CONCEPTS OP VALUE IN THE ARCHIVAL APPRAISAL LITERATURE
AN HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL ANALYSIS
bv
RICHARD KLUMPENHOUWER
B.A., Calvin College/ 1981 M.A., University of Western Ontario, 1982
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARCHIVAL STUDIES
in
THE FACULTY OF ARTS
School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies and the Department of History
We accept this thesis as conforming
to the required standard
THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
October 1988
© Richard Klumpenhouwer, 1988 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced
degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it
freely available for reference and study. 1 further agree that permission for extensive
copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my
department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or
publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written
permission.
Department of
The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada
DE-6 (2/88) ABSTRACT
Archival appraisal is the most challenging and at the
same time the most improtant task performed by archivists.
The complex meaning, varied form, and massive volume of modern documentary information, which now occupies the lion's share of archivists' attention, present immense challenges during the appraisal process. Yet it is precisely these factors which make archival appraisal such an important activity, for it is the responsibility of archivists to preserve and make available a documentary record that is both usable and complete.
This thesis works on the premise that archival appraisal involves a process of applying value concepts to the preservation or destruction of records. Therefore, it is a critical examination of the nature and development of value concepts throughout the history of archives in western civilization from the Middle Ages to the recent past. The preservation of archives before the late nineteenth century depended upon the political, legal, and military values of the original record-creators which persisted over a relatively
long period of. time. From the 18 80s to the 19 3 0s, the value of archives as historical sources became dominant and appraisal followed theories of archival administation based on historicist concepts. From 1930 to 1980, the quality and quantity of records being generated by institutions forced archivists to develop management systems for appraisal and to define value which best conformed to the structures and processes of such systems. Especially in the last two chapters, which deal with modern archival appraisal in the
United States and Europe respectively, the analysis of theories and practices serves to reveal inconsistencies and problems in the application of value concepts. From such an examination, certain patterns emerge which suggest directions for the future development of archival appraisal theory.
- iii - TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ii
Acknowledgements v
Introduction 1
Chapter I: The Value of Documents and Their Preservation Before the Twentieth Century 5
Chapter II: Appraisal and the Rise of Archival Theory, 1880-1930 35
Chapter III: Archival Appraisal as a Management Function, 1930-1980: The United States 61
Chapter IV: Archival Appraisal as a Management Function,
1930-1980: Great Britain, France, and Germany 10 5
Conclusion 152
Bibliography 156
- iv - ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to acknowledge the encouragement, insights,
and suggestions provided by my colleagues in the MAS program, my thesis supervisor Terry Eastwood, and my wife Minnie
Joldersma.
- v - 1
INTRODUCTION
Archival appraisal, as a self-conscious, professional archival function, is essentially a twentieth-century concept and practice. Yet, the documentary record left to us by
societies before this century is also primarily the product of a process whereby documents judged valuable have been preserved and those judged valueless destroyed. The thinking
and motives which lay behind this process as it was applied in earlier times may appear arbitrary, unselfconscious, or simply
incorrect to present-day archivists, but the effects have been the same. In fact, the key to understanding these changes in the reasoning behind archival appraisal in all periods in the history of modern archives will be found in identifying the
implicit or explicit standards of value to which the appraisers necessarily referred. It becomes clear that the history of appraisal theory and practice follows closely the
changing and developing role of archives, the archivist and
archival institutions within modern society. Therefore,
archival appraisal, which has as its purpose the
identification and preservation of documentary records which have an enduring and constant value, is an historically relative process. Nevertheless, it is possible to perceive
certain historical patterns in the relationship between
archivists, on the one hand, and the records creators and
society on the other operating within the appraisal process. 2
From these perceptions, a more profound insight into present-
day theoretical problems surrounding appraisal may emerge.
The history of archival appraisal can be divided into
three major periods: 1) the premodern period to 1880, 2) 1880-
1930, and 3) 1930-1980." These periodizations represent phases
in the development of archivists as controllers of the
appraisal process and, increasingly, as conscious interpreters
of archival value. More importantly, each period is
characterized by major changes in attitudes toward determining
archival value related to the historical context within which
they occurred.
In dealing with the subject of archival appraisal, one is
immediately and constantly in danger of being overwhelmed by
the both physical and conceptual proportions of the problem.
Therefore, in an effort to avoid the worst effects' of this
situation, it has been necessary to define the terminology and
limits of the topic.
First of all, the term "appraisal" as used will
correspond to the definition given in the Dictionary of
Archival Terminology: "a basic archival function of
determining the eventual disposal of records based upon their archival value; also referred to as evaluation, review,
selection, or selective retention."1 The concept of appraisal
as it is understood in this thesis should therefore not be
confused with the appraisal of archives to determine monetary value, which is a completely separate process carried out for
1 Peter Walne, ed. (Miinchen: K. G. Saur, 1984), p. 21. 3
much different purposes. Along the same lines, "archival values" can be defined simply as those values used to justify the indefinite or permanent retention of documents or records.
Secondly, it should be emphasized that the major concern is with concepts or theories of archival value as opposed to the techniques or methods used in the appraisal process. To be sure, it is not always possible or desirable to separate value concepts from methodology -- indeed, an important point in the analysis of modern appraisal theories is that appraisal techniques themselves determined the nature of the value criteria used -- but it should be clear that explanations of techniques or systems in this thesis are made only for the purpose of revealing the inherent archival values used by archivists in implementing such systems.
Thirdly, although the temporal and geographical scope of the thesis is quite broad, the thesis is by no means an exhaustive treatment of the literature relating to archival value and appraisal. Material which presents formative ideas or clear statements on archival value have been selected and that which is derivative, descriptive, and concerns itself totally with practical techniques, excluded. As a result, the theories and examples mainly refer to the manually-produced textual records and archives of government institutions. This is not to dismiss the importance and uniqueness of appraisal problems relating to non-textual media or documents produced by private individuals and organizations, but the quantity of the literature dealing with such material is small, the topics 4
confined to practical methods of appraisal analysis, and the value criteria presented by and large similar to those developed in government archives. 5
CHAPTER I
THE VALUE OF DOCUMENTS AND THEIR PRESERVATION BEFORE THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Record-keeping is as old as civilization itself.
However, it is neither possible nor desirable for us to
consider ancient archives and the value they held for the
societies which they served: for one thing, while archival
historians such as Ernst Posner have completed important works
on archives in the ancient world,1 the sources for a study of
archival value in the ancient period are very scarce, and our understanding of the cultural context very limited; for
another, European record-keeping activity in the middle ages represents a clearer and logical starting-point in the process
of linking the structures, principles, and values of modern
archival practice with those of the past. The period from
about 1200 to the nineteenth century is vast, and the changes
in the nature and value of archives during this period are proportionally broad and complex. Yet, such an overview
provides the necessary context for a discussion of issues, policies, and practices of archival appraisal in the modern
period.
1 Ernst Posner, Archives in the Ancient World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972). 6
Recorded documentation fulfilled an important function in the transition from oral to written communication in medieval
society. Such records were valued not so much for the textual
information they carried as for the power they possessed as artifacts which evoked the memory of an event or transaction
completed in the past. The act of recording itself became part of the ritualistic ceremony surrounding the conveyance to which it referred; hence, the record was valued as a relic or
symbolic memorial which, through its physical form, maintained
the efficacy of the original event. Written records acquired
such characteristics when they began to be regarded as a means
of bringing more durability to what had previously been transmitted almost exclusively by oral tradition. As such, they supplemented rather than replaced human speech and memory.2
This close relationship between the record and the event meant that a great deal of significance was placed on the
physical permanence of medieval charters. Already at the time
of creation, such documents were considered "archival" in the
sense that they were consciously produced in order to be preserved for future generations. First of all, the parchment
and inks used in recording rendered medieval records extremely
durable and well suited to survive the ravages of. time.
Furthermore, beginning in the twelfth century, civil and
ecclesiastical institutions began establishing "treasuries of
2 Michael T. Clanchy, "'Tenacious Letters': Archives and Memory in the Middle Ages," Archivaria 11 (1980-81), 116-118. 7
charters" to preserve such records and consolidated those charters that were most frequently consulted into cartularies for reference purposes.d Their physical permanence, in turn, ensured that, while the documents survived, the original value they possessed at the time they were created could never diminish--there was never a point in time when they could be designated "dead" or "inactive" in the modern sense of those terms.
Michael Clanchy's observations on forgery among medieval charters illustrate the extent to which permanence of form was valued and preserved: when the written information was no longer considered relevant to new circumstances, it was simply altered accordingly. As Clanchy explains,
Concern for posterity and pride in the tenaciousness of letters gave monks a different attitude to charters from modern archivists and historians, who are committed to the principle that documents should not be tampered with and that they should be allowed to speak for themselves. These principles would have seemed nonsensical to medieval monks, because all "scripture" needed interpretation and memory-retaining objects did not speak for themselves: the remembrancer voiced the correct meaning, just as the cantor chanted the true gospel from his illuminated parchment.*
The concept of the medieval written record as a memory- evoking object for oral transmission held consequences for the types of records considered worthy of permanent preservation.
3 Robert-Henri Bautier, "Les Archives," in L'Histoire et Ses Methodes (Paris: Bibliotheque de la Peiade, 1961), p. 1125.
k Clanchy, p. 125. 8
During the high Middle Ages, the major institutions in western
society, the Church and the State, produced and kept records mainly as evidence of legal title and political privilege, not
as storehouses of information on past administrative
transactions. Medieval "treasuries" retained only legal
charters which were systematically classified as permanent memorials of a formal transactions in the past meant to be
effective for future generations. Robert Bautier provides a
list of documents most commonly found in such collections:
privileges pontificaux, contrats de marriage et testaments, traites, actes d'hommage et d'investiture, reconnaisances domainales, etats de droits et, bientot, enquetes et comptes, tous documents auxquels on pourra recourir pour information ou pour preuve.5
The closest modern equivalents to such records are
certain legal documents, and the seals used to enhance the
authority of medieval charters and grants are still to be
found on legal petitions, conveyances, or contracts today.
The difference is that the wording of the legal document is
now more important for its evidentiary value than the
document's actual participation in, for instance, the
conveyancing ceremony. Such ancient legal documents together
constituted the effective rights, customs, and privileges
governing the relationship between the Crown, the Church, and
the community and formed the foundation of the societal order.
In England, legal documents were "public records" in that they were regarded as accessible to the public as "the people's
5 Bautier, p. 1125. 9
evidences."6 They made up the core of the holdings of what would emerge as the Public Record Office in the nineteenth century.
Taken as a whole, archives in medieval society were essentially treasuries of legal documents which, because they served to support and maintain the structure of society, retained their primary legal value regardless of their age or use. As such, they would not consciously be destroyed as valueless in the normal course of administration,, although they could of course suffer from neglect or disaster in the many court offices in which they were kept.
Other types of documents, however, began to be produced
in significant quantities as a result of the emerging administrative bureaucracies in Europe after 1400. These administrative records consisted of documents used to record and initiate internal functions and transactions of state and church offices: they facilitated and were part of the
institutional activities to which they referred whereas statutes and legal charters represented the final products of
such activities. In effect, these new classes of documents were less "public" than legal records in that they were produced and kept essentially for the reference purposes of agencies which emerged, after the sixteenth century, as self-
sufficient government institutions largely independent from
6 Oliver W. Holmes, "Public Records: Who Knows What They Are?," American Archivist 23 (1960), 21-2 3. . 10
the direct control of the royal household.These administrative documents, not surprisingly, were by and large inaccessible to persons outside of the government circle except perhaps through special permission. Consequently, the officials which produced and kept them, as R. B. Williams observes, "came to look upon their offices almost as freeholds and to regard their archives, if not exactly as private property, at least as strictly office muniments."3
The implications of this view for the disposition of agency archives are difficult to establish, but there are indications that the keepers of early administrative documents did not hesitate to practice some form of appraisal when conditions warranted. For instance, in the 13 8 7 inventory for the Ducal Archives of Flanders, the record-keeper marked those documents "qui peau ou neant puent valoir de present," presumably with the understanding that these could be disposed of when necessary.7 Robert-Henri Bautier maintains that, in the medieval "Tresors des chartes" of France, all documents
"qui est de valeur ephemere et qui ne peut servir a etablir un droit, sera rapidement elimine."ly Included among such
7 Geoffrey R, Elton, England 1200-1640: The Sources of History (London: Houder & Stoughton, 1969), p. 69.
8 Robert B. Williams, "The Public Records in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century" in English Historical Scholarship in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Levi Fox (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956), p. 14.
' C. Wyffels,"De toestand in Belgie ten aanzien van het problem van de selektie en eliminatie van hedendaagse archieven," Nederlands Archievenblad 74 (1970), 349.
10 Bautier, p. 1125. 11
"valueless" documents, then, would be written communications exchanged between officials for purposes of intelligence, or in the process of transacting official business. Adolf
Brenneke claims that pre-nineteenth century agencies in
Germany often simply removed the oldest documents--those considered least relevant to the current affairs of the offices--from their registries whenever space to store them became scarce.11 In any case, it appears that, because they were viewed as the private documents of the offices which produced them, as opposed to legal records, and because they were created and used for internal administrative purposes, their disposition was controlled by the records-keepers in the offices according to their own, often arbitrary, utilitarian criteria. It would seem, furthermore, that the keepers of administrative archives from about 1400 onwards increasingly began to encounter the problem of dealing with documents whose primary value, based on the purposes for which they were originally created, had lapsed.
What did ensure the preservation of many of these administrative records was an increasing awareness, as societal institutions became more centralized and complex, that, collectively, the records of past administrative acts could serve as an "arsenal" of information for present and future institutional activities. Within the body of administrative papers, therefore, certain groups, series, or
11 Adolf Brenneke, Archivkunde: ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Geschichte des europaischen Archivwesens, ed. Wolfgang Leesch (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1953), p. 39. 12
classes were collected, segregated from other records, and preserved as most valuable for long-term political or administrative purposes.
The governmental and commercial institutions of the cities of the Mediterranean and the low countries in north• west Europe began keeping records of administrative actions and decisions already in the thirteenth century. Along with legal charters and titles evidencing political or commercial privilege, the town leaders also kept registers of council deliberations, records of the decisions of the various municipal agencies, and, after about 1300, judicial reports and general correspondence. The great state archives of
Europe did not emerge, however, until the latter half of the sixteenth century: a centralized archives of administrative documents was established under Philip II of Spain in 1567, under the Renaissance Popes of Rome in 1568, and under the
Secretary of State of England in 1578.1,2 The central European kingdoms of Prussia and Habsburg Austria did not establish centralized state archives until the seventeenth and eighteen centuries respectively, when diplomatic and strategic information proved important for war purposes. However, in the sixteenth century a sophisticated system of registration was introduced in these areas which grouped all administrative records, regardless of form, into files relating to specific cases which were then classified schematically. This allowed for better retrieval by government officials than the old
12 Bautier, pp. 1126-1129. 13
chronological system, and reflected the growing value such records held for political administrators.13
These state archives were collected and kept separate from the smaller archives which had accumulated in the various offices of the state as time went on. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Prussia, for example, there emerged a distinction between the Auslesearchiv, or selected archives, which were kept and used by the higher executive offices of government, and the Behordenarchiv. or agency archives, which remained with the lower offices. The material in the selected archives, in addition to the papers produced by the higher offices, consisted of documents selected from the various departmental registries which were deemed permanently valuable as evidence of administrative, political, and diplomatic precedent for foreign and domestic policy-making. The agency archives, therefore, retained whatever remained from the selection, and since they were regarded as useful only for lower offices which produced them, they were disposed of when their short-term administrative usefulness had clearly run out.lH Comparable circumstances obtained in England after the middle of the sixteenth century, when the State Paper Office, which housed the papers of the increasingly powerful Secretary of State, was established as a special repository distinct
from the archives of the lesser departments. Among the State
Papers could also be found documents produced in the lower
13 Bautier, p. 1130; Brenneke, p. 13 2.
14 Brenneke, pp. 101-102. 14
offices, indicating that perhaps some selection and requisitioning of documents similar to that undertaken in the
Prussian government archives took place in England as well.iJ
The bodies of documents housed in state archives were recognized as especially valuable to the government, even after the administrative transaction which they evidenced had ceased to be operative. Implicit in such a distinction is the view that some archival records could be identified as valuable for permanent preservation while others could be either consciously destroyed or set aside as of less or no continuing value. While, strictly speaking, these state papers were still being used for the political purposes of the government, such purposes were distinct from those of the officers who created and originally used them. Early administrative documents, unlike legal documents, did not retain their original value as records much beyond the event of which they formed a part; yet, pre-nineteenth century institutional administrations did recognize the continuing, long-term value of administrative records as evidence of political and diplomatic precedence, and created independent, centralized repositories to preserve them for that purpose.
