Archival Appraisal and Collection:
Issues, Challenges, New Approaches
Special Lecture Series
University of Maryland and to NARA Staff
NARA 2 Auditorium: College Park, Md., USA
21-22 April 1999
Archival Studies
University of Manitoba
©Copyright by Terry Cook 1999
Good morning, and thank you for coming. I appreciate being welcomed here at NARA, although fear that I cannot live up to the expectations raised by the flattering notices of me, either beforehand or today.
This is the
third of four public lectures sponsored by the Archival Studies programme of
the University of Maryland, and I do thank Bruce Dearstyne and Chris Halonen
for having me, and for their efficient managing of the arrangements that got me
here. I think that their revitalized
programme is an important part of the North American archival education scene,
especially so with the possibilities of fruitful interaction with working
professionals by its close proximity to NARA, and I so am pleased to support it
this way. I know that at the National
Archives of Canada (NAC), we would have been delighted to have such a
programmes, with its wealth of bright students to tap into, sitting on our
doorstep.
I will
confess that I stand before you this morning a little nervous, even if honoured
to be here. First, to repeat words I
used in my opening address Monday afternoon, I have been a long-time admirer of
many aspects and people of the National Archives and Records Administration, in
whose presence I now stand, apparently with the chore to try to sound wise to
those very people who have been the fount of much wisdom for me over the
years. I have visited NARA for two,
intensive, multi-day tours in the past, as well as on several shorter occasions,
and in turn have co-hosted at the National Archives of Canada two intensive
visits in return by NARA specialists.
As a consequence, a good deal of my work in appraisal and electronic
records at the NAC and in my professional writing has been influenced by ideas
and practices pioneered here. If I may
say so, I still think the Justice Department Litigation Case File appraisal
report is one of the finest piece of archival analysis ever produced anywhere,
and I was exposed to it at a formative moment in my own thinking. It is one example of that “free trade in
archival ideas” that National Archivist Jean-Pierre Wallot referred to between
the two institutions and countries when he spoke in this room a few years ago.
And the
second reason for some nervousness is that I stand in the home of Theodore R.
Schellenberg, the world’s best known and most influential archival theorist,
whose work certainly solidly grounded my own transformation from historian to
archivist in the mid-1970's. In a
recent analysis I published on the history of archival ideas in this century, I
devoted more space to Schellenberg than to any other writer or group of writers
-- 50% more space than to his nearest rivals:
Jenkinson and the Dutch trio of Muller, Feith, and Fruin. As a long-time admirer of Schellenberg, if
in some aspects not an uncritical one, I find it difficult to conceive that I
should be talking about appraisal here in his home when, for over two decades,
I have found inspiration from his ideas and methodologies. I approach his legacy with respect.
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I’ve been
asked to speak this morning about the issues, challenges, and new approaches to
archival appraisal. I would like to
organize my remarks in two sections:
the first on the theoretical
or philosophical underpinnings of determining “value,” which to me is an
overlooked but essential dimension of appraisal, and the second part on outlining an approach to appraisal and records
disposition that we have implemented at the National Archives of Canada, and
which some other countries and jurisdictions have found of interest and worth
imitating. Perhaps there will be some
relevant resonances here, for you, from this work, as NARA itself begins a
business process re-examination of its appraisal and disposition work. Certainly Governor Carlin’s 1997 strategic
plan, which envisions a functions-based appraisal approach, is very compatible
to what has been done at the NAC. But
the functions-based approach to appraisal and disposition at the practical
level of operational reality must reflect a defendable set of theories or
concepts of why some records are
important and some are not. Unless one
can explain to our clients and publics, with conviction and convincingly, that
we have a theoretical vision of what makes some records valuable and most
others not, the best, most efficient methodologies in the world will count for
nothing. This morning I am offering one
person’s reading of the issue, which as I’ve just said, has found positive
responses in some countries, but also polite demurring in others; I do so with
the recognition that different jurisdictions, different traditions, and
differing political realities will modify the applicability of what works in
Canada in other situations.
