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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Archival appraisal | 3/5 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_appraisal | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T15:07:46.545178+00:00 | kb-cron |
The archival appraisal theory of Schellenberg was a major factor in the American Friends Service Committee, et al. v. William H. Webster, et.al (1983) case, which began in June 1979 as social action organizations, historians, journalists, and others, sued the U.S. government to stop destruction of FBI files challenging an existing "archival appraisal decision" of the National Archives and Records Administration (then called NARS). In 1986, Susan D. Steinwall, then at the Area Research Center at University of Wisconsin–River Falls, wrote that this case not only warns archivists to not rely too much "on the opinions of nonarchivists", like FBI agents, regarding the usefulness of the records of a specific agency, but it calls into question commonly held archival assumptions. In her article, she describes how the archivists who appraised the FBI records not only relied on Schellenberg's manual, The Appraisal of Modern Public Records, but on FBI reference material and his own experience. Not only did NARS approving disposal requests for the FBI in 1945 and 1946, but it wasn't until 1978 that they reviewed their appraisal decisions of FBI files under "mounting public pressure", and in appraising these records they had relied on the FBI descriptions of their own files, discussing the records they were to dispose with FBI officials before "approving records disposition requests". After bringing in the writings of others in the field of archival appraisal, which was purportedly embryonic in the late 1970s, like Philip C. Brooks, JoAnne Yates, and Maynard Brichford she notes that often Schellenberg is evoked in discussion of appraisal because he provided archivists with vocab to describe documentation's "potential research values." She adds that in his book, The Appraisal of Modern Records, Schellenberg described how "modern public records" have two types of values, one for "immediate use of the originating agency and secondary for later use by other agencies and users", with secondary values considered "evidential or informational", with many larger series of records in the National Archives accessioned for information they "contained regarding matters other than government actions". She ends her article by arguing that this case, often called the "FBI files case", shows that government archivists should reconsider Schellenberg's appraisal philosophy, and notes how some archivists, like Frank Boles and Julia Marks Young, have advocates for not interpreting what Schellenberg says literally, noting that at times, records that have minimal administrative value may have not have, conversely, "minimal value to research."
== Some current approaches to appraisal == With social movements in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, existing Jenkinsonian and Schellenbergian ideas held by archivists began to be shaken, with efforts to broaden historical records beyond "elites and socially dominant groups", leading some to say that social justice was a call for justice for archives and tying it to appraisal itself. Some, within the field, like Tyler O. Walters, have written about how challenging it is for writers in the archival and library field to create preservation priorities and appraisal methods. They have argued that archival managers understand the appraisal methods in setting preservation priorities in their archive, which is the first responsibility. Others have added to this that archivists have long recognized that "their first professional responsibility is to identify and protect the small portion of the overall record that has long-term value." Some of these changes involved borrowing from experiences of librarians. In 1977, Howard Zinn argued that institutions has ignored "experiences of marginalized peoples", saying they had gaps in their collections which are often "presented as comprehensive representations of social history", following his speech to the Society of American Archivists seven years earlier when he openly questioned the "notion of archival neutrality". Apart from Zinn, Hans Booms also discussed, as did others, the societal role of archivists and how they influence appraisal, with some even posing feminist analysis of appraisal which bolstered social inclusion, placing archivists within ever-changing community dynamics. There have also been scholars who have emphasized the importance of appraising personal archives because they show an individual's character and attitude that theories like macro-appraisal do not account for, necessitating more of an "archives of character than of achievement", with efforts to document our "complex inner humanity" rather than what is on the surface. One of the outgrowths of social change during that period and "rethinking" of archival principles, including of business records, was macro-appraisal in Canada and documentation strategy in the U.S., along with archives that reflect specific social issues and communities, reflecting a changing interest by archivists in "documenting the wider society" and a need to properly document not only society but "public interaction with state institutions".
=== Macro-appraisal === Terry Cook, a Canadian archivist, argues that North American appraisal theory is unplanned, taxonomic, random and fragmented, and has rarely embodied the concepts of institutional and societal dynamics which would lead archivists to a working model that would allow them to appraise the broad spectrum of human experience. His model is a top-down approach, which focuses on key processes through which a particular function is expressed by intersecting with structures and individuals. Macro-appraisal is distinguished from micro-appraisal in that the former seeks to appraise the institution by understanding the context of creation and the interrelationships between, for instance, the different ministries or agencies within a government. In Cook's view, this institutional understanding should precede and inform the latter, micro-appraisal; the appraisal of documents. His approach to macro-appraisal does not just derive from the position of the creating body within an established hierarchy. It is not top-down in a conventional, bureaucratic sense. It is top-down in that it moves from macro to micro-appraisal.
This requires a planned, logical approach—archivists embarking upon appraisals are equipped with an understanding of the record creator, its mandate and functions, its structure and decision-making processes, the way it creates records, and changes to these processes over time.