There is little evidence that the keepers of administrative records recognized the "historical" value of administrative archives for independent researchers and sought to preserve them for such purposes. Certainly, the fact that
15 Hubert Hall, Studies in Official Historical Documents (1908; rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, 1969; ), p. 44. 15
such records were considered private, even secret, precluded their use by outside scholars. But besides this obvious obstacle, the very nature of pre-nineteenth century historical scholarship did little to enhance the value of such administrative records as sources for historical studies; rather, it reinforced the value of ancient legal records over others. Historical researchers and writers who made use of archives during this period were most often concerned with problems of legal scholarship and interpretation. In France, the most important developments in the writing of history derived from the mos gallicus juris docendi tradition of legal studies which developed in the sixteenth century. In Germany, ground-breaking work using archival documentation was undertaken in the eighteenth century by professors of law at the University of Gottingen who regarded ancient laws as primary evidence of the development of German life. In
England, antiquarians and erudite historians concentrated in the same way on customs and traditions preserved in medieval charters as the basis for their studies.16 As a consequence, legal or "public" records rather than administrative records remained the most important sources for historical research purposes and this reinforced the prevalent practice among record keepers of valueing the former over the latter. There was very little public pressure, therefore, to recognize the
"historical" value of older administrative documents.
16 Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient. Medieval, and Modern, (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 161-220. 16
The French Revolution marks a watershed in the history of modern archives. Although, in many ways, it represents the culmination of ideas, movements, and forces that had been gaining strength throughout the eighteenth century, the period of the French Revolution brought significant changes to traditional institutions throughout Europe as part of a conscious effort to create a new political, legal, economic, and social order. Such changes also had an effect on the nature and value of records produced, used, and kept by institutions. First of all, the new nationalism and liberalism which infused political policy during this time required that disposition of all "records of the nation," in the broadest possible sense of the phrase, needed to be controlled in a centralized, rationalized manner. With the subsequent establishment of centralized control, appraisal began to be seen as a conscious process for which some institution or individual needed to be assigned responsibility. Secondly, since the French Revolution represented a conscious break with the past, the cultural and administrative continuity, upon which the older administrative and legal records of state and church relied for their continuing value to society, was lost. What took its place was the emerging idea that documents, after a certain period, acquired "historical" values that were distinct from those to the original agency which produced them. The result was that
"historical" archives were increasingly divorced from their origins as "agency" archives. The problems evident in 17
archival appraisal during this period relate directly to these two developments.
The establishment of the Archives NaJbio.nales de_Franc_e in
17 8 9 set two major precedents often cited as most significant for the future development of archives in Europe: the centralized preservation of all government documents, both legal and administrative, in one institution, and a recognition of the public's right of access to those documents.17 But what is often overlooked is the intense ideological importance which the revolutionaries attached to the control of France's documentary records, and the consequences of such control for determining which archives were valuable and to be preserved and which were valueless and to be destroyed.
First of all, in centralizing all the national records under the control of a separate government agency, the republicans also transferred responsibility for the disposing of documents from record-creating individuals, institutions, and offices to the new national repository. In 1789, records of the royal government and the churches were scattered among more than 1200 repositories throughout France, 405 in Paris alone. The revolutionary government at first wished to bring all of this material together into Archives Nationales, but
17 Ernst Posner, "Some Aspects of Archival Development since the French Revolution," in Archives and the Public Interest: Selected Essays by Ernst Posner, ed. Ken Munden (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1967), pp. 25-27; Theodore R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives: Principles and Techniques (1956; rpt. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 4-5. 18
the local records of the provinces were later, by a law of
17 96, placed under the control of the Archives Dejpartment;ales..
By the law of 2 November 1793, the Archives Nationales was divided into two large sections: the domainal, which held the administrative, legislative, and land title records, and the- judicial, containing records of the courts of law, all of which were considered valuable for the future activities of the state. In 1794, two special commissions were established to appraise all the pre-revolutionary records of state and ecclesiastical institutions.18
Secondly, the heightened republican ideology surrounding the establishment of the Archives Nationales gave pre- revolutionary documents an instant "historical" quality which forced the government to recognize new values. To be sure, the centralized archival appraisal structure was, in many ways, instituted to serve the ideological ends of the revolutionary regime. As builders of a new political order, and, by the same token, destroyers of the old, the republicans appealed to what they considered to be natural and self- evident political and social values which they sought to apply to the management and evaluation of archives now under their control. This held a number of consequences: not only were the archives classified according to a prescribed, rational scheme designed to reflect the natural order of reality rather than growth and tradition; but also, all documents were consciously appraised for preservation and destruction
18 Posner, p. 25. 19
according to these new political and social values. This
conscious manipulation of the documentary record meant that uniform, rational appraisal criteria needed to be formulated.
At the beginning of the Revolution, the archives of the major institutions of the ancien regime. the monarchy and the church, were in danger of being swept away as threats to the new order struggling to assert its identity: between 17 92 and
1794, hundreds of volumes of monastic records, aristocratic genealogies, and feudal titles were burned under official
sanction.19 It is clear that the revolutionary government
still regarded the archives as though the purposes for which they were originally created and used by the institutions of the ancien regime alone determined their value. They continued to view archives as records in the medieval sense, as relics or memorials which retained the original powers of the old order to which they referred so long as they were allowed to exist. As Carl Lokke observes, by destroying the genealogies, titles, and other records of the ancien regime.
"the revolutionaries hoped to make more difficult any return to the past."20
Under more controlled circumstances, however, other views of the value of pre-revolutionary archives began to prevail.
Through the law of 25 July 1794 (7 Messidor II), enacted at the height of the Reign of Terror, the republican government
19 Carl Lokke, "Archives and the French Revolution," American Archivist 31 (1968), 27-28.
20 Lokke, p. 28. 20
appointed an Agence Temporaire des Titres. later- called the
Bureau de Triage des Titres, to appraise all pre-revolutionary records. The instructions accompanying this law reveal the revised thinking of the revolutionaries with regard to the archives of the ancien regime:
Depuis longtemps il s'elevoit de toutes parts de justes reclamants contre 1'existence de titres qui ne doivent pas survivre a la tyrannie monarche ou feodale. Ce ne sont a la verite que des ossemens desseches et sans vie, mais qui, de la poussiere de tombeaux, paroissent attendre qu'on voix puisse les rassembler et les ranimer; il falloit done se hater de miner une esperance non mo ins insensee que coupable et de rassurer le patriotisme contre les prevoyances meme les moins fondees. Mais pour ne rien conserver de pernicieux, convient-il de toute proscrire sans examen et d'envelopper indistinctement dans une meme condemnation les monuments honteaux de la servitude avec les materiaux precieux dans lesquels nous pouvons puiser, ou des lumieres pour l'histoire, ou des armes pour attaquer les usurpations du domaine national e?2*
In spite of the fact that they were created and used for the services of the old order, some administrative continuity, especially with regard to land titles, required that they be retained precisely to protect the republic from royalist enemies. But, moreover, there was a recognition that the pre- revolutionary documents held value for "des lumieres pour
11histoire."
The law specified categories for the selection of pre- revolutionary records. Article VIII prescribed that "titres
21 in Marquis de Laborde, Les Archives de la France: leurs vicissitudes pendant la Revolution, leur regeneration sous 1'Empire (Paris: Librairie Vve Renoud, 1867), pp. 279-280. 21
domainiaux qui peuvervt servir au recouvrement des p'roprietes nationales" were to be preserved to serve the fiscal, legal, and administrative needs of the state. Those documents to be destroyed, listed in article IX, included: 1) feudal titles,
2) those annulled by a contradictory judgement through decrees of the revolutionary government, 3) those relating only to domains already recovered or alienated, and 4). those which controlled domains definitely awarded after 1790.22 Such criteria reflected a view of archives as valuable insofar as they contributed to the overall legal and fiscal purposes of the state administration. The identification of valueless documents even served the pressing military needs of the state as much of the paper slated for destruction was shipped to munitions factories manufacturing cartridges for the revolutionary armies.23
Yet, the law of 17 96 did recognize for the first time that some pre-revolutionary documents were of value for historical, artistic, and educational purposes, and screening committees were instructed to preserve documents of such value as well.2*1 These documents, among which were included the
Tresor des Chartes of the French monarchy and the records of the Parlement de Paris, were placed in a special "section historique" as archives severed forever from the primary
" France, Bulletin des Lois, no. 58, 7 Messidor II [17943.
23 Lokke, 28-31.
ih 7 Messidor II, article XII. 22
function for which they were created. "Historical documents" were therefore implicitly defined as closed fp_nds originating in offices which had suddenly ceased to exist. It is also significant that most of the members of the Bureau de Triage. after completing their appraisal of pre-revolutionary records, were appointed in 1800 as archivists in the historical section of the Archives Nationales.
The appraisal process, it seems, was therefore only necessary for historical documents--those closed fonds. created before 1789--and not for the other open fonds created by the republican government after 1789. It is true, then, that the revolutionary regime did recognize historical values for archives, but these seemed to apply only to documents from an age which it considered to be completely and radically severed from its own. They served merely as artifacts of a lost civilization, not as valuable records of a tradition continuing into the present. The idea that documents of the republic also needed to be appraised according to similar criteria does not seem to have been considered.
It was not, in fact, until 18 3 5 that orders were issued which required inventories to be made of all current government documents slated for destruction and that these be presented to the Minister of the Interior for approval.
Instructions of 1844 were more precise and ordered the
Ministers of Finance, War, and Public Works to examine the
25 Charles V. Langois and H. Stein, Les Archives de l'Histoire de France (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1891), p. 7. 23
inventories and select certain types of records for preservation: all titles, acts, or decisions of interest to the state, the departments, the parishes, factories, the church, charitable institutions as well as those of likely interest to history, science, art, paleography, topography, or statistics. Instead of being eliminated only a few years after being registered, the supporting documents in agencies were to be kept for thirty years to allow for official appraisal.26 A measure of control over the disposition of post-revolutionary records was in this way established, although a conceptual approach to identifying value in archives appears to have remained unarticulated.
Other western European countries developed similar structures for the administrative control of records deemed to be of national importance. However, the German states, The
Netherlands, and England did differ significantly from their
Latin counterparts (France, Italy, and Spain) in their use of a well-established registry system. These registries, operating by the nineteenth century as specialized and independent offices between the agencies and the archives, provided organization and retrieval services for the agencies whose current correspondence they managed.ti The existence of the registries in the Germanic countries not only influenced
26 Marcel Baudot, "Les Triages et Eliminations," in Ministre des Affairs Culturelles, Direction des Archives de France, Manuel d' Archivisticrue (Paris : S.E.V.P.E.N., 1970), p. 163 .
t7 Posner, "The Role of Records in German Administration," in Archives and the Public Interest, pp. 8 7-89. 24
the application of archival arrangement principles developed later in the century, but also served as a strong potential rival to archives for control over records appraisal. As a consequence, archives tended to operate as passive institutions so far as appraisal was concerned, and registries, as the builders and destroyers of the current records of agencies. In Germanic countries, the boundaries between "historical" values and "agency" values, between archives, which contained non-current documents, and registries, which administered documents in current use, were therefore more clearly defined than in France.
In Germany, the separation of values for primary or
"agency" repositories and secondary or "historical" repositories corresponded to the eighteenth-century distinction between the agency archives (Behordjejnarchiv) and the selected archives (Auslesearchiv). Because they were selected and kept for their political/historical importance to the higher offices of government, the selected archives were considered of greater interest to early nineteenth-century scholars, and therefore were valued and preserved later as an
"historical" collection.23
The general relationship between the values of the original registries and those of archives was, in fact, the subject of a debate carried out in the pages of the
Zeitschrift fur Archivkunde. Diplomatik, und Geschichte between 1834 and 1836. Heinrich August Erhard, archivist in
23 Brenneke, pp. 101-102. 25
Miinster, insisted that archives were closer in their nature to libraries than registries since they are preserved for research purposes. He concluded that only when the agency which produced the records had ceased to exist (as in the case of the French monarchy after the Revolution) did their papers become "archival" as closed fonds. L. F. Hoefer of Berlin, on the other hand, sought a closer relationship to the original registries, and he wished to restore archives to their former place in the original agencies who would also determine selection values.c' In any case, the Germans found it difficult to reconcile the values and roles of the archives and the registries in the early nineteenth century and, for all intents and purposes, authorized disposition of public records, established through an administrative order in 1833, remained outside the control of an independent archival authority.^ Evidently, the need to control records disposition was recognized, but the ultimate values whereby records could be judged archival remained vague and unexpressed.
Dutch and Belgian archives also undertook to rationalize disposition of their archives during this period, and archivists in these countries experienced similar problems appraising values according to distinct administrative and
dV Brenneke, pp. 54-60.
30 Hans Booms, "Society and the Formation of a Documentary Heritage: Issues in the Appraisal of Archival Sources," ed. and trans. Hermina Joldersma and Richard Klumpenhouwer, Archivaria 24 (1987), p. 77. 26
historical criteria. In the Netherlands, the growth of records in government departments led to official orders prescribing at least the methods of appraisal. In 1873, each department was ordered to mark with a special pen those papers no longer useful to the agency, and to preserve those considered to be of historical value. In 1877, the marked papers were destroyed under the supervision of the Secretary-
General .j 1
A similar utilitarian approach to appraisal was adopted by the Belgian government after independence in 1840. Those documents not considered useful for the new administration were segregated and gathered together into an "old archives," a process which closely resembled that undertaken by the
French revolutionaries with regard to the archives of the ancien regime. In 1852, the Minister of the Interior, responding to the growth of "useless records," ordered that those created before 18 51 be selected from among the valuable records sorted into two categories: those which could be sold without objection, and those which, because of their confidentiality, had to be destroyed. The only guideline offered for such selection was that the appraisers were to carry out their work carefully. In some instances, departmental officials were also instructed to preseve records considered to be of historical value, but, in practice, as
Belgian archivist C. Wyffels notes, this last criterion
31 H. J. van Meerendonk, "De Driehoeksverhouding als Basis voor Legitimiteit," Nederlands Archievenblad 74 (1970), 376- 377 . 27
received scant attention by the appraisers." It was only in
18 7 7 that archivists from the Algemeen Riiksarchi_ef began to be directly involved in appraisal when they completed inspections of smaller state archives to ensure that records slated for disposal did not contain those of archival value.
A year later, Louis Gachard, the Archivist-General, even attempted to create an administrative division to which departments could periodically send their "useless papers" for inspection before destroying them. However, this progressive concept, allowing archivists effective control of contemporary material, was never realized."
