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Overview of Appraisal: Why Are We Here This Week
Presentation to Appraisal Seminar
By TERRY COOK
Thanks for introductions.... In Melbourne in 1993 etc.... I want to acknowledge before beginning the generosity of the National Archives of Australia, with Monash University and the New South Wales branch of the ASA, for sponsoring my visit. And I want to pay particular credit to Barbara Reed for her long distance organizing of my participation and for making arrangements both efficient and friendly. I can assure you from last week's parallel, but not identical experience that you are in for a stimulating time during these five days. So, here we are. And perhaps germane to this session, why am I here? Let me say why I am not here! I'm not here to give you the Canadian appraisal mantra with any expectation that you will go away and implement this unquestioned wisdom, nor am I here as some kind of grand international pooh-bah brought in your midst to drop off pearls of archival wisdom, and especially so not at a Monash-flavoured event, which is a hotbed of the very best innovative archival thinking. Rather, see me as someone wanting as much to learn from you, who brings different but not necessarily better perspectives, in the hope that both perspectives by week's end may be enriched, as I felt they were last week. Barbara has said that my role is as much to be a devil's advocate, questioning, probing, undermining conclusions maybe reach too quickly, to put ideas on the table for discussion, rather than as dogma. I agree with her approach. In this regard, and abstracting from my role to yours, I came across a wonderful quotation that is very appropriate, I think, to archives and archivists, generally, and to our work this week. It's from A.D.Coleman's Critical Focus: "...disaster predictably results when theory is taken as prescription rather than as provocation and speculation." Too many archivists are frighteningly insecure. They hide behind their ideas as professional crutches they call archival theory, and thereafter they want to hear no challenge to those ideas, practical or theoretical, simply because, for them, theory is rigidly held and defended as a badge of professional identity and status. Let's keep Coleman's idea before us this week: let's use theories, ideas, concepts, to provoke and speculate, not to prescribe, to push the borders of appraisal thinking rather than defend them. What am I to do this morning, therefore? One thing I must try to do is not repeat or anticipate myself excessively. You have the unenviable chore this week of hearing me speak formally three times this week, which is probably two times too many! And poor Barbara and John heard it all before last week, and some NAA staff may have heard part of tomorrow's session: these kind souls are fully excused to fall asleep at any moment. Later in the week, I will be exploring real, live, working appraisal strategies and disposition methodologies, especially in the Canadian macroappraisal model; and looking at the cultural and administrative dimensions or purposes of appraisal; as well as at questions of objectivity and subjectivity in the appraisal process. For this morning, as Barbara has suggested, I will try to put appraisal in a much more global introductory context, by setting forth in a general way the theories, history, and central issues involved with appraisal. What are the problems with appraisal? Why has the approach that has served archivists since the 1940's been increasingly challenged in the past 10 years? Why is change necessary? * * * * * * * * * * * * Appraisal imposes a heavy social responsibility on archivists. In the stirring words of Pam Wernich, a South African archivist writing in 1988, archivists are doing nothing less than "moulding the future of our documentary heritage." Archivists determine "which elements of social life are imparted to future generations...." As a profession, we archivists need to realize continually the gravity of this task. We are literally creating archives. We are deciding what is remembered and what is forgotten, who in society is visible and who remains invisible, who has a voice and who does not. In this act of creation, we must remain extraordinarily sensitive to the political, social, and philosophical nature of documents individually, of archives collectively, of archival functions, of archivists' personal bias, and most especially of archival appraisal, for that process isolates the creators, functions, and activities to be reflected in archives, by defining, choosing, selecting which related documents are to be preserved permanently, and thus enjoy all subsequent archival processes (description, conservation, exhibition, reference, etc.); and -- as starkly, and with finality -- which are to be destroyed, excluded from archives, forgotten from memory. In many societies, and I'll mention this in more detail later this week, certain classes, regions, ethnic groups, or races, women as a gender and non-heterosexual people, have been delegitimized by their relative or absolute exclusion from archives, and thus from history and mythology -- sometimes unconsciously and carelessly, sometimes consciously and deliberately. Why? And is that the kind of restrictive archival legacy we want to bequeath for our own times to future generations? This is not the "Archivist as God" syndrome as much as it is "Archivist as Society's Conscience or Mirror", as its professional representatives entrusted