Provenance Provenance Provenance (from the French "provenir", 'to come from/forth') is the chronology of the ownership, custody or location of a historical object. The term was originally mostly used in relation to works of art but is now used in similar senses in a wide range of fields, including archaeology, paleontology, archives, manuscripts, printed books and science and computing. The primary purpose of tracing the provenance of an object or entity is normally to provide contextual and circumstantial evidence for its original production or discovery, by establishing, as far as practicable, its later history, especially the sequences of its formal ownership,
Provenance of archival science and archival processing. The term refers to the individuals, groups, or organizations that originally created or received the items in an accumulation of records, and to the items' subsequent chain of custody. The principle of provenance (sometimes also termed the principle of "archival integrity" or "respect des fonds") stipulates that records originating from a common source (or fonds) should be kept together – where practicable, physically; but in all cases intellectually, in the way in which they are catalogued and arranged in finding aids. Conversely, records of different provenance should be preserved and documented separately. In archival