In Great Britain, the commissions and reports surrounding the establishment of the Public Records Office (PRO) in 18 38 dealt in many instances with problems of identifying archival value within the mass of government documents. Initially concerned with preservation and access to public records, the government began to establish a more rationalized and centralized control over record-keeping; with this control, however, also came the problem of records appraisal which involved reconciling the old legal and agency values with new historical values.
Beginning in 1800, the British Parliament appointed the first of a series of Record Commissions assigned to review the nature, extent, and condition of public documents in the various repositories of the realm. Although the commissions
32 Wyffels, "De toestand in Belgie," p. 349.
33 Wyffels, p. 349. 28
had no power to control the disposition of such documents, they were given the task of selecting for publication what they considered were the most valuable. Given the conditions under which the records were being kept--they were scattered throughout hundreds of repositories whose keepers charged a series of fees before they could be viewed--such a selection was, in effect, an appraisal exercise.3'
In response to the reform movement then beginning to invade British institutions, a Select Parliamentary Committee was formed in 18 3 6 to investigate charges of mismanagement in the Record Commissions. As a liberal reforming force, the
Committee concentrated on preservation and access to public records as "the people's evidences," as the cumulative legal manifestation of the ancient British Constitution. In doing so, their report also raised issues of the relative value of archives and methods of efficiently distinguishing the useful from the useless. The report, therefore, noted the "great and indispensable value" of public records "for the administration of justice,...their importance in the determination of all rights of property, of all local Customs, Extents, Boundaries, and Rights of Soil, and of several Manoral Rights." Though the
Committee recognized that their overall importance as legal evidence had been somewhat diminished by constitutional
3* Great Britain, Parliament, Committee on Departmental Records, Report. Cmd. 9163 (London: HMSO, 1954), p. 9 [hereafter cited as the Grigg Report]. 29
reforms, it maintained that value of public records "in an historical view remained wholly undiminished."315
In considering these legal and historical values, the committee criticized the criteria used by the Record
Commissions in selecting documents for publication. The commissioners had confined their work, the report claimed, to
"those offices where there are collections of records of ancient date, valuable for historical, antiquarian, genealogical, and topographical, rather than for legal purposes."36 Clearly, while the committee recognized the historical character of older records, they assigned value according to usefulness for the public as a whole, not for the narrower historical interests of a few. Therefore, selection for publication, the report maintained, was to be secondary to the proper description of all the records, mainly because such selection could not serve the interests of all and future users. The committee pointed out that "the information contained in the most valuable Records form a small proportion of that, which legal or historical enquirers might extract from the whole mass"--there remained many other records such as "notices of past events, of the social state and manners of former times, of still-existing rights," which were housed in less obvious places as part of vast series of "least interesting Records." Such less obvious records possessed
-5 Great Britain, Parliament, "Report of the Select Committee on the Record Commission," Sessional Papers, vol. XVI, sec 1-11 (London: HMSO, 1836), p. iii.
26 "Report of the Select Committee" (1836), p. vii. 30
equal or greater value for the public than those selected by the commissioners according to their own antiquarian and parochial interests.37 The committee also recognized, however, that
the number of these [less obvious records], . . . , is so small, and the value of each so uncertain until the occasion for turning it to account actually arrives, that it would be impossible to make a satisfactory selection without a thorough preliminary investigation, and wasteful and inconvenient to print the whole extent of the Records, in the different parts of which such information is or may be contained.38
The judgements presented in the committee's report on selection criteria, it must be remembered, related to selection for publication not for preservation in the archives. Yet, elsewhere in the report, the committee members claimed that the cost of just maintaining masses of papers in the archives was also prohibitive. While the committee had some difficulty with the idea of extracting the most valuable records for publication, they found the task of identifying valueless papers less disconcerting. "In almost every office," the report claimed, "there are large masses of documents utterly useless to anybody for any purpose ....
The keeping of these takes up valuable room and imposes useless trouble. Under proper precautions, the Record
Commission would do great service by destroying them."3' By
37 "Report of the Select Committee" (1836), p. vi.
38 "Report of the Select Committee" (1836), p. vi.
39 "Report of the Select Committee" (1836), p. xlii. 31
concentrating on the disposal of useless papers rather than the identification of the most valuable for printing, on the reduction of records rather than on their acquisition, the
Committee adopted an approach to appraising their records which archivists throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century would generally employ.
As strictly legal documents, however, public records in
Great Britain could not be disposed of, and it was considered
"too contentious" an issue to include departmental papers, such as those housed in the State Paper Office, within the scope of any new legislation on public records. Most observers did not see these documents as "records" in the same sense as legal documents, but as historical or literary material which should be properly deposited in the British
Museum.^ Therefore, there persisted at this time the clear distinction between legal or "public" records and administrative papers, between the use of records for the primary purposes for which they were created and their use for secondary purposes by which they serve other users, between
"agency" archives and "historical" archives. As a result, the
18 3 8 Public Records Office Act only gave the Master of the
Rolls "charge and superintendence" of the legal records housed in departments, and "custody" of such records only upon their transfer to a yet to be constructed Public Record Office
(PRO).
w John Cantwell, "The Public Record Office Act and its Aftermath: A New Perspective," Journal of the Society of Archivists 7 (1984), 277 . 32
Administrative practice, however, slowly began not only to erode such distinctions, but to shift responsibility for appraisal to the PRO. In 1841, a precedent was set when the
Master of the Rolls took into his custody Admiralty documents relating only to administrative matters which were in danger of being destroyed.^ The pressure from high volume paper- producing departments such as Treasury and Admiralty to transfer their old administrative documents to the PRO continued to increase. In 1845, the Treasury began a procedure of declaring some of their non-current documents
"historical" and sending them routinely to the PRO. Finally, in 1852, an Order-in-Council placed all departmental documents under the "charge and superintendence" of the Master of the
Rolls, and the flood began, this time under legislative sanction.*2 Although this assured the PRO its role as the ultimate preserver of all non-current documentation, it remained a rather passive acquirer, not an active appraiser, of government documents. Departmental papers continued to be administered in the same manner as under the 1845 agreement with the Treasurywith departments submitting transfers under their own initiative and retaining custody of their archives even while housed in the PRO. Over the next century, despite the passing of legal instruments giving the PRO authority over administrative records, departments continued to maintain the upper hand where appraisal was concerned. As the Grigg report
^ Grigg Report, p. 13.
^ Cantwell, p. 284. 33
observed in 19 54, "in law, Departmental registries are branches or parts of the Public Record Office; in practice, the Public Record Office acts as an extension of the
Departments."£>3
Under this state of affairs, the PRO inherited all the burdens of administering public documents and very few of the powers to make an independent appraisal of their archival value independent of the utilitarian priorities of the departments. To be sure, various ad hoc committees which included PRO officials did authorize destruction of legal as well as administrative documents after 1858, but the criteria used and methodology applied continued to be inconsistent and ill-defined. Only in 1877 was the Master of the Rolls given the authority to destroy records deposited in the PRO under his custody; the departments, however, were given the same powers for records still under their custody, both in their own offices and in the PRO. Lists of documents to be destroyed were to be made up and submitted to Parliament. As well, rules instructing all departmental records-keepers to identify records of historical value were also instituted.^
The somewhat weak archival control over the disposition of government records, therefore, was accompanied only by a second-hand authority over appraisal. This procedure, too, persisted until the late 1950s, when the recommendations of
*3 Grigg Report, p. 15.
^ Great Britain, Parliament, "First Report of the Royal Commission on Public Records," Sessional Papers, vol. 44, cmd. 6361 (London: HMSO, 1912-13), pp. 15-16. 34
the Grigg Report on departmental records of the government were implemented.
By the 1880s, then, most European countries had placed the disposition of records of at least the most important record-producing institution, the State, under some kind of central control. Although national archives administrations benefited from this control, it was often other state agencies or departments which retained the final appraisal decision.
Although secondary, mainly historical, values were recognized, such decisions were made according to a strict distinction between the documents' value as part of an "agency" archives or as part of an "historical" archives. Moreover, when certain records were designated valueless, no indication was given as to why and how these were identified as such. Yet, as a more rational system of records disposition began to be implemented, the problems accompanying the vast increases in record volume began to make themselves evident to archivists.
And, especially in Britain, it was clear that the task of records appraisal was shifting away from the records creators to the records keepers in the archives. After 1880, these administrative challenges, combined with the growing
importance of archives as centres of research, elicited from archivists the first ideas on appraisal as an archival
function. 3 5
CHAPTER II
APPRAISAL AND THE RISE OF ARCHIVAL THEORY, 1880-1930
With the advancement of archives in the nineteenth century as centralized, rationalized, and independent record• keeping agencies, the problem of defining the nature and function of archives and archival work also became apparent.
Throughout this period, archival agencies were gaining status not only as centres of scholarship, but as cultural institutions important to the national identity of European states. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this elevated role of archives within society served as the background for archivists to formulate the basic theories of modern archives administration. This new body of archival theory helped to reconcile what had been regarded throughout the nineteenth century as conflicting values of archives--those of the original administration and those of historical scholarship. With such theoretical ammunition, archivists, as keepers of the collective memory of the nation, also began to address the problem of archival appraisal which this new role had given them.
By the 1880s, the value of both legal and administrative archives as evidence for historical scholarship had been firmly established. Scholars throughout the early modern 36
period did consult archives, but certainly not often enough .to pressure record-creating agencies to preserve them for historical purposes. Those groups which did value documents as sources for historical research were most concerned with legal documents and charters: the study of history and the study of law remained closely connected up to the end of the eighteenth century, at least in terms of documentary criticism.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, historical scholarship had attained the status of an independent discipline with its own "scientific" methodology based on the analysis of both legal and administrative documentary sources. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historians' achievements brought them to positions of public esteem and influence greater than they attained before or since, which leads Ernst Briesach to characterize this period as the "'Golden Age' of historiography."1 The nature and prominence of history during this period held important consequences for the value and appraisal of archives.
The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of a more comprehensive and complex approach to historical scholarship, one which elevated history to a central position in European cultural, intellectual, and political life. This historio- graphical movement, which has generally been termed
1 Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 261-265. "historicism" developed to its fullest expression in Germany.
There, already in the eighteenth century, philosophers such as
Johann Gottfried von Herder rejected the rationalist views of
Enlightenment historians which portrayed history as a continual progress towards the realization of self-evident natural laws, in favour of an organic approach, which viewed historical events and institutions as unique to themselves and to their time. Gottfried Wilheim Friedrich Hegel expanded the meaning of historical process to encompass the entirety of human knowledge: only through the dialectic of historical development, Hegel posited, can the generating force of Reason or Spirit, which is in a constant state of becoming, realize itself.c With this view, historical understanding, rather than an a priori scientific structure, represents the key to human understanding, as Georg Iggers explains:
History thus becomes the only guide to an understanding of things human. There is no constant human nature; rather, the character of each man reveals itself only in his development. The abstract, classificatory methods of the natural sciences are therefore inadequate models for the study of the human. History requires methods which take into account that the historian is confronted by concrete persons and groups who once were alive and possessed unique personalities that called for_the intuitive understanding of the historian.d
£ G. W. F. Hegel, "Philosophical History," in Theories of History, ed. Patrick Gardiner (New York: Free Press, 1959), pp. 58-73.
3 Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, rev. ed. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 198 3), p. 5. 38
This historicist philosophy dominated the work of nineteenth-century German historians who have often been hailed as the founders of "scientific history" in their critical use of documents and what has been perceived as their commitment to "objectivity." Yet, the ultimate goal of documentary historians such as Leopold von Ranke was to find meaning and moral values operating through and above history.
Through his efforts to write history in order to show "how it actually was" (wie es eigentlich gewesen). Ranke also strove to perceive a divine, almost providential "hand of God" working through the historical process as the expression of moral will. Ranke often referred to Ahnen, or intuitive knowledge, as a means of attaining this higher perception.''
Historicist methodology was developed further by the "Prussian school" of historians, of whom Johann Gustav Droysen and
Heinrich von Sybel were most prominent. Droysen claimed that the meaning of history, and hence human nature, could only be grasped through a subjective and personal yerstehen
(understanding) achieved by directly involving oneself in the entire organic context of the subject-matter.5
Through this historicist approach to their research, the
German historians of the nineteenth century, as opposed to their Enlightenment counterparts, tended to view the state as
* Leopold von Ranke, from Histories of the Latin and Germanic Nations from 1494-1514 (18 32), as quoted in What is History--Fact or Fancy?, ed. Brian Tierney, Donald Kagan, and L. Pearce Williams, 3rd.ed. (New York: Random House, 1977), pp. 6 - 7.
5 Iggers, p. 111. the primary manifestation of historical meaning. This idealist concept viewed the state as a self-contained, individual entity which, through the seemingly time-bound motivations and actions of its members, contributed to the realization of the true purposes of history. Ranke declared that states represent "an idea of God" and maintained that "it would be foolish to consider them as so many institutions existing for the protection of the individuals who have joined together, let us say, to safeguard their property.'0 Moreover, historians were prominent political figures not only in
Germany, but in other European states, precisely because they viewed existing power structures as positive forces in society.7 On account of this view of the state, the German historians, as Iggers points out, "were remarkably inattentive to the great social and economic changes brought about by industrialization. History to them remained primarily the interplay of the great powers, and diplomatic and political documents continued to offer the prime sources for historical study."8
The historicist philosophy of the most important documentary historians held vast consequences for the development of archival theory and concepts of archival appraisal. In the first place, the archives of government came increasingly under the control of historians. By the
b in Iggers, p. 8.
7 Breisach, p. 262.
8 Iggers, p. 12. 40
1880s, historians such as Sybel, Friederich Meinecke, and Max
Lehmann held the highest positions in the Prussian State
Archives.9 Because the state was such a significant force in historicist history, its archives were too important to be left to registry officials. The selection of documents for destruction, at the same time, was transferred out of the hands of the agency officials who created them precisely because, it was argued, they were not historians.1^ In many ways, the development of central state archives as prominent cultural institutions in nineteenth-century society was based on this idealist concept of the state's place in history.
In the second place, the historicist ideas of the archivist/historians influenced to a great extent the formulation of provenienzprinzip. or the principle of provenance, and its introduction into the Prussian State
Archives in 1881. This new concept of archival arrangement required that records be organized according to their provenance, the original structure which they had acquired in the agencies which produced them, rather than according to an artificially imposed classification scheme. In practice, this meant preserving or recreating the original internal arrangement of the agency registries; hence the close association at this stage between registraturprinzip, or the
9 Posner, "Max Lehmann and the Genesis of the Principle of Provenance," in Archives and the Public Interest: Selected Essays by Ernst Posner (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1967), pp. 37-38.
10 Woldemar Lippert, "Das Verfahren bei Aktenkassation in Sachsen," Deutsche Geschichtsblatter (1901), pp. 249-264. 41
principle of original order, and provenienzprinzip. By recreating, in the very structure of the archives, the organic, historical processes in which they participated, the
German archivists sought to enhance greatly the historical quality, and hence the ultimate value, of the State Archives: such an approach, as Gregg Kimball has pointed out, was more in line with historicist philosophy." Friederick Meinecke gave expression to this view when he observed that, by applying the principle of provenance to the State Archives,
"the registry of every single agency . . . now became a living organism of its own with its peculiar principle of life, and the different persons with their individual traditions and impulses now came to light. "12 •
It is true that simple administrative necessity also lay at the foundation of this new principle of archival arrangement based on provenance but the German concept was most concerned to preserve the record as a source for historicist studies. In fact, a number of antecedents to this arrangement principle were developed as a more practical, and sometimes the only, alternative to subject classification. As early as 18 26, a Dutch lawyer, Gerrit Dedel, decided that it would not be practical to arrange the archives of various ecclesiastical chapters in Utrecht according to a predetermined geographical and subject scheme since individual
11 Gregg Kimball, "The Burke-Cappon Debate: Some Further Criticisms and Considerations for Archival Theory," American Archivist 48 (1985), 373-378.
