Citation: Thibodeau, K. A Foundation for Archival Engineering. Analytics 2022, 1, 144–174. https:// doi.org/10.3390/analytics1020011 Academic Editor: Murilo da Silva Baptista Received: 5 October 2022 Accepted: 11 November 2022 Published: 18 November 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Article A Foundation for Archival Engineering Kenneth Thibodeau Anderson College of Business and Computing, Regis University, Denver, CO 80221, USA; kthibodeau@fordham.edu Abstract: Archives comprise information that individuals and organizations use in their activities. Archival theory is the intellectual framework for organizing, managing, preserving and access to archives both while they serve the needs of those who produce them and later when researchers consult them for other purposes. Archival theory is sometimes called archival science, but it does not constitute a modern science in the sense of a coherent body of knowledge formulated in a way that is appropriate for empirical testing and validation. Both archival theory and practice are seriously challenged by the spread and continuing changes in information technology and its increasing and increasingly diverse use in human activities. This article describes problems with and controversies in archival theory and advocates for a reformulation of concepts to address the digital challenge and to make the field more robust, both by addressing the problems and by enriching its capabilities by adopting concepts from other fields such as taxonomy, semiotics and systemic functional linguistics. The objective of this reformulation is to transform the discipline on the model of modern scientific method in a way that engenders a new discipline of archival engineering that is robust enough to guide the development of automated methods even in the face of continuing and unpredictable change in IT. Keywords: archive; archival theory; taxonomy; semiotics; systemic functional linguistics 1. Introduction People, individually and in both legally established and informal organizations create and use information in carrying out their affairs. Persistent items and ensembles of such information, in written language, image, audio/visual and other forms, constitute archives. While in use or retained because they might be needed in the continuation of those affairs, they are termed current archives. Subsets of archives are selected and preserved because they are deemed to have long-term value, which might be different than and even unrelated to the value they had in the conduct of affairs. These subsets are called historic archives. Possibilities for realizing the value of archives in both phases are hobbled by technical, intellectual and pragmatic factors. The foremost technical obstacle is the challenge that digital information technology poses for archives. The main intellectual impediment is the state of archival theory. A critical pragmatic issue is the confusion of theoretical and practical matters. This article suggests that all three types of challenges can be addressed by reformulat- ing archival theory. Reformulation here has the sense of expressing in a different way. It does not necessarily entail altering what archival theory asserts, but seeks to express it in a way that enables a more vigorous response to the technical, intellectual and pragmatic challenges faced by the field. Reformulation should be simultaneously conceptual and methodological. The article suggests a fundamental change in the way archival theory is expressed by shifting its priority from providing an intellectual foundation for the perfor- mance of archival functions to enabling those who use archives to discover and explore things of interest. This prioritization would also contribute to the performance of archival functions because it would facilitate the development and implementation of automated tools not only to assist archivists in their work, but also to perform tasks that are labor Analytics 2022, 1, 144–174. https://doi.org/10.3390/analytics1020011 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/analytics