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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 defines the creators, functions, and activities to be reflected in
archives, by defining, choosing, selecting which related documents are to be
preserved permanently, and thus are to enjoy all subsequent archival processes
(description, conservation, exhibition, reference, etc.), and, as starkly, and
with finality, which are destroyed,
excluded from archives, forgotten from memory.
In many societies, and I’ll mention this in more detail tomorrow,
certain classes, regions, ethnic groups, or races, women as a gender and
non-heterosexual people, have been de-legitimized 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 so much the “Archivist as God” syndrome as it is “Archivist
as Society’s Conscience and Mirror,” as its professional representative
entrusted with creating 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 the identification and selection of records to form our archival heritage
from the private non-government
sphere of human activity is equally challenging, but that aspect of the
appraisal function, in consideration of my audience and time constraints, I
will place aside for today. Helen
Samuels and Richard Cox have called appraisal the archivist’s “first
responsibility” from which all else flows.
Surprisingly, however, it is not generally a responsibility 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, with
much justification, "the father of appraisal theory in the United States,
” and, I would add, the world! 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 part of my address -- that “a body of appraisal theory is perhaps the most
pressing need in the archival field today.
If we delay much longer,” he warns, with some prescience, considering
remarks quoted in the recent New Yorker
article from some NARA staff, “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.
As Berner
implied, the most difficult, and the most overlooked, dimension of appraisal is
its theoretical core upon which the strategy and methodology of appraisal
practice depends, or should depend. Before discussing appraisal theory, however, it may be useful 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
as the un-self-conscious 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.
Concern for records having this quality of evidence is not something new
that electronic records has imposed on the profession, therefore, but rather
the heart of traditional archival theory.
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, which are the reasons or principles upon which
some records are judged to be important and some are not. Of course, if records are not authentic or reliable, if they do
not have the characteristics of evidence, their value is very much diminished,
but that is true of all records: the
letter of a cabinet secretary and the invoice ordering new pencils. And as I suggested yesterday, it holds true
whether the letter or invoice is in paper or electronic form.
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, indeed, each day, and
each hour, 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. That being said, one is not left any further ahead in defining
issues of value, or importance, or significance, or any of the other terms used
in appraisal to distinguish WHY some
records are kept and others 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 cabinet secretary, the secret
negotiating of a new trade agreement with China and the ordering of pencils are
both business transactions that lead to the creation of documents, maybe even
under ideal 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. When Governor Carlin refers to ready access
to “essential evidence” as the central mission of NARA, the focus of appraisal
theory is determining what is “essential,” while the focus of archival theory
is defining record-keeping standards that will produce “evidence.”
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 the good and
what is not, what is beautiful and what is not, have rarely been articulated
within the archival profession -- as Berner noted. 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, taxonomic set of criteria,
and then act accordingly to preserve the records having those values. That kind of recognition and action is, in
my opinion, strategic or methodological or procedural, however, not
theoretical. Theory tries to answer why
some records are archival and others are not; strategy and methodology answers
how, where, when, and with whom such a determination should occur.
Now there is
a healthy scepticism in the archival profession about theory, which can become
a kind of arid neo-Scholasticism of debating how many archivists can dance
inside a Hollinger box. I think from my
travels that I could observe that this scepticism towards theory is most
pronounced here in the United States, perhaps fittingly so as the home of James
and Dewey’s pragmatism, of American know-how, of rolling up the sleeves and
getting the job done. I have some
sympathy with that view, especially when theory seems an external imposition
taking little cognizance of workplace realities. I worked for 23 years in a national archives where producing
hard, real, practical results was what counted — not endless speculation of why
we were doing the work, but getting on with it. Yet when the work needs to be re-conceptualized, when new factors
arise that cause accepted strategies and methodologies to break down, then
theory can provide the basic principles for restructuring or reengineering
processes, it can focus the justifications necessary to explain why we do what
we do to our various publics, and it can animate a vision necessary to unite
staff behind new approaches. It is
important to remember that the opposite of practical is impractical, not
theoretical. Theory is rather the
complement to practice, and theory and practice should interact and
cross-fertilize each other, rather than one being derivative of or dependent on
the other.