12 in Posner, "Max Lehmann," pp. 41-42. 42
registers contained information on many different subjects and localities.1-' The famous circular issued by the French Minister of the Interior in 18 41 instructed the Archives Departmentales to arrange their records according to a principle of respect des fonds. whereby the body of records of a single, independent agency, family, or individual (fonds) would not be intermixed with records of another fonds. It is clear that the main motivation behind such a principle was administrative expediency: Natalis de Wailly, a member of the French Archives
Commission, contended that the chief advantage of arrangement by fonds lay in its ease of application since "it consists of nothing more than bringing together items, only the origin of which it is necessary to determine. This principle is similar to the later German formulation except that respect des fonds does, not- insist on original order of records within the fonds as required by registraturprinzip. a further indication that evidence of organic development was not the main concern of the early French practices.
The advent of a new historicist-inspired approach to archives as formulated in the theory of provenance offered, in turn, a system of values according to which appraisal decisions could be made. Certainly, historical criteria based on the subjective judgement of the historian/archivists of the
13 H. Hardenberg, "The Administrative Practice underlying the Dutch Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives," Archives and Manuscripts 3, No. 4 (1968), 6.
in Theodore R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives: Principles and Techniques (19 56; rpt. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 172. 43
time had been used to appraise records before the 1880s, sometimes with unfortunate results for future researchers. In
18 40, for example, Louis Gachard, the Belgian Archivist-
General, ordered all the sixteenth-century commercial records of the Antwerp merchants destroyed as historically valueless'1"
In the early nineteenth century, French archivists also used historical criteria to identify permanent values, as Marcel
Baudot has observed:
Malheureusement la conception qu'on avait alors de la recherche historique etait bien different de la notre, et certaines eliminations autorisees, telles que celle des listes electorales et des listes des plus imposes, etaient facheuses pour les historiens d' aujourd-hui.16
Historicism, however, offered a definite and consistent philosophical foundation for a provenance-based appraisal methodology.
The historicist concept of verstehen allowed archivists, as historians now involved in maintaining evidence of organic process within archives, to justify their appraisal practices to an increasingly skeptical historical community. At the
Second German Archives Congress held in Dresden in 1900, research-minded historians had come into conflict with practically-minded archivists over whether any archival documents should be disposed of at all. In answering their
15 Renee Doehaerd, "Remarks on Contemporary Archives," American Archivist 14 (1950), 325.
io in Marcel Baudot, "Les Triages et Eliminations," in Ministre des Affairs Culturelles, Direction des Archives de France, Manuel d'Archivistiaue (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1970), p. 169. 44
historian critics, the German archivists put forward historicist rationale in an effort to render archival appraisal a legitimate activity: Friederick Meineke declared that archivist/historians possess a "feeling for historical life," an intuitive insight into the progressive development of society which allows them to measure relative archival value; Woldemar Lippert saw appraisal as a matter of
Fingerspitzengefuhl based on the intuitive, subjective yerstehen which, he claimed, archivists also acquired through learning and practicing history.17 The entire philosophy of historicism had been developed as a reaction to scientific, pre-determined theories of historical value; as such, historicist concepts of value could never be prescribed or described--they were experienced. The archivist of this period, therefore, as Wilhelm Rohr concludes, strove to find the answer to questions of relative archival value "on the basis of his historical education and professional experience from case to case."13
While verstehen justified the essentially subjective activity of appraisal in the eyes of historians, it also depended for its effectiveness on the ability of archivists to immerse themselves in the organic process of history through
1 Hans Booms,"Society and the Formation of a Documentary Heritage: Issues in the Appraisal of Archival Sources," ed. and trans. Hermina Joldersma and Richard Klumpenhouwer, Archivaria 24 (1987), p. 84.
18 Wilhelm Rohr, "Zur Problematik des modernen Aktenwesens," Archivalische Zeitschrift 75 (1958), 75 [my translation]. 45
the documentary evidence. Arrangement by provenance provided a concrete context for the subjective experience from which historical intuition could develop: the original order of the archival fonds revealed, like a fossil, the progressive development of a living organism and, as such, served as a surrogate for the process of development itself.
The emphasis on preserving the organic nature of the archives as evidence of historical process allowed archivists, furthermore, to transcend historiography itself. It is true that appraisal by historicist intuition, while it remained a subjective, anti-theoretical activity, did rely to a great extent upon a historical consensus concerning the inevitability of human progress and the ability of intellectuals to perceive certain laws governing human history. Indeed, intuitive appraisal assumed that, by experiencing historical process, one could also predict future lines of development and hence future values for historical documents. Friederick Meineke's assertions about the archivist's "feeling for historical life" and his ability to determine value accordingly depended, as Hans-Ulrich Wehler observes, on a "rather unsceptical belief in steady human progress, the blessings of the liberal nation-state, and a richly unfolding culture."'' Even as intellectual skepticism replaced this consensus of optimism after the First World War the principle of provenance remained as the theoretical basis for appraisal. Indeed, as Booms observes, as skepticism in
19 in Booms, p. 84. 46
archival work corresponding to a general intellectual instability between the wars increased, so did the German archivists' attachment to the principle of provenance.iy The reason for this is that the archivist's essential task in provenance-based appraisal involved preserving the original structure of archives as evidence of organic process, and not necessarily predicting future historical values. The requirements of future historians were automatically served by such an appraisal approach since it rendered the evidence of organic process clearer by freeing the "archival body" from unnecessary or irrelevant material.
The statements of German archivists on the essential function of appraisal may help to clarify the nature of this provenance-based approach. In 1901, Woldemar Lippert, while he recognized the need to dispose of records for budgetary reasons, remained convinced that appraisal "was a blessing to future historians who would otherwise have to drink from an ' unfathomable sea of material."2* A firm proponent of original order as an appraisal tool throughout his long career as an archivist, Adolf Brenneke explained the essential goals of this approach in one of his later works:
As appraisal frees the registry from dead weight [Ballast]. extracts the essential material of the organism and thereby enhances its clarity and usability, so is it, in the final analysis, a part of those activities
Booms, pp. 86-87.
Lippert, p. 258 [my translation]. 47
which transform_ the registry into an "archival body. "c:i
The value of organic evidence as the object of provenance-based appraisal was reinforced by a number of factors. First of all, the existence of registries, in the
German case, provided a clear and practical guide for appraisal and made value by virtue of the original structure
(provenienz) much easier to identify than by subject-matter of the content (pertinenz): the permanently valuable entity, the fonds, was already formed in the registry system and the information contained in the records were automatically valuable so long as they contributed to the organic wholeness of the fonds. Secondly, the historicist/idealist view of the state as the most important manifestation of historical meaning, and as an independent, absolute entity, rendered the records it produced automatically of valuable provenance; what remained was to make this evidence of the state's activities more useable by appraising the records according to the hierarchical authority structure of the state bureaucracy-- from the most powerful offices, it was assumed, came the most important records.23
The practical consequence of the provenance approach to appraisal was that archivists became very reluctant to destroy large numbers of records within a fonds for fear of affecting
22 Adolf Brenneke, Archivkunde: ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Geschichte des europaischen Archivwesens, ed Wolfgang Leesch (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1953), p. 38 [my translation].
23 Booms, pp. 87-88. 48
its organic unity. Following a tour of archival institutions in 1920, South African archivist C. Graham Botha reported that
"many countries are rather reluctant to destroy any of the ministerial or departmental archives."^ The influential 1898
Dutch manual on archives written by Muller, Feith, and Fruin, perhaps the most consistent and insightful statement on archival methodology based on provenance, does not even consider appraisal as an archival function. Sections 3 3 to 3 5 of the manual even warn against destroying duplicates of originals since they may be useful for legal or reference purposes. In the end, all that is offered, in the cases where appraisal is necessary, is the statement that "common sense should always decide and one should not destroy anything without the advice of experts."25 The historicist approach to appraisal remained a matter of preserving organic unity through provenance; whenever the sheer number of documents threatened to obscure such an organic unity, archivists in this period could only rely on practical experience to make such appraisal decisions.
Similarly, the appraisal standards formulated in 1901 by
Georg Hille, the state archivist of Schleswig, and re-issued by H. O. Meisner in 193 9 remained vague on actual value criteria and focussed instead on very practical methods for
^ C. Graham Botha, Report of a Visit to Various Archives Centres in Europe. United States of America, and Canada (Pretoria: Government Stationary Office, 1921), p. 44.
25 Samuel Muller, Jacob A. Feith, and Robert Fruin, Manual for.the Arrangement and Description of Archives, trans. Arthur H. Leavitt, (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1940 ), p. 96. 49
establishing origins and definite legal values. Under
"General Disposition," Hille offered a number of broad maxims for guiding the archivist in appraisal, such as "extremes are to be avoided," "old age is to be respected," "archives created for a specific past purpose, so long as that purpose is fulfilled, can be disposed of," and "too great an abstraction is evil." This last statement especially reflects the historicist aversion to a priori criteria for determining value, and stresses the uniqueness of each case. The section
"Disposition according to the Origin of the Records" contains general methods for establishing the proper place of each document within the administrative hierarchy so that duplicates could be more easily identified. "General files,"
Hille instructed, "are preserved by the central office at the point where they are generated," and records of intermediate and lower agencies are kept only if they refer to the administration of the lower offices. The section that relates to the actual documentary value of archives, "Disposition according to the Subject of the Archives," besides upholding the value of records for maintaining rights of property, offers only a cursory statement about the potential significance of information on society as a whole: "Files on the rights of private persons in non-state instances of public right" are to be preserved "if they pertain to significant affairs, if they represent typical rights, or if they document a notable person."2o Altogether, Hille's appraisal standards
-° Brenneke, pp. 40-41. /
50
reflect an historicist approach to appraisal in their concern with maintaining the organic unity of the records. Due to their generality, such guidelines necessarily relied more on practical experience than theoretical analysis for their effectiveness.
The development of archival appraisal theory in other
European countries followed closely the scholarly influence of
German historiography in these countries. The German documentary approach to scholarship, and the historicist philosophy which supported it, greatly influenced historiography in Britain, France, and the United States.
Frequent contacts and exchanges with the great historical faculties of Germany made Oxford and Cambridge centres of
German-style "historical science." As Breisach describes it,
"the German historical seminars were the training grounds for missionaries of Geschichtswissenschaft and the German historical works were its missionary tracts."2' The British had always retained their own unique literary and antiquarian style of historical writing, but German historicism, which exalted the unique cultural traditions of any nation as worthwhile historical manifestations, adapted easily to the
British setting.i3
As a result, appraisal concepts in Britain followed lines of development comparable to those in Germany and culminated in the work of Sir Hilary Jenkinson, the most comprehensive
2/ Breisach, p. 263.
23 Breisach, pp. 285-286. 51
and sophisticated archival theorist of this period. As documentary history gained in importance in Britain, so too did the value of government and private records for historical research. British views on the research value of archives and their ideas on appraisal carried the concept of preserving the original organic context as evidence to its furthest extent.
In 1910, a royal commission was appointed under Sir
Frederick Pollock to inquire into the state of both public and local records in Britain. In their first report, released in
1912, the commissioners paid special attention to the methods and rationale for the destruction of records. In their review of the work of various committees appointed between 1852 and
1900 to select and recommend both legal and departmental records for destruction, the commissioners criticized past appraisals for putting administrative expediency over historical research. Indeed, they questioned the entire motives behind legislation which gave archivists and records keepers the power to order destruction of records:
The ulterior object of the official action taken in 1877 and 1898 for statutory authority to destroy valueless documents was to make space for the reception of fresh transfers . ... It is difficult to peruse these official documents without some misgivings in respect of the sweeping assertions made by the authorities of the Records Office as to the utterly useless nature of a great mass of Departmental Records under their care.2'
29 Great Britain, Parliament, "First Report of the Royal Commission on Public Records," Sessional Papers, vol. 44, Cmd. 6361 (London: HMSO, 1912-1913), p. 16 [hereafter cited as Pollock Commission I]. 52
The report also questioned the qualifications of the selection committees since their members were not appointed according to
"their general knowledge of history." Various cases were cited which illustrated how several classes of records which were scheduled for destruction were found later to be valuable.3y
Clearly, the commissioners were calling for a new appraisal policy which conformed to a professional, historical understanding of their research value. Archivists, in this view, could only undertake appraisal using an historicist approach as to their relative value. The report therefore proposed "a more systematic and more expert examination" of allegedly useless documents, "1) in their relation with other classes, 2) in respect of the use that has been or might be made of them by students."31 These recommendations were based on the same kind of assumptions upon which the German archivists relied in legitimizing their role as appraisers, namely, that the evidence of historical process preserved in the original structure of the records and the expertise and experience of the archivist as historian provided reliable foundations for archival value judgements.
The Pollock Commission confirmed the role of the archivist as one most concerned, not with the efficient control and management of government documents as "the people's evidences," but with their preservation as historical
30 Pollock Commission I, pp. 17-19.
3' Pollock Commission I, p. 20. 53
evidence. The appraisal ideas of Deputy-Keeper Sir Hilary
Jenkinson, as formulated in his 1922 Manual of,Archive
Administration. carried the German provenance approach to its furthest limits in order to preserve the value of archives as historical evidence. Jenkinson's arguments must be dealt with in detail before they can be situated within the general context of this period.
In his definition of the nature of archives, Jenkinson adopted the German vision of organic, whole unity. "Archives are not collected," he declared in a later essay; "I wish the word 'Collection' could be banished from the archivist's vocabulary, if only to establish that important fact ....
They are not there because someone brought them together with the idea that they would be useful to students of the future, or prove a point or illustrate a theory. They came together, and reached their final arrangement, by a natural process: are a growth; almost, you might say, as much an organism as a tree or animal. "3c As a consequence of their participation in this organic process, archives, Jenkinson claimed in his Manual.,
"state no opinion* voice no conjecture; they are simply written memorials, authenticated by the fact of their official preservation, of events which actually occurred and of which they themselves formed a part."33
32 Hilary Jenkinson, "The English Archivist: A New Profession" (1947), in Roger H. Ellis and Peter Walne, eds., Selected Writings of Sir Hilary Jenkinson (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1980), p. 238.
33 Jenkinson, Manual of Archive Administration, 3rd ed. (London: P. Lund, Humphries & Co., 1965), p.. 4. 54
The fact that archives are evidence of an organic process in which they themselves participated gave them, in
Jenkinson's view, a special quality essential to their value as historical documents. Since they were produced as part of an activity, the information recorded in archival documents could not consciously be manipulated with a view to influencing future interpretations for the purposes of research. Therefore, Jenkinson concluded, the information they contain is "impartial." This concept of impartiality is central to Jenkinson's entire theory of archives as historical evidence, and is best related in his own words. The original
1922 formulation stated that "the only Safe prediction . . . concerning the Research ends which archives may be made to serve is that . . . these will not be the purposes which were contemplated by the people by whom the archives were drawn up and preserved. "3Ii Jenkinson offered a clearer explanation of the concept in a later essay:
The purpose for which they [archives] are used is not once in a hundred times . . . the purposes for which they were originally compiled and preserved . . . . It is the indifference of the Official Custodian to the interests in which his documents come to be used which give archives properly preserved one of their outstanding characteristics-- their unbiased quality: there is no questioning the impartiality of a witness who knows nothing of the point, nor of its importance, which his evidence will be used to establish; who made his statement in a totally difference [sic] connexion."
