Pluralist and deconstructionist archival theorists havechallenged these dominant evidence-based definitions ofrecords. Indigenous Australian scholar Shannon Faulkhead,for example, offers a pluralist view of records as "anyaccount, regardless of form, that preserves memory orknowledge of facts and events. A record can be a document,an individual's memory, an image, or a recording. It canalso be an actual person, a community, or the landitself.'[xviii] For Faulkhead, the defining characteristicof a record is not its ability to serve as evidence, but asa springboard for memory.
I find this pluralist view of records to be very interesting. It reminds me of the recordings of interviews and oral histories I helped document and preserve while working at my last job. I wonder if those scholars pushing for a more evidence-based definition of records would even consider them to be records.