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 should underpin 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 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, although they may not have been
consciously articulated that way by their authors. All attempt to justify WHY some records have long-term
value. Until that justification is
clear in our minds, there is little point, I believe, in building appraisal
strategies, establishing improved or more efficient disposition regimes, or
articulating functional or other appraisal criteria, for these are all
designed, by definition, to identify and protect records having long-term
value. But one has to know first what
makes something have “value,” what one is looking for, before developing better means to find it. Theory comes first. Theory sets forth the principles upon which
we must agree to proceed. Theory allows
us to defend our choices to contemporary critics and to posterity.
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 that the creating
institution is relatively stable, small in scale, and straight-forward in its
functions and activities, that actions and events are institution-specific and
narrowly and cleanly focused within a Weberian vertical or hierarchical
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 highly educated staff as in Jenkinson’s
Oxbridge days. Alas, dear colleagues, none of these conditions pertain in the
vast majority of late twentieth-century institutional record creators.
Unfortunately,
even if these conditions were to exist, this passive approach also sanctions
the destruction of archivally valuable records for any reason the creator, or
subsequent 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, on to "politically
correct" or symbolic acts used 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 the Balkans 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, in Australia over child abuse
records at the John Oxley Centre, and massively in South Africa by apartheid
officials as sworn testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has
detailed. These are the most famous,
but by no means not the only cases of illegal records destruction.
Even putting
such abuses aside, allowing the creator to determine “value” privileges the
powerful and the institutional in society those who have the resources and
infrastructure to create and manage records in an orderly way, who can 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, this
approach confuses archival theory and appraisal theory. Archival theory traditionally saw the
archivist preserving original order and context, as a kind of invisible
guardian who did not interfere with orders, context, values, that were, so it
was thought, original, natural, inherited, given. Appraisal by contrast is about “Making Choices,” in the phrase of
the National Archives of Australia’s new strategic plan in this area. It is thus also about very active
interference to isolate a tiny portion from the whole for long-term
preservation. Here, as always,
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 and residue of documents from a records creator,
then severing any records from that organic whole seemed to him to violate a
fundamental principle of archival theory.
The exercise of "personal judgement" by the archivist, as
Jenkinson knew 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 European archival 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. I will address this directly tomorrow.
The second
approach to appraisal theory assigns “value” according to user needs (actual or
anticipated). Best argued by Theodore
Schellenberg and holding sway over most of the archival world in the second
half of the twentieth century, this approach sought, quite admirably, to
broaden the institutional bias of Jenkinson by considering a much wider range
of records and researchers’ needs. This
theory is grounded in an empirical approach to determining value. If a researcher can use the record, then it
has value. If it is hard to identify or
to imagine or, increasingly in resource-hard times, to 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 considerable 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. We should recognize, too, that there are reflections of a
broader societal perspective in aspects of Schellenberg, although only
indirectly through the filter of history and historiography. If the researchers found uses for records,
then it may be assumed that the records must fill needs that society felt, and,
again, historians would in their choice of topics and themes would indirectly
reflect as well trends in society.
This
empirical or pragmatic approach based on use to determining archival value was
thus an important step forward, but it may leave 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
and graduate 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. Reflecting on several decades of such use-based approaches to
defining archives, Gerald Ham has argued that the results are "a selection
process so random, so fragmented, so uncoordinated, and even so often
accidental...." It could hardly be otherwise, he asserts, 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 continues,
"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,
was the first attempt to transcend these obstacles that Ham raised, 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
impose criteria on appraisal that are external to the record’s context and thus
undermine its provenance, thereby detracting 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 to
interpret and implement the wishes of others, whether creators or users. Archivists in these approaches then build
strategies and develop criteria to meet these wishes, but they do not
articulate appraisal theory. I
consequently have some problem with this.
Let me say why.
Except in
private business corporations, at least directly, 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 opinion, 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. 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.