Jenkinson, Manual. p. 12.
35 Jenkinson, "The English Archivist," p. 241. 55
Jenkinson therefore went beyond seeing value in the original structure of the archives as evidence of organic activity as the Germans had done; he perceived archival value as dependent upon the very intention and motives of the original record creator. So long as this original intention remained uncompromised in the record, so long as its authenticity as an unaltered record could be established, its value for historical research was also assumed.
Jenkinson1s ideas on archival appraisal were very much bound up in his concept of impartiality. As the original agencies had created an impartial record by remaining unconscious of later research uses, so too could impartiality only be assured when the selection of those to be destroyed followed the same original, impartial criteria. If appraisal were carried out only by and for the purposes of the original agencies, and not for research purposes, so Jenkinson argued, future generations would have no grounds to question the selection. To be sure, Jenkinson realized that allowing only the original intentions of the record creators to govern the appraisal process would result in disappointments for future researchers, but the alternatives were much more dangerous.
Jenkinson contended that "we are not in this account to blame overmuch the judgement of earlier periods; the truth is simply that they were unable to predict the directions which would be taken by the historical interests of the next hundred years."Ji
Yet, predicting historical value through a kind of verstehen
36 Jenkinson, Manual, p. 148. 56
could never serve as a reliable appraisal guide since it compromised the impartiality of the entire fonds:
For the Archivist to destroy a document because he thinks it useless is to import into the collection under his charge what we have been throughout most anxious to keep out of it, an element of his personal judgement; for the Historian to destroy because he thinks a document useless may be safer at the moment (since he presumably knows more history than the Archivist), but is even more destructive of the Archives' reputation for impartiality in the future: but for an Administrative body to destroy what is no longer needed is a matter entirely within its competence and an action which future ages (even though they may find reason to deplore it) cannot possibly criticize as illegitimate or as affecting the status of the remaining Archives;1,37
Jenkinson's thinking on appraisal led him to practical conclusions very different from those of his German counterparts. Jenkinson clearly saw the rising bulk of archival material as a serious problem in terms of both administrative and intellectual control: "There is a real danger," he observed, "that the Historian of the future, not to mention the Archivist, may be buried under the mass of the manuscript authorities."38 Was there any way the archivist could help to relieve the pressure of overabundance?
Jenkinson considered destruction by the archivist legitimate only in the case of word-for-word duplicates, but even with such documents, he doubted whether the labour involved in weeding them out justified the small reduction this would
' Jenkinson, Manual. p. 149.
8 Jenkinson, Manual, p. 138. 57
afford.-1 Instead, he maintained that the answer to the problem of appraisal lay with the record-creators themselves: the process of "archive making," as Jenkinson termed it, could be improved and adapted to make sure that the agency would not destroy either too little or too much. His "rules for archive making" instructed agency officials to leave memorials of all important proceedings, to preserve as little as possible, and to arrange records as clearly and consistently as possible.
Altogether, Jenkinson's "golden rule" for archive-making was to keep files
in such a state of completeness and order that, supposing himself and his staff to be by accident obliterated, a successor totally ignorant of the work of the office would be able to take it up and carry it on the strength of a study of the Office Files.140
In this way, the interests and intentions of the original agency would be clarified, the impartiality of the record preserved, and material ephemeral to the essential character of the archival body siphoned off.
Jenkinson's concept of appraisal in the service of preserving the impartial record as historical evidence is an extension rather than an alternative to the German approach.
Jenkinson's ultimate goal, after all, was to recreate and preserve the original, organic activity which produced the records and in which the records participated. Consistent with historicist thinking of the time, he essentially viewed
Jenkinson, Manual, p. 147.
Jenkinson, Manual, pp. 152-153. 58
record-creating organizations such as the State as individual, self-contained entities able to define their own needs. His theories, therefore, followed the principle of provenance in appraisal to its logical conclusion; he diverged from the
German approach in that he clearly emphasized the quality of the records as impartial evidence above the structural unity of the records as evidence of organic growth. The unique emphases in Jenkinson's version of appraisal with reference to the original organic nature of archives probably derive from the British tradition of record-keeping itself: incompleteness of English registries in organizing all supporting documents according to administrative function made it difficult for archivists to perceive the organic structure from the file system itself,41 and the strong British tradition of viewing public records as legal evidence raised the importance of evidential impartiality in their use.'"- Yet, in placing the responsibility for appraisal in the hands of the record creators and out of those of the record keepers, Jenkinson's main objective was to provide the most efficient and logical method of freeing the "archival body" from irrelevant and obscuring material; after all, agency officials, as unselfconscious-conscious appraisers, remained outside of the many conflicting and complex interests with which the historian/archivist, as a critical scholar, would have to
h1 Sche11enberg, Modern Archives, pp. 178-179.
*2 see Chapter I above; Richard Stapleton, "Jenkinson and Schellenberg: A Comparison," Archivaria 17 (1983-84), 70. 59
deal. In this way, Jenkinson conformed to' the historicist concepts of appraisal dominant at the time.
The period between 18 80 and 1930 represents a kind of
"golden age" in the history of archives and in the development of appraisal concepts: official measures to control the disposition of public records and the preservation of private manuscripts had been set in place; the study of history, as an activity central to European intellectual life in the late nineteenth century, also elevated the status of archives as sources for such history in western society; historicist philosophy and methodology provided a consensus for the establishment of a consistent, sophisticated archival theory which seemed to reconcile, once and for all, the interests of the original administration and of historical scholarship in the selection of archival documents for permanent preservation. Appraisal according to provenance, with primary reference to the original structure and use of the documents as self-defining, organic unities, seemed to offer a convincing, practical, and above all, infinitely adaptable approach to the ever-growing challenges of determining and identifying archival value in the records. However, by the
1930s, it was becoming apparent that provenance-based concepts of appraisal also depended, to a large extent, on certain assumptions about the record producers, the records they produced, and both the primary and secondary usefulness of the records. This set the stage for the development of ax-chival appraisal as a management problem for which concrete models 60
and theories needed to be developed. 61
CHAPTER III
ARCHIVAL APPRAISAL AS A MANAGEMENT FUNCTION, 1930-1980: THE UNITED STATES
The great advances made by archivists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in developing theories for administering and preserving archives as unique
sources of documentation held lasting consequences for the
future. The definition of archives as self-contained, self-
actualized, organic unities as embodied in the principle of provenance meant that their value, even for purposes of
secondary research, was inextricably linked to the
institutions or individuals which created them and provided the conditions for their original use. But after 1930,
assumptions about the nature and inherent value of archives as historical evidence began to be seriously eroded in the face
of the changing quality and quantity of contemporary archives.
The organizations which produced records were expanding and
diversifying, creating new forms and functions for
documentation within their operations. Formerly the products
of a direct and simple communicative event, records now became
part of systems which needed to be consciously managed in
order to maximize efficiency and effectiveness. In order to
apply standards of archival value to such new forms of
documentation, archivists were compelled to initiate and participate in a process of systematic records creation and contol. Ultimately, they began to adopt such systematic management techniques in their own administrations; appraisal, along with arrangement and description, became a management function within the overall process of bringing documents through a life cycle of orignal administrative use to later archival use. This management approach was both an incentive and a tool for analyzing persistent problems in archival appraisal which involved questions such as: the relationship between the original and archival values of documents; the degree to which the form and structure of archives determine value; and the possibilities for archivists to perceive permanent archival values based on the needs of future generations of archives users. In many ways, the answers to such questions offered, first of all, by American archivists after 1930 were assumed to be found within the very workings of the process itself.
It has been widely accepted that the early twentieth century witnessed a veritable revolution in records and record-keeping. French archival theorist Michel Duchein contends that, while there have certainly been important developments before the twentieth century, changes in the way records were created, used, and kept after 1930 were so dramatic "that we are justified in speaking of a real archival revolution."! This revolution, both quantitative and
1 Michel Duchein, "The Archival Revolution: The Challenge of Modern Archives to the Archivist," SoutheastJksian Archives 5 (July, 1972), p. 4. 63
qualitative in nature, is directly related to the changing
structure and function of organizations within modern society.
Twentieth-century government, business, and social
institutions have not only increased their capacity to create
(through the use of typewriters and, later, wordprocessors), to reproduce (by means of carbon copies, stencils, and photocopies), and to manage (with the introduction of filing
systems) larger amounts of records, but have also expanded the
scope and complexity of the operations which require
documentation. As a result, the volume and variety of records they produce have increased at a phenomenal rate.
One need only compare inventories of government, business, or church records from the nineteenth century with those of the same organizations today to appreciate the quantitative magnitude of this increase. A specific example provided by Duchein illustrates the point most effectively.
In 1882, the year it was established as a government
department, the French Ministry of Agriculture produced about
15,000 linear feet of documents, the result of its activities
in the areas of agricultural education, veterinary services,
agricultural statistics, production incentives, hydraulics,
forestry, and horse-breeding. By the 1970s, the same
department was creating and using over 170,000 linear feet of records annually--an increase of 1100 per cent--and its
responsibilities had widened to include national and
international agricultural policy and planning, fixing and
controlling production and pricing levels, commercial 64
marketing for agricultural products, and countless rural social and environmental programs.t
In qualitative terms, new forms of records and records systems have rendered it more difficult to perceive directly the meaning of the information carried by the document. The most obvious manifestation of this change is the appearance of non-paper documents such as photographs, which are products of a unique process, and films, tapes, microforms, and computer data, which can only be used and interpreted through mechanical or electronic intermediaries. With such records, the process of their creation, original arrangement, and primary use is more complex than for paper documents in that they must conform to the conventions of their respective media in order for them to be effective. However, such special media records represent only part of the total number of documents produced since 1960, and a very small proportion of those produced between 1930 and 1960. They are, in addition, only symptoms of a much larger revolution in the quality of records generated by organizations during this period.
As organizations grew in size and complexity after 1900, new methods and functions for the creation and use of records were also introduced to help control and coordinate both
internal and external activities. Increasingly, the forms and functions of records were defined by the objectives and
structures of scientifically managed communication systems which made traditional assumptions about the relationship of
2 Duchein, p. 5. 65
the document to the original agency obsolete. JoAnn Yates'
studies of twentieth-century communication systems in American
business organizations reveal the nature of these
developments. Relying on the work of business historian
Alfred Chandler, Yates contends that during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a shift occurred which transformed many small, owner-operated enterprises into
large, departmentalized, manager-operated corporations.
Within the small, owner-operated business, written
communications were generally limited to accounting records
and series of incoming and outgoing correspondence relating to
a wide variety of subjects. Internal communications between
the owner and supervisors within the company were transmitted
almost exclusively through verbal orders. What is more,
correspondence and account records were simply arranged
chronologically in indexed volumes, reflecting a very direct,
unstructured system of communication. In contrast, large,
manager-operated businesses needed to transmit their internal
communications on paper both laterally (to other departments
within the company) and downward (to subordinates). More
importantly, "scientific management" principles, first
developed by Frederick Taylor to increase production
efficiency, were applied to the organization as a whole, and
record-keeping in particular. The introduction of vertical
filing allowed organizations to classify separate documents 66 according to functional and topical groups rather than chronologically in bound volumes.0
As a result of this systematic management revolution, which occurred within public as well as private institutions, new types of documents were created and their functions within the organization changed: internal memoranda, circular-
letters, and supervisory reports were used to coordinate and appraise internal operations to ensure greater efficiency; technical reports and research data were compiled to help plan and develop strategies for future growth; and case files on
certain individuals, organizations, programs, or subjects
could be related to different circumstances as they arose.*
Even the actual writing of business letters became more formal and standardized to fit the communication system: record creators were limited to one topic per letter, and standard forms were developed to ensure that information remained
d JoAnn Yates, "From Press Book and Pigeonhole to Vertical Filing: Revolution in Storage and Access Systems for Correspondence," Journal of Business Communication 19 , No. 3 (1982), 5-26; Yates, "Internal Communication Systems in American Business Structure: A Framework to Aid Appraisal," American Archivist 48 (1985), 141-158.
* The case file, common to many modern organizations, has been defined as "a folder or other file unit containing material relating to a specific action, event, person, place, project, or other subject." Frank B. Evans, et.. al. , comps, Williams L. Rofes, ed., "A Basic Glossary for Archivists, Manuscript Curators, and Records Managers," American Archivist 37 (1974), 416. The British concept of "particular instance papers," which has a somewhat broader meaning, refers to "series of papers which have the same general subject matter, but relate it to different instances." Michael Cook, Archives Administration (Folkstone, Kent: Dawson, 1977),p. 72. 67
consistent and predictable."' With this movement towards systematizing the creation and use of documents, "record keeping," as Francis Blouin observes, "thus shifted from serving a descriptive function to serving as an analytic tool."0 Records no longer served only as memorials of past actions for the organization; they were produced, collected, manipulated, or consulted to help make decisions on internal and external operations.
The implications for archivists were profound. The increased volume and variety of records threatened to overwhelm not only existing storage capacities of archival repositories, but also the simple control measures developed to ensure that archival repositories would receive permanently valuable documents. Appraisal, as a process by which the organic unity of archival fonds is made more coherent and perceptible through the destruction of non-essential material, therefore became an ever more important component of archival work. However, archivists before the 1930s assumed that the relationship between the information carried in archives and the agency which generated them was fairly direct and spontaneous; that the creation and structuring of archives, as part of organic, historical phenomena, is a "natural" process which provides its own justifications for what it produces; and that, ultimately, the appraisal of archives must follow
5 Yates, "Vertical Filing," p. 21.
0 Francis X. Blouin, Jr., "A New Perspective on the Appraisal of Business Records: A Review," American Archivist. 42 (1979), 318. criteria of value inherent in the form and structure of the
archives themselves. No longer was the organic development of
agencies clearly evident in the structure of archives once their current use had been exhausted; no longer, too, could
the original agencies, in their creation and use of records,
be counted on alone to form a complete and coherent body of
documentation conforming to the purposes of archival
institutions. What is more, twentieth-century records related
as much to the requirements of communication systems, be they
formally or informally defined, as to the intentions and
activities of the records creators themselves. This meant,
increasingly, that, first of all, archivists needed to be
active participants in the process of records creation itself
in order to identify the archivally valuable or valueless records. Secondly, as organizations were required to use
systematic management systems to control and use their
records, so too did archivists need to develop appraisal as a
management function to gain administrative and intellectual
control over documents being transferred to their
repositories.
American archivists were at the forefront of a general
movement towards developing systematic appraisal techniques
for archives after 1930. Although the archivists working with
federal public records at the National Archives quickly began
to dominate the field after 1930, Illinois state archivist
Margaret Cross Norton formulated the initial concepts of
archival appraisal which set the tone for all future debates 69
on the subject. Her ideas were at first considered radical
and, for some, unacceptable, yet the basic elements of her
proposals eventually became widely accepted by her archival
colleagues and successors.
Norton offered her ideas on archives as a reaction to the
view, dominant in the U.S. and in Europe at this time, that
archives should be administered primarily to serve the
interests of historians. Writing in 1930, Norton blamed the
view of archives as historical records "vaguely believed to be
of value because historians keep saying they are valuable" for
the "slow material progress" of archival institutions in the
U.S.7 Norton maintained that archives, and especially public
archives, are essentially legal records that need to be kept
for important administrative purposes. Efficient methods of
administering records ensure that the records provide proper
legal evidence regardless of whether the documents are
frequently consulted, and hence are current, or very
infrequently, and therefore are noncurrent. The arrangement
of archives according to provenance was an important principle
for Norton, not because it preserved evidence of historical
growth, but because it enhanced the legal authenticity of the
documents after they had been transferred to an archival
institution. Norton wrote in 1943 that "the necessity for
acceptable certification is the basis for the adoption of
7 Margaret Cross Norton, in her Norton on Archives: The Writings of Margaret Cross Norton on Archival and Records Management, ed. Thornton W. Mitchell (Carbondale, 111.: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1975), p. 4. 70
provenance as the basis for the classification of archives.