with creating and preserving an archival legacy. Pam Wernich further wrote that "the selection of records for preservation from the vast quagmire of official documentation represents the greatest professional challenge and the most important area of archival activity." I agree with her, with the qualification that perhaps the identification and selection of records to form our archival heritage from the private non-government sphere of human activity is equally challenging. Helen Samuels and Richard Cox have called appraisal the archivist's "first responsibility" from which all else flows. Surprisingly, however, it is generally a first responsibility not well met. Richard Berner dedicated his important 1983 book, Archival Theory and Practice in the United States, curiously, in light of what I'm about to say, to his "friend and teacher," T.R. Schellenberg. Yet Berner stated that there was no appraisal theory covered in his book on archival theory, noting that "the main reason for this omission is the primitive nature of its development." And that in a book dedicated to Schellenberg, who has been called by others "the father of appraisal theory in the United States"! Berner notes that most so-called theory has "not yet moved significantly beyond the taxonomic stage in dealing with appraisal." That he defines as the mere naming or classification of values, and as merely"one of the first stages of analysis in the descriptive sciences." Berner concludes -- which is not a bad theme for the first part of this week's considerations -- that "a body of appraisal theory is perhaps the most pressing need in the archival field today. If we delay much longer," he warns, "we will all be smothered by useless paper and all forms of machine-readable records, unable to distinguish those worth saving from all the rest." While theory about appraisal "is still in early gestation," in his words, theories about "arrangement and description have emerged from a protracted pregnancy, and have a coherence now that is lacking in appraisal practices." While some writing on appraisal has certainly occurred since Berner wrote this in 1983, most of that writing is strategic, not theoretical, and no consensus has emerged. We thus have, I think, our first major issue to address, now, and to keep before us this week. What is the difference between archival theory and appraisal theory, this distinction that Berner highlights, and is there any relationship between the two. And Berner's closing reference to appraisal practices raises the corollary question: what is the difference between appraisal theory once defined, and appraisal strategy, methodology, and practice, that is to say, what is the relationship between the ideas and the regime in which they are or can be implemented. As Berner implied, the most difficult, and the most overlooked, dimension of appraisal is its theoretical core upon which everything else depends, or should depend. Before discussing appraisal theory, however, we need to explore the difference between "archival theory" generally, and "appraisal theory." Archival theory is derived from the characteristics of records and the context of their creation and contemporary organization and use. Beginning with the French articulation of respect des fonds in the nineteenth century, and reinforced a century ago by the famous Dutch Manual of 1898, and in subsequent pioneering books by Jenkinson and Casanova before 1930, classic archival theory focused on the organic character and evidential properties of records as being the very core of archival thinking. Archives were viewed in such early thinking, then, as the unconscious and thus natural byproducts of administrative or human activity, and if so maintained, without tampering and in unbroken or traceable custody, they could be considered reliable and authentic evidence of the actions of those who created them. Such an initial theoretical focus on respecting the original order and the context of creation reflected those pioneering archivists' preoccupation with arranging and describing older records of uncertain provenance. But such archival theory, which concerns the nature of records, has no direct benefit to appraisal theory, which concerns the value of records, the reasons or principles why some records are judged to be important and some are not. Of course, if records are not authentic or reliable, do not have the characteristics of evidence, are not part of trustworthy record-keeping regimes, their value is much diminished, perhaps destroyed, but that is true of all records: the letter of a prime minister and the invoices ordering new pencils. The inherent nature of records, as the natural, organic by-products of their creators' actions, does not help determine which records, of the billions and billions created each year, actually have long-term or archival value. All records by definition bear evidence (sometimes imperfectly, it is true) of the acts and transactions that created them, and all have (or had) an original order and context. But that being said, one is not left much further ahead in defining issues of value or importance or significance, or any of the other terms used in appraisal to distinguish which of those records are to be kept and what are to be destroyed. What differs and is important, is not the evidential and contextual nature of the record, but rather the various and differing contexts of the acts and transactions, or at a higher level, of the functions and programmes, that caused the record