Sociologists
have suggested that 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. Such value assignment to particular
functional phenomena will in turn determine, when this insight is transformed
into an appraisal model, which related records are declared to be archival or
which are not. The appraisal theory I
am outlining 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, it is the
functional context of creation and contemporary use that determines 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. Because
appraisal has traditionally been focused on the value of records, this
approach, which focuses first the value of functions, has been called
“macroappraisal.” To get people
thinking, or just to stir up trouble, I have often said of this third approach
to value determination that, while archivists appraise records for eventual use
by researchers, archivists should, in the first instance, neither appraise
records nor try to anticipate their use.
But here I drift from theory into strategy, so let’s define that.
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
agencies 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 records continuum or
throughout the life cycle 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 SPIRT metadata modelling or
Australia continuum record-keeping 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 electronic records --
indeed, to turn data and information into records and thus evidence -- are
essential, as we discussed yesterday.
But they reflect the concerns of archival
theory, not appraisal theory. Remember my point that the cabinet
secretary’s policy brief and the invoice for pencils are both records.
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 some stark ones were cited in the New Yorker article, such as the volume
of cables from the Department of State.
My figures are that, 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. 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 system 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 sof 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 Congress or the New
York Times, 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, 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
“weathervane” 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 some 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, and 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 congruence of theory and strategy.
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. Institutions have certain formal or
internally developed functions assigned
to them or sanctioned by democratic societies;
in this way they are a filter of societal trends, activities, needs, and
wishes, of the things and concepts that society “values.” For these assigned functions, the
institutions articulate various sub‑functions, which are allocated to
different administrative structures or
offices, each with a mandate to perform or implement such a function, or part
of a function, or perhaps parts of several functions. These offices in turn create various programmes and activities to
meet their functional mandates, which in turn lead to specific actions and
individual transactions, for the efficient operation or delivery of which
information systems are built.
Citizens, clients, groups, companies, and associations interact with
these functions and structures, programmes and activities, and, depending on
the latitude and flexibility allowed for this interaction, they shape,
challenge, and modify these programmes in varying degrees. Of all these steps and processes, the record
itself is the final evidence within those information systems of all these acts
and transactions, and of
citizen/societal interactions. This
means that the contextual milieu in which records are created ‑‑
what I have called their conceptual rather than their physical provenance ‑‑
is determined by all these factors:
functions, sub‑functions, structures, programmes, activities,
actions, and transactions, and client interactions, as well as records‑creating
processes, systems, and technologies.
By focusing archival research on analysing -- that is, “appraising” --
the importance of manageable numbers of these functions, programmes, and
activities in the first instance, rather than on appraising billions of
records, or tens of thousands of systems, series, and collections, the
archivist is able to see the whole forest, rather than just a few trees. Seeing the whole context ultimately means
that poorer and duplicate records are more easily identified and eliminated,
and that the most succinct, precise, primary record in the best medium for a
particular function is more readily targetted (or “appraised”) for archival
preservation. In short, macroappraisal
strategy shifts the initial and major focus of appraisal from the record to the
functional context in which the record is created. Revealing that there is nothing really new in the world, but just
new emphases, macroappraisal reflects a three-word insight made a half century
ago by American archival pioneer, Margaret Cross Norton: “records follow functions.” Since there are too many records to appraise
, why not focus on appraising functions instead, which will then encompass the
records that are following them?
Using such
knowledge gained by an institutional functional analysis, the main appraisal
questions for the archivist are not what has been written (or drawn,
photographed, filmed, or automated), where it is, and what research value does
it have. Rather, based on this kind of
functional-structural decomposition or analysis, the two key appraisal questions
are, first, what functions and activities of the creator should be documented
(rather than what documentation should be kept?) and, secondly, who, in articulating
and implementing the key functions, programmes, and transactions of the
institution, would have had cause to create a document, what type of document
would it be, and with whom would that corporate person cooperate or interact in
either its creation or its later use?
These questions beg a third and really the most important question: which records creators or
"functions" (rather than which records) have the most
importance? And its converse, which I
want to underline strongly from my Canadian “total archives” background,
despite the overwhelming majority of my written work having dealt with government
records: the necessary converse is to
also ask, with archival partners: which
functions are poorly documented in institutional records and must be
complemented or supplemented by private manuscripts, other archival media, oral
history projects, and non-archival documentation (publications, "grey
literature," buildings, inscriptions, monuments, museum and gallery
artifacts, etc.) -- none of the latter necessarily collected by archivists or
at least the institutional or corporate archivist. Only after these questions are answered can the archivist
target realistically the actual records or series of records likely to have
greatest potential archival value.