Otherwise, authenticity could be questioned in court."- To be sure, this primary concern with the legal uses of archives for the original agency would also best serve the needs of future historians using the records: "Unless the archivist can forget more or less temporarily his personal enthusiasm for history,"
Norton concluded, "and work for the building up of a real archives department functioning as an efficiency proposition in state administration, he is neglecting both his duty as a historian and as a public official."9
At first glance, Norton's ideas seem to be very similar to those of the British archivist Sir Hilary Jenkinson, whom she cites often in her writings. Jenkinson also defined archives primarily as documents serving the administrative purposes of the officials who produced them, not those of historians, and that, by preserving the legal authenticity and and impartiality of archives, archivists also fulfill their role as keepers of historical evidence. However, Jenkinson's concern with impartiality led him to the conclusion that archivists should be minimize their participation in the formation of archives through appraisal; rather, the records creators themselves are the only ones capable of selecting records since only their selection would remain true to the purposes for which they were originally kept.1'-' The
3 Norton, p. 28.
9 Norton, p. 8.
15 see pp. 54-59 above. 71
differences between Norton and Jenkinson on this point reveal an entirely new approach to appraisal.
Norton claimed that, while the argument that archives should be preserved primarily as historical evidence may have been acceptable in the nineteenth century, the increasing
"multiplicity and complexity" of the functions of organizations in society and the resultant changes in record• keeping had made such an approach obsolete by the 1930s. She cited an example from her own work to illustrate: from 1818 to
18 31, the official correspondence of all the governors of
Illinois amounted to 132 pages in a single, small volume; by the 1930s, the statehouse needed its own post office to handle the nine truckloads of letters received and delivered in one day.'1 Furthermore, this great bulk of documents represents an inferior record because the offices producing them are no longer constrained by the limitations of the technology to organize and select documents according to their own strictly defined administrative purposes. Formerly, Norton claimed, records were not created unless they were important so that, for the archivist, it was "both necessary and possible to preserve them all". New techniques in document production and reproduction caused administrators to shirk their responsi• bilities for maintaining a useable record: "The fact," Norton contended in 1945, "that it is easier for an executive to order all records to the files for storage than to select the
11 Norton, pp. 7-8. 72
more important ones for preservation has brought a chaotic
situation in most state offices."1"
In contrast to Jenkinson, therefore, Norton placed no
confidence in modem organizations to define the purposes for which they keep records, let alone devise efficient ways to
create and maintain records for such purposes. Because of
this, she viewed as one of the most important tasks of the
archivist the arrangement and appraisal of records not only when they are transferred to archival repositories, but also
during the period of their current use, even to the point of
their creation. Writing in 1930, Norton observed that the
archivist is naturally inclined to be ah active participant in
pre-archival record-keeping because of "his pessimistic
knowledge that the departments left to themselves will
continue to make a mess of things as they have in the past,
for they will have filing departments, not archives
departments." Filing clerks, Norton maintained, merely
cleared away the documents into files with no concern for
later retrieval and use; archivists, on the other hand,
possess a "sense of perspective" which allows them to
appreciate, first of all, the continuing value of documents as
records beyond their initial use, and secondly, the
interrelations between agencies in the organization which
produced them to allow for an efficient, integrated record
retrieval system.10 In view of this and the archivist's
1£ Norton, p. 13 2.
13 Norton, p. 9-10. 7 3
"knowledge of departmental development and of political science and history," Norton contended that the archivist should have veto power over decisions concerning the disposition of records.*1* Altogether, with their "specialised training and expertise" in the field of documentation, archivists are the persons best qualified to organize and select records so that they are useable for both the administrator and the future researcher.15
Norton's ideas on appraisal required that the archivist approach appraisal as a manager of records rather than as a keeper of historical evidence. Since the archivist is most concerned with preserving a proper legal record of administration, the process of the determining value of records operates on a continuum between the agency and the archives: appraisal, along with arrangement, should be a concern of the archivist right from the point of creation.
For Norton, a document's entrance into an archives does not automatically transform it into an historical record; the only criterion for transferring records to an agency archives is frequency of use, not historical value. Already by 1930,
Norton had implemented a rule for the Illinois Archives
Department that, generally, only records referred to less than once every six months should be transferred to the archives.'2
By 1936, Norton had expanded this system into three
^ Norton, p. 16.
15 Norton, p. 234.
16 Norton, p. 11. classifications for records which require three levels of archival control and administration: current records, still required for the day-to-day operations of the agency, which are kept in agency offices; semicurrent records, less frequently consulted, which are kept in alternate storage under the control of the agency; and noncurrent records, no longer regularly used for current administration, which are put under the custody of the archivist.17 This method of archival control and disposition eventually served as the basis for integrated systems of records management and archives administration developed later in the National
Archives.
In 1944, Norton presented a comprehensive management approach to archival appraisal which involved three simultaneous processes. First of all, at the point of original creation and use, the archivist seeks both to prevent unnecessary records from being produced and to ensure that administrative activities are properly documented.. This involves determining the potential function, form, content, and relation of the record to other records. Secondly, the archivist finds ways to reduce the size of the record through techniques such as microphotography. And thirdly, the archivist carries out a "scientific selection of records which can be destroyed as having no further value for administrative or research purposes."18
17 Norton, p. 18.
18 Norton, pp. 233-238. 75
It is in this third process that Norton encountered the most difficult problems of appraisal. "It is comparatively easy to select records of permanent value, relatively easy to decide on those of no value," Norton observed. "The great bulk of records are borderline."1'' Her approach to appraisal of existing documents required a comprehensive analysis of the records' function, content, form, and relationship to other documentation -- precisely those elements which Norton identified as important in the creation and use of records.
She did recommend a number of conventional, common-sense techniques such as preserving all records of a certain age and destroying most "housekeeping" records as relatively valueless.20 In the main, however, Norton bypassed the central problem of developing criteria of value for making appraisal judgements; she simply concentrated on establishing an integrated and efficient system of records management and archives administration through which such value criteria could be systematically applied.
While the ideas of Margaret Cross Norton were highly advanced, the progress made by American archives at the federal level before 1930 was decidedly meagre. Considering this, the many important contributions made by federal archivists after 1930 to the development of a systematic management approach to archival appraisal is quite surprising.
It was not until 18 8 9 that legislation was passed which
19 Norton, p. 239.
20 Norton, pp. 239-246. 76
required department heads to submit lists of records recommended for destruction to Congress for authorization.
Only in 1912 was the Librarian of Congress given the power to prevent the destruction of records he considered to be of
"historical value."21 Indeed, the National Archives was not established as an independent agency until 1934.
Ironically, their rather late start helped to make the accomplishments of the Americans after 1930 that much more spectacular, for a number of reasons. First of all, when archivists at the National Archives began their work, they suddenly found themselves responsible for a voluminous and by and large very poorly organized mass of records which had accumulated over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
European archival theories were often developed with medieval records in mind, and could rely on established registry systems to form comparatively complete and organized archival fonds• American archivists, considering their situation, felt a greater need to develop systematic appraisal techniques which involved them in the process of records creation as well as records keeping. Secondly, American archivists were not as bound to existing record-keeping structures and techniques as were their European colleagues. They could therefore more easily formulate and implement new theories and practices
21 Carmelita S. Ryan, "Special Study of the Appraisal of Indian Records," in Indian-White Relations: A Persistent Paradox. ed. Jane F. Smith and Robert M. Kvasnicka (Washington, D.C.: Howard Univ. Press, 1976), 34 77
without too much resistance from the government bureaucracies which had produced the records ."
In the first issue of the Bulletins of the National
Archives. it was contended that archives possess a twofold value, administrative and historical.i6 This twofold concept of archival value combined Norton's idea of an archives as the repository of a sponsoring institution's legal and administrative evidence with the older concept as a repository of historical evidence and implied that they were somehow complementary. Rather than remaining distinct and separate activities, the effective management of records for administrative purposes necessarily complemented the formation of archives. The appraisal of records according to these two sorts of values was part of a continuum of activity which could be systematically integrated and managed by the archivist.
The first sophisticated analysis of the nature of archival appraisal following this approach was a 1940 article by Philip C. Brooks, a senior archivist at the National
Archives. In order to appraise records effectively, Brooks insisted that it is necessary to analyze what he called the
"life cycle" of the record from the time of birth through the period of original activity to dormancy in the archives.
23 Ernst Posner, "The National Archives and the Archival Theorist." American Archivist 18 (1955), 209-210.
23 U.S. National Archives, "The National Archives of the United States," Bulletins of the National Archives 1 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives,1936), pp. 2-3. 78
Brooks provided a detailed description of the many material and ideological factors which determine whether the record survives to reach the archival stage and the effect that such factors have on the character of the record. The components of Brooks' life cycle concept are best illustrated through the use of a diagram:2*
purpose, history, policies, structure of agency creation filed filing reduction of = II Archives record informal, systems transfer sampling not filed non-current, microfilm material origins valueless of document
With his analysis, Brooks wished to emphasise that appraisal is the result of a series of decisions made under- certain circumstances and that, therefore, it is a process.
But, unlike Jenkinson, who insisted that the archivist remain removed from this process, Brooks found it imperative that archival considerations apply to the selective management of records at every stage of the life cycle.
At the time of creation, the form, content, and distribution of the record is determined. Brooks claimed that, since such decisions concerning the creation of the record "are based on the intention that certain of the documents should be retained for the future, . . . the more
^ Philip C. Brooks, "The Selection of Records for Preservation," American Archivist 4 (1940), 223-227. 79
that intention is taken into account by the author of the instruction manuals the better off all of us are."-"'
At the time of filing, the records are organized to allow for future reference. Brooks acknowledged that many filing systems in use at that time violated the original integrity of the file by copying and interspersing letters by name or subject. Contrary to this practice, Brooks envisioned an
"ideal program" for a filing system structured for, appraisal and disposal purposes. This meant that material would be filed by the date at which its original usefulness expired.
It is at the filing stage, Brooks maintained, that the archivist must become directly involved in the process of record-keeping: "Appraisal is made when the records are filed, and consultation at that time with representatives of the archival agency will allow the archivist to make their study when full information as to the function represented by the records is available."2'1
In line with his view of appraisal as a process operating within the entire life cycle of the record, Brooks claimed that the final appraisal undertaken by the archivist at the time of transfer had been overvalued, partly due to the pressure to reduce archival storage costs/' Brooks did not deny, however, that when a record enters the dormant or archival stage of its life, new considerations must be taken
25 Brooks, p. 223.
26 Brooks, p. 22 5.
27 Brooks, p. 226. 80
into account in any further management of the record. Methods of reducing bulk through transfer to other archives, microfilming, and sampling, Brooks contended, were not solutions to the basic problem of archival appraisal, namely, the development of archival value criteria.
In defining such values, Brooks expanded the twofold notion of archival value outlined in the first issue of the
National Archives Bulletins into three components: value for the purposes of efficient administration and legal protection to the agency of origin; value for the study of the administrative history of the record creating body as it provides evidence of administrative precedent for administrators, organizational operations for political scientists, and the functional context or provenance of the records for archivists; and "historical value" for information on people, places, and events with which the agency dealt potentially useful for a wide variety of research activities.^'
By identifying value as evidence of administrative history between the continuing administrative value and potential research value, Brooks reinforced the idea of appraisal as a series of activities which rely upon each other for their ultimate effectiveness. In order, therefore, to apply the three archival values to appraisal, archivists must not wait for one set of values to expire and another to emerge over time; they must become involved in the life cycle of the records as soon as possible:
29 Brooks, pp. 230-232. 81
The whole appraisal function is one undertaking, and it can best be performed with a complete understanding of the records of an agency in their relationship to each other as they are created rather than after they have lain forgotten and deteriorating for twenty years . . . the earlier in the life history of the documents the selection process begins, the better for all concerned. And the earlier in that life history that co• operation between the agency of origin and the archivist can be established, the easier will be the work of all.2?
Although Brooks' concept retained the importance of archival theory and the use of value concepts, one of the results of this approach was that archivists began to place an emphasis on developing or improving administrative methods for reducing record volume. Most of the important components of systematic reduction were outlined in a 1940 study by Emmet J.
Leahy of the National Archives, considered by many to be the
"father" of modern records management.
Leahy analyzed the development of disposition techniques for public archives in both Europe and the United States. His analysis revealed that, with the pressure of record volume
increasing throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, governments began to implement systems within their agencies which controlled and simplified the process of
segregating valuable records from the valueless. The general historical tendency was to reduce the bulk of records by
2? Brooks, p. 22 6. 82
managing them in a systematic way, thus making the job of
appraisal more effective.i0
Leahy identified some of the most important components of what he considered to be an effective reduction program based
on methods being used in the United States at that time.
First of all, though the administrator is given responsibility
for the initial selection of records, the archivist supervises
and approves proposals for destruction. Secondly, large
series of records produced in a certain form for specific
purposes could be routinely destroyed after a certain period
of time without obtaining legislative approval for each
series. Such programs required that archivists and
administrators draw up schedules of records thus identified which included a date of final disposition. It also required,
Leahy contended, more effective systems of record creation and
filing conforming to such reduction schedules; proper records
management was, for Leahy, an essential prerequisite for
efficient appraisal. Thirdly, Leahy maintained that a
systematic method for transferring records to archives "tends
to throw the spotlight of attention on collections of doubtful
or of no value" and would ensure that the "special knowledge
and advice of former custodians" would be accessible to
archivists performing the final appraisal. Fourthly,
reduction could be further achieved by microfilming bulky
documents or making scientific samples or abstracts of certain
30 Emmet J. Leahy, "The Reduction of Public Records," American Archivist 3 (1940), 14-31. series of documents.'' Altogether, systematic methods for disposition could, in themselves, solve many of the problems of appraisal since they eliminated needless repetition of analysis and provided favourable conditions for making value judgements about records.
The United States' entrance into the Second World War in
1941 intensified efforts to implement records management techniques in all government agencies. The National Archives, because of its limited resources of staff and space, felt even more pressure to control ever increasing number of records produced by agencies involved in the war effort while keeping
costs to a minimum. A Records Disposal Act was passed in
1943, which allowed for the use of record schedules authorizing destruction of certain recurring series of records. A 1945 amendment made the use of general schedules
covering all agencies of government permissible. However, these disposal methods relied for their effectiveness on a
consistent and integrated records creation and filing system which very few of the departments were either willing or able to adopt.-2
While the cooperation of the record-creating agencies in
a records management system remained elusive, archivists began
advocating the application of principles of efficiency and
effectiveness to the administration of records as they
31 Leahy, pp. 131-138.
32 Donald R. McCoy, The National Archives,,: America' s Ministry of Documents, 1934-1968 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1978), pp. 155~-163. 84
received them at the end of the life cycle. G. Philip Bauer presented the extreme view that the relative value of records coming into an archives should be compared with processing and storage costs that the archival institution itself would incur by accepting them. This meant that the National Archives should use cost-accounting standards to determine the limits of its capacity for taking in new accessions. Given such limits to its resources, archivists would then need to justify the retention of incoming records, not their disposal. Bauer in fact calculated that, according to such administrative standards, the National Archives could only justify keeping
1,000 cubic feet of records."3
Bauer's statements, presented to a conference of archivists in 1944, were controversial and elicited many responses opposing such an appraisal method. Herman Kahn of the Department of the Interior Archives Division, for instance, insisted that the moral and cultural standards of civilized man is the most important criteria for judging the value of records, not the relative monetary cost of preservation in the archival institution."1* Yet, Bauer's general approach, that the requirements of an institution's own administrative system, by which it makes efficient use of its allocated resources, is a major factor in determining
33 G. Philip Bauer, "The Appraisal of Current and Recent Records," National Archives Staff Information Circular 13 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives, 1946), pp. 11-20.
in Bauer, pp. 23-25. 85
archival value, remained an important component of later theories on appraisal.