to be created. To return to my example, in the office of a Prime Minister of Australia, the secret negotiating of a new trade agreement with China and the ordering of pencils are both business functional transactions that lead to the creation of documents, maybe even under ideal continuum management, in systems implementing the full functional requirements for record-keeping, but clearly one function generates records of long-term importance and the other does not. That in a nutshell is the justification for the functional appraisal that I have been developing in recent years, and which the National Archives of Canada has formally implemented -- but I will come back to that. Appraisal theory, then, to offer a definition, articulates concepts that determine "value," and enunciates the generic attributes of those concepts that apply to the selection of records for enduring preservation. Unfortunately, appraisal theories of "value," which in many ways reflect such classic (and difficult) philosophical questions as what is good and what is not, what is beautiful and what is not, have rarely been articulated within the archival profession. Archivists seem to assume that records contain inherent or self-evident informational, evidential, or legal values, which the archivist need only recognize, or judge against a circular. taxanomic set of criteria, and then act accordingly to preserve the records having those values. That kind of recognition and action is strategic or procedural, however, and thus most appraisal literature is strategic or procedural in orientation, not theoretical. As far as I can determine, archivists, when they have addressed appraisal theory, have so far suggested that degrees of "value," or "importance," or "significance," that must underpin all appraisal strategy and actual appraisal decisions, can only come from, or be imposed by, one of three sources: the creator, the user, or society at large. Other possibilities may exist, but they have not yet been developed into appraisal theory. If any of you this morning or through this week can think of any others, I would be pleased to hear of them. Let us look briefly at these three sources of determining value, which amount to three theories of appraisal. Part of our role this week is to determine at this most fundamental of levels WHY records have long-term value. Until that is clear in our minds, there is little point building appraisal strategies, establishing appraisal or disposition regimes, or articulating functional or metadata criteria, for these are all designed, by definition, from an archivist's perspective, to identify and protect records having long-term value. But one has to know first what one means by "valuable," one has to know what one is looking for, BEFORE developing the means to find it. Theory comes first. Theory sets forth the principles upon which we must agree to proceed. The first appraisal theory model is allowing the creator to determine "value" and therefore to make the archival appraisal decision. This was the approach advocated by Sir Hilary Jenkinson, and still finds some advocates. This approach has the advantage of allowing those closest to the records, and to the functions and activities that generated them, to isolate the best records reflecting those activities, to undertake a natural winnowing or reduction of the bulk of records over time so that only the essential core or bare minimum remains. The assumption is that the original actors in the events and issues are best qualified to do this selection because they know the issues. Thus, a natural residue will emerge, which in the fulness of time, the archivist will take into custody and preserve forever. This approach assumes, however, that creating institution are relatively stable, small in scale, and straight-forward in their functions and activities, that actions and events are institution-specific and narrowly and cleanly focused within a Weberian vertical bureaucracy, and that these characteristics -- small, stable, focused, centralized -- are also replicated in the institution's recording technologies and record-keeping systems and in its staff. Alas, none of these conditions pertains in the vast majority of late twentieth-century institutional record creators. Unfortunately, even if these conditions did exist, this passive approach also sanctions the destruction of archivally valuable records for any reason the creator (or owner, or controller) may determine, from concern over personal embarrassment or scandal, to over-zealous protection of privacy, to thwarting openness and accountability in government, to "politically correct" or symbolic acts to justify the present by destroying the past, as when the French Revolutionists deliberately destroyed the mediaeval and royalist documentary legacy of France or -- from another angle but showing the same motivation -- when modern military strategists deliberately bombed the archives and libraries of Bosnia as a means to break the spirit of opponents by destroying their roots and memories. That this creator-driven approach to determining value might lead to serious abuses, thus undermining the accountability of government to the governed, outside the dramatic intensities of war and revolution, has also been graphically revealed in recent years in Canada over illegal records destruction relating to the HIV-tainted blood scandal and our tarnishing peace-keeping murders in Somalia, in the United States regarding the Nixon Watergate tape recordings and Bush