Once the
macroappraisal is completed, and actual series or classes or systems or
collections of records are before the archivist for appraisal, traditional appraisal criteria can be applied to
the records in question, where greater granularity is necessary or
desirable. Such criteria are used to
refine further the value of individual records or small groupings or series of
records within the theoretical‑strategic functional-structural
matrix. Political, technical, legal,
and preservation issues are also considered at this point. Known research uses may also be considered,
at this final stage only, but not driving the process. If the strategy is called macroappraisal,
these record-related criteria are microappraisal. Such microappraisal criteria involve
assessing such factors as age, uniqueness, aesthetics, time span, authenticity,
completeness, extent, manipulability, fragility, duplication, monetary value,
use, etc. Such appraisal criteria are
certainly used now in the daily work of archivists and are well articulated in
our literature, and thus no more need be said about them here.
Macroappraisal
in Canada occurs at three levels, in descending order: first, between all the
various institutions or records creators or functions falling under the
collection jurisdiction, mandate or acquisition policy of an archives;
secondly, between the various functional programmes of a single institution or
records creator; and, finally, between the various functions and activities of
a single programme or function within that creator -- all using various
criteria for assessing the importance of functions to institutions' mandates. For a macroappraisal strategy to work based
on functional weighting, we found that a whole new relationship was necessary
between the archives and government agencies, to implement what we termed a
planned approach to records disposition.
This established that records disposition must proceed in a planned,
logical manner; that records-creating agencies must be ranked and then
approached in priority order, that formal negotiated disposition plans using
project management methodology must be in place, and that each appraisal
project must be proceed comprehensively across a function, not in small
administrative fragments, not medium by medium, not (in the first instance) by
looking at a few isolated examples of actual records in a few sub-registries,
and not (as is usual) in response to the latest space crisis in some part of
the creating department. We also asked
some hard questions around basic past assumptions about assigning or approving
retention periods for non-archival records and about focusing on passive
records destruction approvals rather than active archival targetting.
Macroappraisal
strategies and methodologies are increasingly popular, because I believe that
they are increasingly necessary. Although
reflecting earlier conceptual models by Hans Booms and Helen Samuels,
functions-based appraisal was first pioneered, in actual working reality, in
Canada as macroappraisal and in the Netherlands as the PIVOT project. Both we and the Dutch felt a little lonely
at first, and we were delighted when we discovered each other at the ICA in
Montreal in 1992. Both projects are
being refreshed at the present time based on lessons learned over the past
eight years. The revitalized National
Archives of South Africa has formally adopted the Canadian model for its
appraisal and disposition work. The
National Archives of Australia is now adopting it, as have some Australian and
American states and Canadian provinces.
Others jurisdictions are exploring its merits. Yet growing popularity doesn’t necessarily mean it is right, or
completely right for every national situation.
It will be for you to decide whether its approaches and methodologies,
which I have just barely summarized this morning, are logical and applicable as
NARA undertakes its reengineering project in this area.
For us in
Canada, we believe that there is merit in the proposition that for government
records, archives should reflect as far as possible the values of the society
contemporary to the records creation, and be inclusive of Gerald Ham’s “broad
spectrum of human experience.” We
believe that the best way to discern society’s values is through an analysis by
archivists of functions, structures, and actors directly, and their
interaction, rather than being determined indirectly by records creators
themselves or by groups of users. And
we believe 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, as much as it does the records of governing
structures and their inward-facing bureaucrats. The records that most sharply reflect that interaction are the
targets for archival preservation. And
we don’t just believe, but we know
that such an approach is only possible based on an extensively re-engineered
records disposition relationship between the archives and its client agencies
and a renewed commitment that the core of archivists’ work is scholarly research
into records, record-keeping systems, and their functional context across space
and time.
Thank you.