity provides archival documents with the highest authority, and d) unbroken custody ensures documents authenticity have been at the heart of archival theory and in control of archival methodology. As a consequence, archival methodology has been based on the idea of respect, for context, provenance, relationships, order, structure, form, etc. The digital environment, in the initial decades of its development, relied to a large extent on established archival theory and methodology, and, in some cases, it even revived concepts that were pivotal in previous centuries, but had lost relevance in the 20 th century, such as those of document/records as opposed to data/information, authenticity as opposed to authentication, integrity, evidence, chain of preservation, and