[3] Another benefit of maintaining original order is that it reduces the amount of time that archivists must spend processing and arranging new records as they are received into a collection.
Max Lehmann is often credited as the first archivist to write about the principle of original order, when he developed guidelines for the Prussian Privy State Archives in 1881.
Original order, or the Registraturprinzip, represented the easiest way for the Prussian archivists to maintain the complicated registry systems of the State Archives.
"[10] Many, though not all, contemporary archivists, though, have changed their thinking and view personal papers as archives deserving of the same treatment as government or organizational records.
[13] The malleable nature of large organizations, in which groups of records can pass through multiple custodians prior to their transfer to an archive, can make identifying an original order difficult.
[15] Continued use of an archival collection and ongoing processing or rearrangement may also impact ideas of what constitutes "original" order and what contextual information is prioritized for preservation.
Inscription, the way that digital files are written to a drive or disk, typically stores bits of data in non-sequential order, based on where space is available.
Digital records are more likely to have multiple versions over the course of their lifetime than physical records—more, even, than the creator may be aware of—which can make identifying original order difficult.
These findings include the fact that electronic records may have multiple variations of original order because they do not have a fixed system of organization; they can be reorganized based on any number of metadata at the click of a button.