White House e-mail records, and here in Australia I believe, judging from your listserv, such controversies are also not unknown. Even putting such abuses aside, allowing the creator to determine "value" still privileges the powerful and the institutional in society who have the resources and infrastructure to create and manage records in an orderly way, to afford to allow for a natural residue to form and survive over time, and then at the very end of the life cycle, pass these accumulations to an archives for preservation. And most evidently, the approach confuses archival theory and appraisal theory. Archival theory traditionally saw the archivist preserving original order and context, as a kind of invisible guardian that did not interfere with orders, context, values that were, so it was thought, original, natural, inherited, given. Appraisal by contrast is about "making choices," and thus about very active interference to isolate a tiny portion from the whole. Here, at least, Jenkinson was consistent, recognizing that the logic of archival theory strictly interpreted meant that appraisal of records by the archivist was not an appropriate activity. If archives were the organic emanation of documents from a records creator, then severing any records from that organic whole seemed to him to violate a fundamental archival principle. The exercise of "personal judgement" by the archivist, as Jenkinson know any appraisal must necessarily involve, would tarnish, in his view, the impartiality of archives as evidence, as of course would any consideration of saving archives to meet actual or anticipated uses of records by historians or other researchers. The archivist's role was to keep, not create archives. Some Europeans thinkers remain distinctly uncomfortable with the seeming gulf between the alleged objectivity of archival theory (or "archival science"), on the one hand, and, on the other, the evident subjectivity of appraisal theory. The second approach to appraisal theory is to allow user needs (actual or anticipated) to determine value. Best argued by Theodore Schellenberg and his American successors, and holding sway over most of the archival world in the second half of the twentieth century, at least until very recently, this second approach sought to broaden the institutional bias of Jenkinson by considering the needs of a much wider range of researchers. It is an empirical approach to determining value; if a researcher can use the record, then it has value. If it is hard to imagine or anticipate or, increasingly in resource-hard times, demonstrate use, then the record does not have value. Schellenberg articulated various categories of use, with which we have been familiar since we were baby archivists: primary and secondary uses, and within the latter category, evidential, legal, fiscal, and especially informational research values. Certainly consistent with his focus on society and secondary research, Schellenberg to his credit attempted much more than had the Dutch, Jenkinson, or other European authors to build bridges between archivists and librarians, and between archivists caring for institutional records and those responsible for private manuscripts. And let's be fair: there are elements of a broader societal reflection in aspects of Schellenberg, although only indirectly. If the researchers found uses for records, then it can be assumed that the records must fill needs that society felt, and, again, Schellenberg's privileged historians would in their work indirectly reflect as well trends in society. This use-based empirical approach to determining value was thus an important step forward, but it still leaves archives subject to the loudest lobbying groups of researchers or the latest trends of history graduate schools that either form archival mindsets directly or produce professors and graduate students who pressure archivists to acquire "relevant" records for their research. Moreover, archivists trained in history or closely related social sciences in their undergraduate degrees are unlikely to be able to judge empirical use values for the physical sciences, medical, environmental or planetary needs, geographical, aesthetic, or many other fields of human endeavour. Such use-based definitions of value-determination for archives, Gerald Ham has argued, have created after several decades of operation "a selection process so random, so fragmented, so uncoordinated, and even so often accidental...." It could hardly be otherwise, for archivists' value-formation processes became "too closely tied to the ... academic marketplace," with the ultimate result "that archival holdings too often reflected narrow research interests rather than the broad spectrum of human experience. If we cannot transcend these obstacles," Ham warns, "then the archivist will remain at best nothing more than a weathervane moved by the changing winds of historiography." Building teams of archivists and researchers from various disciplines, as advocated by Helen Samuels and later others in the "documentation strategy" approach, was the first attempt to transcend these obstacles, but only succeeded by creating others. In any use-driven approach to "value," the archivist must remain ultimately a prophet trying to predict future research trends rather than an analyst trying to reflect the functions, programmes, and activities of records creators and the broader society in which those creators live, work, play, think, and dream. Use-driven archival paradigms also de facto wrench