Archival appraisal
[2] Appraisal is important in order to maintain cultural heritage for future generations and can provide a legal record for those concerned about their human rights.
[5][6] Appraisal can be viewed as a balancing act between the demands of administrative and heritage objectives; between the context of creation and the use of records.
[7] Depending on the degree of her or his autonomy to make appraisal decisions, an archivist's role is more or less central to the memory of an institution or society.
It is the duty of the profession to "act as a mediator between those who produce archives and those who use them, as a facilitator of public memory making and keeping".
[12][13][14] Whether this argument is accepted or not, a professional assessment which constitutes appraisal, requires specific knowledge and careful planning.
[15] The authors articulated concepts of provenance and original order that privileged an "organic bond" in a collection that precedes its transfer to an archival repository.
[14] Sir Hilary Jenkinson was a British archivist and Deputy Keeper of the Public Record Office upon his retirement.
[16] Jenkinson staked out a limited role for the archivist, positioned between the administrative body transferring the records and the researcher who might seek to access them.
As long as destruction is done in accordance with the needs of its "practical business" and the agency of origin refrains "from thinking of itself as a body producing historical evidence", its actions should not, in Jenkinson's view, be considered illegitimate, even by succeeding generations.
In 1986, Susan D. Steinwall, then at the Area Research Center at University of Wisconsin–River Falls, wrote that this case not only warns archivists to not rely too much "on the opinions of nonarchivists", like FBI agents, regarding the usefulness of the records of a specific agency, but it calls into question commonly-held archival assumptions.
She ends her article by arguing that this case, often called the "FBI files case", shows that government archivists should reconsider Schellenberg's appraisal philosophy, and notes how some archivists, like Frank Boles and Julia Marks Young, have advocates for not interpreting what Schellenberg says literally, noting that at times, records that have minimal administrative value may have not have, conversely, "minimal value to research."
[22] Others have added to this that archivists have long recognized that "their first professional responsibility is to identify and protect the small portion of the overall record that has long-term value.
[2] In 1977, Howard Zinn argued that institutions has ignored "experiences of marginalized peoples", saying they had gaps in their collections which are often "presented as comprehensive representations of social history", following his speech to the Society of American Archivists seven years earlier when he openly questioned the "notion of archival neutrality".
[24][26][2] Terry Cook, a Canadian archivist, argues that North American appraisal theory is unplanned, taxonomic, random and fragmented, and has rarely embodied the concepts of institutional and societal dynamics which would lead archivists to a working model that would allow them to appraise the broad spectrum of human experience.
His model is a top-down approach, which focuses on key processes through which a particular function is expressed by intersecting with structures and individuals.
Macro-appraisal is distinguished from micro-appraisal in that the former seeks to appraise the institution by understanding the context of creation and the interrelationships between, for instance, the different ministries or agencies within a government.
Cook also argued that in any appraisal model archivists need to remember the people who slip through the cracks of society, with the voice of marginalized groups often only heard and documented through "their interaction with such [white, male, and capitalist] institutions and hence the archivist must listen carefully to make sure these voices are heard".
Connected with the writings of Helen Willa Samuels, documentation strategy aims to reach beyond institutional frameworks when appraising collections.
"Archivists are challenged to select a lasting record", Samuels says, "but they lack techniques to support this decision making" (1992).
[30][31] At the same time, some scholars have said that digitization of records may influence decision-making of appraisal since the greatest proportion of users for archives are generally family historians, often called genealogists, leading to implications for future record-keeping and entailing that digitization be clearly defined as just one component of appraisal which is "appropriately weighed against other considerations".