Two federal commissions on government organization and efficiency gave this management approach to appraisal concrete form. The "Hoover Commissions" of 1947-1949 and
19 53-19 55, chaired by former president Herbert Hoover, recommended implementing the proposals of Emmet Leahy as head of the commission's records management task forces. The result was that the strong emphasis on efficient housekeeping activities inherent in the life-cycle concept of appraisal began to dominate the entire structure and function of the
National Archives. The National Archives was subsumed under a newly-created General Services Administration charged with coordinating and maintaining the efficiency of all federal government offices and operating under the objective of
"maximum service at minimum cost. "iZ! For current or active records, a program of "paperwork management" was instituted which prescribed the creation of concise and consistent forms, letters, and reports and the development of better systems for controlling the filing, typing, and duplication of records.
Federal records centres were established throughout the country to house semi-active records before they reached the archives with the goal of bringing up to 50 percent of all federal records under their control. The head of the General
Services Administration decided which records were to be accepted" by the National Archives upon the recommendations of
35 McCoy, pp. 220-231. 86
the archivists, although Congress retained its authority to approve the disposal of federal records.-'0
Although administrative mechanisms for managing the creation, organization, and disposition of U.S. government records were being set in place by the early 1950s, American archivists still lacked coherent value criteria to make appraisal decisions at various points in this administrative process. A management approach to appraisal required value criteria that are systematically presented and could be systematically applied. Such a system of appraisal values were provided by perhaps the most influential archival theorist of the post-war period: National Archives administrator Theodore R. Schellenberg. His ideas, as formulated in various articles and manuals, continue to influence North American thinking on archival appraisal.
Schellenberg's appraisal concepts were first set out in a highly-structured and analytic procedures manual published as one of the Bulletins of the National Archives in 19 5 6 and titled "The Appraisal of Modern Public Records"."" Unlike his predecessors, Schellenberg approached the problem of appraisal by defining values first and deriving a methodology for appraisal from those values. He divided appraisal values into two levels: "primary values," which the records hold for the agency that produced them and used them for their own
36 McCoy, pp. 236-238, 275-278.
37 Theodore S. Schellenberg, "The Appraisal of Modern Public Records," Bulletins of the National Archives 8 (October, 1956). 87
administrative, operational, and legal purposes; and
"secondary values," which the records hold for users other than the creating agency after they have served their original purposes. Schellenberg claimed that archivists were concerned only with secondary values, which he divided further into
"evidential" and "informational" values. Evidential values are those which the records hold as evidence of the organization and functioning of the agency which produced them. Informational values are those which the records hold as sources of information on persons, things, and phenomena with which the originating agency dealt during the course of its activity.35
To be sure, Schellenberg's values are very similar to the last two value concepts which Phillip C. Brooks propounded earlier in 1940.3 9 However, Brooks devoted more of his analysis to the actual life-cycle of records than to applying his appraisal values to the records. For Schellenberg, analyses and decisions about the value of the records were central to the.process of archival appraisal. His purpose was to provide justification for positing both evidential and informational values, practical techniques for applying
"tests" for each, and concrete guidelines for determining which records produced by an agency are most likely to pass such tests.
33 Schellenberg, "Appraisal," pp. 6-7.
39 Brooks, pp. 230-232. 88
The reasons for placing value in records providing
information on persons, things, and phenomena is indisputable simply by virtue of its comprehensiveness; the question that remains however is, which persons, things, and phenomena
should be documented by the archival record? Rather than answering this question directly, Schellenberg concentrated on the qualities and characteristics of records most likely to possess informational value, rather than the persons, things, or phenomena they document. He identified three
characteristics which may serve as tests for informational value: uniqueness, form, and importance. The tests of uniqueness and form refer both to the records themselves and to the information they contain. In other words, the tests
serve to determine the degree to which the information is unique and concentrated, and whether the records are physically duplicated or in a usable form and arrangement.'11
Determining the information value of records according to their uniqueness or form is a process which relies on fairly
straightforward standards of comparison. However, "in
applying the test of importance," Schellenberg admitted, "the
archivist is in the realm of the imponderable, for who can say
definitely if a given body of records is important, and for what purpose, and to whom?"*' Therefore, in dealing with the
informational value of records according to their importance,
Schellenberg simply resorted to the traditional assertions of
w Schellenberg, "Appraisal," pp. 22-2 5.
41 Schellenberg, "Appraisal," p. 25. 89
his predecessors that the research interests of present-day users and quasi-mythical, sentimental values of society (to justify, for instance, keeping letters bearing the signature of a famous historical figure) should serve as a guide.
Archivists, he contended, acquire insight into such interests and values through their own general knowledge, their contacts with researchers while providing reference services, and their consultations with various subject-matter specialists.^
The remainder of Schellenberg's analysis was an attempt to show how the tests for informational value could be applied to specific groups of public records relating to either persons, things, or phenomena. Schellenberg here concentrated on the types of records produced by modern-day federal governments in the United States: census data, personnel records, immigration records, records of civil registration, land titles, military or civil service records, and
investigation and regulatory records on industries and
corporations for information on persons; land records, geographical exploration records and surveys, architectural drawings and specifications, ship registries, and patent registries for information on things; economic and social statistics, records of various special federal government programs, and scientific records for information on phenomena.
In showing how informational values are applied to specific types of records, Schellenberg effectively illustrated various techniques of appraisal, some of which, particularly the
hl Schellenberg, "Appraisal," pp. 26-27. 90
application of statistical sampling, were highly innovative."-'
Yet, they remained techniques and examples which merely
illustrated the process of appraisal but did not define the
content of the value decision. By and large, Schellenberg's
attempts to define informational value in a concrete and usable form did not advance archival theory much beyond the
level already attained by his predecessors. The question of
the relative importance of the records and the information
they contain, a question which forms the very heart of the
problem of determining archival value, eluded him as it had
his predecessors.
Schellenberg was much more successful, and influential,
in developing his ideas on evidential value. This is mainly
because archival appraisers, in seeking out records of
evidential value, do not need to enter that "realm of the
imponderable" which they face when applying the test of
informational importance to an infinite universe of persons,
phenomena, or things. For in positing evidential value,
Schellenberg had already identified the person, phenomena, or
thing to be documented -- the structure and functioning of the
agency which produced the records -- and asserted its archival
importance above other elements. As such, the concept of
evidential value allowed Schellenberg to develop much more
concrete guidelines for applying this value to the records
than for the concept of informational value.
Schellenberg, "Appraisal," pp. 27-44. 91
Richard Stapleton, in his analysis of archival theories of Schellenberg, has clarified the nature of Schellenberg's idea of evidential value by extracting three basic rules from
Schellenberg's general explanation. The first rule is that those records which document the structure or organization of the agency should be preserved. These include records on the origins of the agency and organizational charts. The second rule is that those records which document the substantive functions of the agency should be preserved above those which document the facilitative. These include: summary narrative accounts such as annual reports and agency histories; records that establish policies and procedures such as minutes, regulations, or directives; research and investigative reports, correspondence and opinions on legal matters, summary budget documents, and publicity releases and material; and summaries or selections of records on the actual execution of agency policies and programs. The third rule is that those records produced by offices occupying the higher levels of the administrative hierarchy generally have more evidential value than those occupying the lower levels.'44
While the process of determining evidential value as outlined by Schellenberg provided archivists with a highly practical and seemingly objective method for undertaking appraisal, it also required a much more sophisticated
44 Richard Stapleton, "The Ideas of T.R. Schellenberg on the Appraisal, Arrangement, and Description of Archives," Master of Archival Studies Thesis, University of British Columbia 1985, pp. 67-69; Schellenberg, "Appraisal," pp. 13- 22 . 92
theoretical justification for positing it as an absolute value
in the first place. To this end, Schellenberg cited three
"reasons" for keeping records which document the structure and
function of the record-creating agency. First of all, the
original agency itself may require such records to help
establish administrative precedent, maintain administrative
continuity, and afford a measure of public accountability.
Secondly, such records are indispensable sources for
administrative historians and students of public
administration. Thirdly, applying the test of evidential value is a relatively "definite" and "objective" process for which appraisal decisions will vary only on the degree of
documentary completeness, not subject-matter. Fourthly, records of evidential value provide meaning to the records as
a whole and make them understandable to all researchers since
they represent a vital and often exclusive source of
information on the provenance of the records.*5
Another justification for positing evidential value relates to the relative impartiality of the information
preserved. Schellenberg originally claimed that his idea of
evidential value had nothing to do with the legal impartiality
of the evidence by virtue of it having been in the "unbroken
custody" of a person or agency, as propounded by the British
archivist Hilary Jenkinson. "The quality of the evidence per
se is thus not the issue here," Schellenberg explained, "but
5 Schellenberg, "Appraisal," pp. 7-9. "the character of the matter evidenced."1*6 In later writings on arrangement of archives, however, Schellenberg cited impartiality as an important component of evidential value:
Since they [the records] were created in consequence of the actions to which they related, they often contain an unconscious and therefore impartial record of the action . . . Records, however, also have a value for the evidence they contain of the actions that resulted in their production. . . These added values--values because of their production during action and their evidence of action--will be referred to as evidential values .H?
Here, Schellenberg seems to be combining value as impartial records with value as evidence of the functions and structures which produced the records under the single concept of evidential value. Although the connection between impartiality and evidence of original function advocated by this statement is obscure, Schellenberg may have been claiming that the original actions needed to be documented in order for the impartiality of the records to be preserved: if the information contained in the records is to be understood as information produced by agents unconscious of later archival uses, the functions and structures which formed the context of that production must also be documented.
It is difficult to underestimate the influence of
Schellenberg1s ideas on appraisal on archival science not only in North America, but world-wide. Perhaps the best
Schellenberg, "Appraisal," p. 7.
H" Schellenberg, "Archival Principles of Arrangement," American Archivist 28 (1965),.39-41. 94
illustration of the extent of this influence is that the terms
"informational" and "evidential" value become almost synonymous with the concept of archival appraisal itself in the professional archival terminology: the terms form separate entries in the basic glossary prepared by American archivists in 1974 and in the dictionary of archival terminology produced by the International Council on Archives in 19 84.*° Until recently, North American archivists, and government archivists in particular, have generally accepted and used Schellenberg's analysis and guidelines, especially those relating to evidential value, since they seemed to offer a workable conceptual approach to a extremely complex and. pressing problem.
Schellenberg's value concepts, and the methods he outlined for applying them, complemented the life-cycle management systems for the control of records which were being put in place in many government archives. It is perhaps because of this that his twofold theory found such a wide reception. From this perspective, it was the process
Schellenberg described which was most influential rather than his identification of what constitutes valuable archival material. His "values" were more categories for analyzing records in a life-cycle process of disposition than statements of value. First of all, the strict delineation between primary and secondary values were clearly formulated to serve
*8 Evans, pp. 422, 424; Peter Walne, ed, Dictionary of Archival Terminology (Miinchen: K.G. Saur, 1984), pp. 70, 92. 95
a management process which requires separate administrative personnel, procedures, and facilities for records as they are used by officials of the record-creating agency and for the records as they are used later by researchers in archives.
Secondly, the concept of evidential value, while clearly defined, singles out the structure and functions of the record-creating agency as something of special significance, mainly because it helps to document the administrative life- cycle of the records as well. Thirdly, concept of informational value, which does deal with reality outside of the workings of the original agency and the life-cycle management process, necessarily requires a definition of the relative importance of the person, place, or thing which is to be documented, and insofar as Schellenberg failed to offer such a definition, the concept remains too vague and general to be very useful.
The period beginning within the establishment of the
National Archives in 19 34 and culminating with the publication of Schellenberg's theory in 1956 was a period of intense, almost urgent activity in the area of archival appraisal. The
1960s and 1970s, by contrast, witnessed a veritable dearth of new appraisal concepts within the North American archival community. It is difficult to assess whether this indicates that archivists in the United States and Canada were satisfied with or simply indifferent to the twofold concept of evidential and informational values systematically applied during stages in a life-cycle process of records disposition 96
as developed by Schellenberg and his colleagues at the
National Archives. The ideas on appraisal which were advanced during this period tended, if anything, to erode the strict dichotomies between primary and secondary values and evidential and informational values.
Thornton W. Mitchell, in his 1970 article on appraisal, was mildly critical of what he viewed as the history-oriented, overly rigid nature of Schellenberg's concept of secondary value. Mitchell suggested that archivists should be more aware of the total documentation produced by the record- creating agency, the structure and operations of the agency, and the form and volume of the records before making an appraisal decision and warned against establishing theoretical generalizations about value, maintaining that "it is preferable to evaluate records on the basis of their own merits." His was "a pragmatic approach to appraisal that has as its goal a clean-cut decision about the records appraised.
Records cannot be measured in degrees of value, and decisions about their retention cannot be made by balancing one type of value against another."*' Mitchell was in effect advocating a return to the practical concerns of ensuring an efficient appraisal decision process operating at all points in the life-cycle at the expense of general, defined appraisal values applied at various stages.
^ Thornton W. Mitchell, "New Viewpoints on Establishing Permanent-Values of State Archives," American Archivist 3 3 (1970), 163-174. 97
The first major manual on appraisal to appear after
Schellenberg was written by Maynard Brichford in 1977 as part of the Society of American Archivists' Basic Manual Series.
Like his predecessors, he viewed appraisal as a process involving research and analysis of the records, the successive consideration of certain values, and the application of various techniques. __In Brichford's appraisal process, the characteristics of the records must first be defined. Besides age, volume, form, and function, Brichford considered
Schellenberg's concepts of evidential and information value to be characteristics of records to which no value was necessarily attached. Brichford's appraisal values were based rather on the needs and considerations of potential users and keepers of the records: administrative value derives from the usefullness of the records for continuing administrative activities; research value depends on the documentary quality of the records for researchers other than the original administration; and archival value is determined by comparing the previous values with the cost to the archival institution to process and preserve the records.50 This last value criterion reintroduced Phillip Bauer's 1946 proposal that archives must balance the value of records with the costs incurred to keep them. Altogether, Brichford concentrated on describing an appraisal process combining a number of factors of which the application of values is merely one. The
50 Maynard J. Brichford, Archives and Manuscripts: Appraisal and Accessioning (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 197 7), pp. 2-10.' 98
technical thoroughness and consistency used by archivists in this process was as important as the values used to make appraisal decisions.
Although it relates more to technique than value concepts, the development of sampling as an archival appraisal method serves to illustrate further how American archivists attempted to solve the problem of archival value by allowing a systematic, controlled process to make the decisions for them.
However, as with other methods employed to help reduce the size of records through management systems of disposition, sampling still needed to be carried out for a stated purpose, and this once again begged the question of archival value.
Sampling is a method used by social scientists to select and analyze research data, but it has many different variations depending upon the nature of the data and the type of research inquiry. Archivists at the National Archives had already in 1947 implemented a kind of sampling technique to select Rural Rehabilitation records based on a geographic classification developed previously by the Bureau of
Agricultural Economics.31 However, this single case study did little to advance archivists' understanding of the methodology and theory of sampling as an archival appraisal tool.