records from their natural context within the business activities of the creator. They impose criteria on appraisal that are external to the record and that thus undermine its internal transactional functionality, that is, its provenance, and thus detract from its role in cultural memory. These are its theoretical weaknesses; I will return to strategic ones later. While "value" can certainly be defined through the needs, prejudices, and societal influence of Jenkinson's creators or Schellenberg's users, I submit that these are not archival values. In both cases, appraisal has been taken from the domain and professional competence of the archivist, who then is left merely to interpret and implement the wishes of others, whether creators or users. Archivists in these approaches build strategies and develop criteria to meet these wishes, but they do not articulate appraisal theory. And that to me is wrong. Let me say why. Except, at least directly, in private business corporations, archivists are usually perceived, mandated, and paid as society's guardians of its collective memory, its heritage, its past, its history, and thus they have, in my view, an obligation to reflect in archives in each generation the values of that society that entrusts to them with the professional role of not just keeping archives, but of identifying, selecting, appraising, choosing archives. This is the "community expectations" of AS 4390 in the broadest sense. The third theoretical basis for appraisal, then, is founded on discerning directly the values and trends of the society contemporary to the records' creation, and translating these into appraisal strategies and methodologies. Inevitably, all societies (including the archivists residing in them) assign greater or lesser value to different dimensions of the three-way interplay of social structures, societal functions, and citizens and groups. This is how society functions. Here I reflect or rather complement Frank Upward's work; this is the Anthony Giddens approach to appraisal! Such value assignment to particular functional phenomena in society will in turn determine, in this model, which related records are declared to be archival or which are not. The appraisal theory I am advocating suggests that such societal values may be determined by the archivist by specifying the generic functional attributes, and points of special intersection or conflict, between the creators of records (that is, structures, agencies, actors); socio-historical trends and patterns (that is, functions, programmes, activities); and clients, customers, citizens, or groups upon whom both function and structure impinge, and whom in turn influence both, directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly. Archival appraisal theory in this third option explores the nature of these agents and acts, and the interconnections or interrelationships between them, and assigns greater importance, or "value" to certain functional-structural factors as compared to others. This is why it is known as "functional appraisal." Because, as Hans Booms noted, the functional context of creation and contemporary use establishes value, it is a provenance-based approach to appraisal. Because it looks first at functions rather than records, it has been called a "top down" approach -- not because it favours the elite in society! Because appraisal has traditionally been about deciding the value of records, this approach, which decides first the value of functions, has been called "macroappraisal." To get people thinking, or to jar the traditionalists, I have often said of this third approach to value determination that, while archivists appraise records for eventual use and thus societal enlightenment, archivists should, in the first instance, neither appraise records nor try to anticipate their use. But I drift from theory into strategy, so let's define that. **********BREAK************ Appraisal strategy, as distinct from appraisal theory that we have just been discussing, provides a way or logic or means or methodology whereby the foregoing theoretical definitions of value may be implemented in working reality. I will not review the appraisal strategy that could be used to implement Jenkinson's approach to determining value, because, as indicated already, I think his approach is unacceptable, theoretically and morally, for modern archives. It is an irresponsible abdication of the responsibility that society has assigned to archivists. Archivists certainly should consult with creators and investigate their views of what functions and activities might be important, but that advice is just that: advice, to be weighed by the archivist against a much wider range of knowledge from other sources and research. And let me underline that my anti-Jenkinsonian stand has nothing whatsoever to do with two things. First, records management staff in creating departments very often implement the appraisal decision, even interpret the appraisal criteria, set forward by archivists. That is well and good, and close links along the continuum are essential in this regard as in others; such staff are archivists' essential partners and allies. The point is, however, that the major appraisal decisions and criteria are made by the archivist acting on behalf of society, not by agency staff acting on behalf of the creator. And second, being opposed to a Jenkinsonian approach to appraisal theory also has nothing to do with opposing projects like Pittsburgh or UBC, Monash's metadata modelling or