What is a physical file?

"Entity Archives" is a new concept put forward by some comrades in the archival field in the early 1990s. As the name implies, a physical file is a file that is transformed by collecting and sorting physical objects with archival attributes.

Physical objects can't be archives because they don't have the essential attribute of archives-original records. As we know, archives are the original records directly formed by people in social activities, and they are a kind of documents that people have processed and kept for future reference. It is a special thing that combines originality and recording. The so-called primitive means that it is naturally formed during people's social practice activities, rather than after finishing and processing. The so-called record, since the birth of archival science, the "record" studied in the field of archival science without exception refers to the narrow sense, that is, the information of human social activities is directly recorded on a specific carrier (such as paper, film, disk, CD-ROM, etc. ) With writing, symbols, images and other recording tools, people can obtain information as long as they master the tools to identify these words, symbols and images. But do physical files have these characteristics? Undeniably, the objects collected in archives and rooms (including the tiger symbol used to mobilize the army in ancient times and the Fang Jian given by feudal emperors) may be primitive and can convey the information of past human activities, but they cannot be archives because they do not have the nature of "recording" in a narrow sense. They do not record information directly on a specific carrier through words, symbols, images, etc., reflecting the whole process of a certain behavior, but through the form of something.