Original Order
The archival principle of maintaining records in the arrangement given to them by their creator, preserving context and evidential value.
Original order is a foundational archival principle: records should be kept in the arrangement and sequence in which their creator maintained them, rather than being reorganized (for example, by subject or chronology) by the archives. It is a companion to the principle of provenance.
The reasoning is that how records were arranged is itself evidence — it reveals how the creating office worked, related documents to one another, and made decisions. Re-sorting records can destroy that context and the records’ value as authentic evidence. Preserving original order also makes large bodies of records manageable to describe (via finding aids) without item-by-item reorganization. There are practical exceptions — when the original order is lost or was never meaningful — but the default is to respect it.