Australian AS4390 continuum initiatives or the National Archives of Canada's development of functional requirements for record-keeping within an electronic work environment. Those initiatives to ensure the properties of evidence in records, indeed, to turn data and information into records and knowledge, are essential. But they reflect the concerns of archival theory, not appraisal theory. Remember my point that the Prime Minister's policy brief and the invoice for pencils are both records. To avoid misunderstanding on just this point of discourse between the Canadian and Australian archival traditions and the issue of continuum management, let me be clear what aspect of "appraisal" I am speaking about this morning, and likely all week. In one sense, all records need to be "appraised," or, let me rephrase that: all business functions and activities and transactions need to be appraised, so that an appropriate record is created and captured, whether it be an invoice for pencils or a draft free trade treaty. Continuum thinking sees this as part of appraisal and something an archivist undertakes with various other record-keeping professionals within institutions. I have no argument with this approach, and indeed have supported it for years, although using different language and terminology. My concern today and my definition of "appraisal" is more specific, without disagreeing with AS 4390 strategies. My concern is which values, and then which strategies, will be used to choose the small percentage of all the records created that have enduring, long-term value, not just to the creator, not just to contemporary society for accountability purposes, but to a larger society, across time and space. No doubt we will discuss this distinction and its validity further during the week. So much for Jenkinson and related caveats. For Schellenberg's theoretical model, or the second, use-based or empirical theoretical appraisal framework, the strategies that have prevailed for the past half century for its implementation are now breaking down. While I have indicated already some theoretical problems with Schellenberg's approach to determining value, there are practical ones as well. These practical considerations were as significant in the changes implemented at the National Archives in Canada, and elsewhere, as any concern for theoretical clarity, just as it was practical breakdowns in the former records disposition process that forced change, not some new theory of management. In relying on the archivist's advanced training in history, combined with input from users groups of historians and other researchers, other specialists, past archival precedents, and informed intuition, used-based values articulated in this way - especially Schellenberg's central "information values" - must then be searched for in the records. The central methodological question is a simple one: "Which records are useful?" And in order to allow the historical perspective time to develop and for research needs or historical trends to be manifested, Schellenberg and his colleagues adopted the life-cycle approach to records administration and records disposition: only when records were finished their active and dormant phases of use, long after file closure, would the archival use-based decision be made to keep the record permanently or to destroy it. In Canada we felt that there were five difficulties with implementing this strategy. First, there are simply far too many records involved to locate these research values with any assurance of accuracy. Assembling large teams, as for the admirable FBI records appraisal case here at NARA in the early 1980's, must remain the rare exception rather than the rule for most archives. Everyone has their favourite figures, and here are mine. If laid end-to-end, the current or active paper records (meaning only those of the most recent five years) of the Government of Canada would circle the globe 144 times or complete 8 trips to the moon and back. To put that into more concrete terms, that is the equivalent of 600,000 full-length books produced per year per archivist -- to appraise. And it is estimated that there are between 100 and 1000 times that "paper" total in all electronic formats. A second problem relates to developing an historical perspective: holding records for 10 or 20 or 30 years after file closure, even 50 or 75 years as in France, until the historical dust settles, as it were, in the life cycle model, to determine historical patterns and trends is not an expenditure of public funds many nations, states, provinces, municipalities, or universities will now tolerate. It also allows many non-archival records to creep through the grate, as Jim Stokes will tell us later this week about the NAA's project to cut perhaps 50% of its backlog now acquired in this manner. Thirdly, in the office systems world of the present and future, the appraisal decision needs to be made and coded into the software, at the systen design or system remodelling stage, before any record is actually created. Moreover, in that virtual electronic world, as mentioned yesterday, many kinds of records will increasingly not even exist in ways that we traditionally understand in order to be appraised at the record or document level, unless record-keeping regimes are designed to stitch together context, structure, and content into an understandable recorded entity, which requires active "up front" continuum work by archivists, rather than "back end" life cycle analysis. Fourthly, there is not a single record that I've ever met that doesn't have or suggest some use to someone somewhere! We all have our stories. Within days of destroying scores of boxes invoices and receipts from a larger 400 metres/1300 feet of Department of Fisheries records, 1880-1920, that documented the purchase of boots, rain coats, hats, and other gear for the many fisheries inspectors of Canada, a representative arrived from the Maritime Museum at Lunenbourg, Nova Scotia, who was enthusing that they wanted to put a large mannequin by the front door of a typical fisheries inspector, and were there any records relating to the kind s of clothing, hats, boots, etc., such inspectors might have worn at the turn of the century! Such incidents have often made me think that researchers should not only ask, "Do you have anything on subject x," but also "Was there ever anything on subject x." There are simply an unknowable number of possible uses for records, and decisions based on such an approach are often hard to defend as part of a coherent whole to researchers. In the use-based approach, the archivist is put into this impossible accountability position of saying, "I destroyed these records because they were not considered or judged or appraised to be useful," and to be saying this to a researcher, perhaps by now wide-eyed, foaming at the mouth, and thinking of the letter she or he is going to write to their M.P. or newspaper, saying in return, "But I am here to use them. What do you mean they are not useful?" I think that that is an untenable position, politically, in which we have placed ourselves. If judging future possible research uses is a prophet's game, basing use predictions on past research trends and patterns only has validity if all records, upon which such analysis is performed, are on an equal playing field. Most often they are not, because of the varying difficulties and levels of their arrangement and intellectual access; the quality of their descriptive finding aids; their copyright, FOI, privacy, and other legal impediments; their past participation in publications, exhibitions, CD-ROM's, and web sites - by the archives and others; their being "hot topics" - Gerald Ham's "weatherwave" again - and drawing bursts of interests; the archivists' own background and thus interest in and promotion of certain records, by word-of-mouth on through reference services to conference presentations and publications. These factors, and a good many others, may hinder or encourage, but they ensure that all records do not have an equal opportunity, or level playing field, to be used. Therefore, conclusions about which records are most used and thus most "valuable" are highly problematic. Finally, the fifth concern, the life cycle strategy has de facto driven a wedge between records creators and records managers on the one hand, and archivists on the other, although I would assert that this need not necessarily be the case. Records are the purview of records managers; archives are the purview of archivists. This notion which seems natural and normal to North American archivists is quite foreign to Europeans and Australians, and increasingly Canadians. They see more of a common record professional involved in a continuum of record-keeping activities, but, granted, with different perspectives or emphases along that continuum. There is a danger, of course, of too close an identification and affiliation with record creators along the continuum, which could lead back to some of the flaws of the Jenkinsonian model, but the continuum properly managed is an important, and Australians would say, essential strategic opportunity for archivists, and the life-cycle strategy undercuts it. So ... too many records, transient and unstable electronic records, an infinite number of possible uses, no luxury of a long passage of time to develop an historical perspective on what might be important or of value, what, then, to do. The response in Canada has been to adopt a top-down rather than a bottom-up strategy for appraisal: one that gives strategic priority to functions and work processes at the top, and not to recorded products or records emerging at the bottom from those functions and processes. I hasten to add that "top-down" relates to a functional decomposition methodology, not to administrative hierarchy or to an assumption that records at the top of the elite carry more "value." Such functional strategic thinking has long been used in corporate and governmental practices, and is evident today in business system analysis and system design in the world of computers to current interest in business process re-engineering and government restructuring, as well as increasingly in records management file classification and indexing, as Catherine Robinson illustrates in her recent excellent A&M article, and in financial and human resource planning and measurement systems. And so, I thought back in 1989, why not also consider its applicability in archival appraisal? Moreover, and especially important, such a strategy is consistent with the third model of theoretical value determination based, as I have noted earlier, on archival records being chosen for best reflecting the sharpest image of the functionality of society. In macroappraisal, there is, then, a happy congruence of theory and strategy centred around function. It is precisely on this point that the macroappraisal strategic approach
has its greatest value. The reasoning behind the macroappraisal approach
is simple enough to state.
Yet growing popularity doesn't necessarily mean it is right, or completely right. Issues remain. Let me conclude by outlining what I think some of the more difficult of them are, again as a way of provoking discussion and setting an agenda for over the week. Make this Cook's Top Ten List. I will make three general propositions, and then ask seven corollary questions: 1) Do we agree that value determination - what is important, significant, essential - for long-term archival preservation should reflect as far as possible the values of the society contemporary to the records creation, as well as Gerald Ham's broad spectrum of human experience? 2) Do we agree that society's values will be best discerned through an analysis by archivists directly of the functions, structures, and actors of the state, and their and citizen's interactions, rather than having such values determined indirectly by records creators themselves or by specialized groups of users? And is there a fourth source of value determination? 3) Do we agree, as a corollary, for government archivists especially, but one can transform this to any institutional setting, that the focus of appraisal decision-making should be more on the functions and thus records of governance rather than on those of government. "Governance" is defined to include cognizance of records reflecting the interaction of citizens with the state, the impact of the state on society, and the functions or activities of society itself, and th touchstone or identifying moments of national experience, as much as, or indeed, more than it does the records of governing structures and their inward-facing bureaucrats. I make this proposition to you: the collective task of institutional archivists is to preserve the best recorded evidence of societal governance, not just of governments governing or of bureaucrats talking to each other. If these three points are accepted, then others follow: 4) What are the criteria by which one judges -- or appraises -- one function or sub-function as more important than another? In short, what are the criteria for functional appraisal? 5) What approaches or mindsets are necessary to ensure that the strategic means of close "up front" continuum work with records creators and records managers does not revert to Jenkinson appraisal ends, where archivists become captive of corporate and institutional agendas rather than their own, as has happened in France? This begs whether there is a conflict between the administrative and cultural values of archives, which we will look at later this week. 6) Are special media such as photographs, maps and plans, video and film, or posters, also amenable to these new approaches, or are they disadvantaged? There may be a conflict here between the records of process (or transactions) and recorded products (films, photographs, some databases) which are the end-result of those processes. 7) If appraisal decisions reflect their time and place, and are themselves an important historical and cultural artifact, is retrospective reappraisal ever justified? If so, on what grounds, and leaving behind what evidence or trace of what was and why it was changed, from archival to non-archival, and destroyed? 8) What mechanisms (including also training and job re-definitions) are necessary in the transitional period from life cycle to continuum, and from subject-based to work-process or functional based records management systems, and indeed from information systems to recordkeeping systems? Appraisal decisions based on new world thinking may be hard to implement, for some years anyway, in lingering, sometimes strongly lingering, old world realities? 9) How does all this relate to the other half of the archival profession that's out there collecting private manuscripts and other media? 10) And how do we, who argue so strongly for accountability for others, make our own work transparent and well documented, so that we are accountable to contemporaries and to posterity for the awesome choices that we make to form society's memory? How do we link our descriptive instruments of what we have in archives or preserved by others for archives, with our appraisal instruments or reports, to show two things: first, why we have it, and second, what related records originally (or later) associated with it were destroyed, and why. These questions and the subsequent answers will not be easy. This is the hard, real world of "making choices." There is no universal standard or rigid theory; solutions - and indeed animating concepts - will rightly reflect their time and place, as I've suggested recently the history of all past archival theory and strategy has done. There will be political and economic realities. The choices will always be relative and subjective; if you have a problem with that, listen to the greatest philosopher on appraisal in the world, Hans Booms. After very thoroughly exploring the subject of appraisal, he concluded thus: "The extent of archival subjectivity and societal conditioning ... seems rather frightening. ... [Yet] archivists ... are ... unavoidably subject to the fundamental orientation of society. ...archivists' capacity to know [anything] ... is inevitably dependent on a life experience shaped by the environment. ...It goes without saying that the formation of a documentary heritage is a subjective and therefore socially conditioned process. This fact is ... rooted in the very essence of human existence; it is a condition that cannot be changed or removed, only confined. Methods for limiting the effects of subjectivity must be employed, but these will never achieve a state of absolute objectivity -- an impossible goal." Let's not pursue an impossible dream, therefore, but get on with the real and very difficult task of appraisal in the real world. Thank you. |
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Overview of Appraisal: Why Are We Here This Week Are the Administrative and Cultural Values of Archives Compatible? |