Paul Lewinson offered the first comprehensive explanation of the use of sampling techniques for archival appraisal in a
1957 article. He defined archival sampling in government
51 Kulsrud, Carl J., "Sampling Rural Rehabilitation Records for Transfer to the National Archives," AmejrjLcan Archivist 10 (1947), 328-334. 99
archives as "the selection of some part of a body of homogeneous records, so that some aspect of the Government's work or the information received or developed by the
Government may be represented or illustrated thereby" and distinguished this from "commercial sampling," which is solely concerned with revealing that which is typical of the whole, and "statistical sampling" which requires a measure of reliability not possible in archival sampling.01- Lewinson viewed sampling of archival material, therefore, as a unique process carried out for the unique documentary requirements of archives.
To be sure, methods of random selection to reveal the typical and standards of reliability are important considerations in archival sampling, but Lewinson insisted that it must first be decided what previously-defined archival values such a sample will serve. Schellenberg's concept of evidential and informational values provided him with the necessary criteria for judging whether sampling is appropriate: he suggested that, in order to preserve records of evidential value, a random sample conforming to statistical standards of size and probability would be most effective since it would serve to reveal typical aspects of the structure and function of the records-creating agency; in order to preserve records of informational value, a selected sample which conforms to preconceived standards of importance
j2 Paul Lewinson, "Archival Sampling," American Archivist 20 (1957), 292. 100
would be used to so that atypical or significant persons, things, or phenomena with which the agency dealt will be documented.53 Whether this suggestion effectively followed an acceptable value criteria could be open to debate, but
Lewinson made it clear that the sampling process in itself could not provide an objective method for selecting records, even if "all the physical requirements are met; in the end, the sample can only serve a specific documentary purpose which the archivist has determined to be valuable:
The archivist must bear in mind that there is no such thing as a demonstrably universal sample that would serve all conceivable research purposes within a given universe. The overall appropriateness, the refinement, and the reliability of a sample arise out of the particular research problem that the sample is to illuminate.5*
Eleanor McKay's more recent discussion of random sampling as an appraisal tool reflected the general shift emphasis in appraisal practice of the 1960s and 1970 away from
Schellenberg's large conceptual framework based on evidential and informational values towards a more flexible, case-by-case process. However, the issue of archival value criteria remained a large factor in determining the success of a sampling project. McKay used the example of bulky and homogeneous series of U.S. congressmen's and senator's records to illustrate how a random sampling method could be applied to archival material. She pointed out, in agreement with
Lewinson, 299-310.
Lewinson, 312. 101
Lewinson, that, while a selective sample preserves atypical and significant files in such a series, the random sample retains a small, typical portion of the series. However, she did not appeal to the categories of evidential or informational value to justify the decision to sample and the preferred technique; rather, she relied on the opinions of political scientists and historians engaged in quantitative research to determine whether random sampling of such series would best serve their research interests. In this way, McKay appealed to the values of specific fields and methodology of quantitative research, which represents only one means of interpreting social science data, to justify the her appraisal of the records; the random sampling process could not in and of itself provide these values .55
In the end, the use of sampling techniques in archival appraisal provided American archivists with yet another possible method for reducing the size of records produced by modern government agencies. But, as with other appraisal and disposition management systems instituted to help control the amount of material entering archives, sampling methodology must still be directed towards a stated purpose and in the case of archives, this requires a preconceived idea of what is archivally valuable. The introduction of sampling techniques in archival administration after 1945 can therefore be viewed as one aspect of the general situation in American appraisal
55 Eleanor McKay, "Random Sampling Techniques: A Method of Reducing Large, Homogeneous Series in Congressional Papers," American Archivist 41 (1978), 281-28 9. 102
theory: archivists had analysed and defined the factors of a systematic management process for appraisal, but without accepted value standards, the ultimate objective of such a process, and its effectiveness as an appraisal tool, remained elusive.
The history of archives after 1930 is dominated by the question of archival appraisal. Revolutionary changes in the volume, quality, and use of documentary records forced archivists to abandon the passive, intuitive approach in acquiring and disposing of material which had been based upon traditional assumptions about the provenance and structure of records. American archivists, because of the late development of large government archives in the U.S., felt the effects of these developments perhaps more immediately and with more force than their European colleagues. In response, they formulated concepts and techniques which provided archivists with a systematic management framework for becoming active appraisers of records in order to reduce the volume and increase the quality of material entering archival repositories. The life-cycle concept of records and the systems of records management which were implemented to serve this concept allowed both record-creating and ax-chival agencies to gain a measure of administrative and intellectual control over the vast and complex body of records generated by modern organizations.
These management processes, however, also required archivists to make overt decisions about what is of archival 10 3
value and what is not, and American archivists were much less successful in their efforts to develop value criteria for these decisions. Appeals to the needs of present-day historical researchers and the historical experience of archivists to help interpret these needs for the future merely echoed the ideas of nineteenth-century archivists: it was already clear in 193 0 that important changes had taken place
in historiography and historical methodology since the turn of the century. T. R. Schellenberg's concept of evidential and informational values was the most sophisticated of the
American efforts in this area, but while such value categories complemented the life-cycle process of disposition in the way they are to be applied, they were too vague and too much tied
into an administrative process to be useful: the concept of informational value, which relates to records as they document persons, things, or phenomena with which the record-creating agency dealt, relies on a definition of the relative significance of such persons, things, or phenomena, and
Schellenberg failed to provide this definition; the concept of evidential value, which relates to records as they document the structure and functioning of the record-creating agency, relies on the assumption that the history of the record-
creating agency as revealed in its own records is of special
significance, and this implied a bias towards the values and
concerns of administrative structures. In the end, American
archivists seemed to put their faith in a managed and
systemtic process of appraisal and trusted that, through the 10
workings of this process, the necessary value decisions could be made. 105
CHAPTER IV
ARCHIVAL APPRAISAL AS A MANAGEMENT FUNCTION, 1930-1980: GREAT BRITAIN, FRANCE, AND GERMANY
As archivists in the United States were developing comprehensive systems for managing the appraisal of public records, European archivists were making great strides toward constructing their own system of controlled archival disposition. The crisis brought about by the immense increase in the volume of record production, and the diversification of subject matter and quality of information such records contained was felt no less acutely by European archives. But, while the Americans worked to fill a vacuum left by years of official neglect, archivists in Britain, France, and Germany chose to incorporate of aspects of their own record-keeping traditions into new appraisal systems to establish truly unique approaches and concepts of archival value.
Much of the tradition of modern archival administration in Great Britain, and the ways in which British archivists dealt with the problem of record volume, had been defined by
Hilary Jenkinson in the 1920s and 1930s. As has been shown,1
Jenkinson contended that, in order to preserve the impartiality of archives as historical evidence, the archivist should leave any appraisal of records to the original record-
' see above, pp. 54-59. 106
creators. American archivists, and especially Schellenberg, rejected this vision of quiescent and disinterested archivists receiving and keeping whatever forces and decisions in society had deemed should be transferred to their custody. Records management and value analysis for the conscious appraisal of records in archives were important concepts in Schellenberg's
1956 manual Modern Archives, and Jenkinson's comments in a review of the manual revealed the serious differences between the two approaches:
To make the fact that Archives have been subject to selection of this kind an essential part of Archive quality is to make the sad conclusion that our generation is bringing Archives a long step nearer to the status of those artificial "Collections" to which which Dr. Schellenberg . . . assigns, in agreement with me, an inferior quality as evidence; and that in doing so it surrenders
one of the most valuable of m archive characteristics--their impartiality.t
Jenkinson's concerns followed the traditional view that every aspect of the form of archives directly reflected their provenance, and hence their meaning; the American approach was based on the assumption that the organization and composition of archives needed to be analyzed and controlled by archivists or else they would reflect nothing but chaos. This issue of
appraisal remained the central focus of disagreement between
Jenkinson and Schellenberg throughout their careers."
2 Jenkinson, "Modern Archives: Some Reflections on T.R. Schellenberg," in Selected Writings, p. 341.
3 For a general comparison of the ideas of Jenkinson and Schellenberg, see Richard Stapleton, "Jenkinson and Schellenberg: A Comparison," Archivaria 17 (Winter 1983-84), pp. 75-8 5. 107
In spite of Jenkinson's immense influence on British archival theory and practice, the pressures exerted by wartime demands for economy and efficiency began to erode the British profession's strict adherence to his principles. In 1943, the
British Records Association, in an effort to meet part of the urgent wartime need for paper salvage, issued a pamphlet which for the first time defined appraisal principles for British archivists. Besides the value that records hold for the agency that produced them, which Jenkinson regarded as the sole criterion for records disposal, the pamphlet also recognized three "historical or general uses" of records: 1) to document the history of the agency, 2) to document unique and important technical methods and operations, 3) to meet the demands of present and future researchers for any information incidentally or accidentally preserved in the records. The first use corresponded roughly with the usefulness of the records for the original agency, and so in practical terms did not conflict with Jenkinson's "golden rule for archive making." The second and third uses, however, required the application of value judgements beyond those of the original records creators. For identifying these uses, however, the pamphlet merely offered guidelines for eliminating routine and duplicate information.* But, in spite of its shortcomings, this document did encourage archivists to engage in conscious
* Great Britain. Public Record Office, Principles governing the Elimination or Ephemeral or Unimportant Documents in Public or Private Archives (London, undated), as outlined in Schellenberg, Modern Archives, pp. 137-139. 108
analysis of the value of records for other than the original purposes for which they were created.
Much more momentous for the development of an appraisal
system on the scale of the American efforts, "an event of central importance to archives and records management in
Britain and elsewhere," as Michael Cook described it,"J was the
1954 British Government report on departmental records
commonly known as the "Grigg Report" prepared by a committee under the chairmanship of Sir James Grigg.s The mandate of the committee was to review the policies and procedures of
British archives in their efforts to preserve departmental records (as opposed to just legal records), and this placed the report in the line of a long series of reports on archives which appeared throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. But in addition, and in keeping with the post-
19305 revolution in growth and quality of information and the management systems devised to control this revolution, the
Grigg Report set out a detailed structure for the efficient
identification and disposition of archivally valuable material. The committee's conclusions, drawn from an in-depth
study of past and present practice, and the justifications put
forward for implementing various aspects of their report, revealed rather unique concepts of archival value.
5 Michael Cook, Archives Administration (Folkstone, Kent: Dawson, 1977), p. 63.
6 Great Britain, Parliament, Committee on Departmental Records, Report, Cmd. 9163 (London: HMSO, 1954) [hereafter cited as the Grigg Report]. 109
As was evident by the selection policies adopted during the war, the practical problems involved in trying to control the vast build-up of modern departmental records had eroded the effectiveness of traditional practices and the concept of the archivist as passive recipient. The Grigg Report confirmed the inadequacy of the these practices and concepts. While judgements about the value of records to the originating departments could be made by the departments themselves, judgements about historical research value were much more difficult. As a result, both the departments, in compiling their destruction schedules, and the archivists, in reviewing the schedules before final approval by Parliament, had in practice avoided making any kind of appraisal decision at all, and the judgement was ultimately referred back to the departments at such a late date as to make even the task of determining administrative value difficult.7
The report viewed this situation to be mainly the consequence of administrative precedent established in 1845-46 whereby the Public Records Office serves as a storehouse for non-current records still under the custody of the departments, which invariably postponed making a selection for archival purposes in favour of current administrative tasks.3
But the report also recognized the force of traditional
British archival theory on appraisal and the fact that "the present Deputy Keeper of the Records [Jenkinson] once
7 Grigg Report, pp. 18-25.
8 see above, Chap I. re: 1845-46 agreement 110
expressed the view that archivists, like historians, should not be concerned in the selection of records for preservation
--a task which should be left to the administrators."?
Whatever the merits of such a theory, and the justification for such practices, the committee clearly viewed them to be inadequate to meet the demands of modern administration and historical research.
The committee proposed changes to the system of records disposition that were clear, precise, and no less than revolutionary. Essentially, the report recommended that judgements about administrative value and historical research value be made separately in two "reviews." In the first review, specially-trained departmental records officers, supervised by officials of the Public Record Department, make a selection of records based on the question "Is this
Department likely to require this paper any longer for its own
Departmental Purposes?", such purposes including the need to document administrative precedent and the structure and functions of the department. In the second review, departmental records officers, in conjunction with archival officials of the Public Records Department, make a selection, based again on the criterion of administrative value, of the records which survived the first review but also now using the criterion of whether they would be of value for the purposes of historical research. It was further required that the first review be undertaken no more than five years after the
9 Grigg Report, p. 22. Ill
records became non-current, and the second review, when the records are twenty-five years old.1"' In order to make this system of reviews as efficient and effective as possible, the report also offered guidelines for departmental records officers in the proper registration and classification of records, and methods for dealing with special types of records, such as "particular instance papers" [case files], photographs, films, and sound recordings.11
The theoretical grounds for this management system of appraisal rested on two basic assumptions. First of all, in setting the time periods for each review, the committee contended that accurate judgements about administrative value can only be made when the original functions which created the records are still operative or very recently discontinued, and that judgements about historical research value require the
"perspective" achieved only after a certain lapse of time.lc
To be sure, the first part of this contention makes a great deal of sense, since it would always be of an advantage to have the object of documentation, in this case the departmental programs, structure, and organisation with which the records dealt, as clear in the perception of the appraiser as possible. The second part suggests that, with the distance of time, one is able to better perceive the significance of certain actions, events, or people which may not have been
10 Grigg Report, pp. 28-38, 50-52.
11 Grigg Report, pp. 34-45, 55-58, 71-80.
12 Grigg Report," pp. 3 5, 38. 112
clear at or near to the time of the records' creation. This allows, for example, for the documentation of the genesis and/or continuity of events, phenomena, or programs which gained much greater importance with the passage of time, with lines of continuity extending into the future. However, in some degree the question of what is important is still not adequately addressed by this assumption, for time merely replaces the relative research values ascendent at the time the records were current with new, equally relative values.
The second assumption, while much simpler, rests on even shakier ground and, because of its expected application, is much more crucial to the whole system. Although the first review is to be undertaken by the departments themselves using only the criterion of administrative value, because some records were being destroyed before they could be judged.for their historical research value in the second review thex^e had to be an assurance that records judged to be of no administrative value and destroyed would not include any records of historical research value. The report put the problem in the following terms:
We consider that the solution to the problem must lie in the application of this [historical] criterion by indirect means. If the question to be answered by the Department's reviewing officer is put in the form, "Is this' paper likely to be of historical or legal importance, or to be useful for social or economic research?" it is difficult to see what the grounds for his answer can be; for he is unlikely to have had any experience to which he could possibly relate such a question. But if the question is put in the form, "Is this Department likely to require this paper any longer for 113
its own Departmental purposes?" it immediately becomes intelligible in terms of the experience gained by a Departmental Officer in the course of his normal work. Such a substitution can of course be justified only if the two forms of the question are in practice synonymous; that is, if the papers retained as a result of answering the question in its second form will in practice include those which would be retained if it were possible to give a correct answer to the question in its first form.''3
Subject to the provisos that "departmental purposes" take in administrative precedent and organizational history and that the review be undertaken very soon after the record has become inactive, the committee stated simply, "we believe that they will."
In many ways, the assertion that the needs and values of the administrators who created the records automatically take in the needs and values of historical researchers resembles the basic attitude of Jenkinson towards appraisal. This system still leaves the first and most crucial act of appraisal in the hands of the administrators, acting in their own interests, and Jenkinson himself insisted that the Grigg report guidelines were wholly consistent with his strongly held principle that the archivist remain outside of any appraisal process.14 However, with such an approach, Jenkinson was mainly concerned with preserving the impartial quality .....of the records; the architects of the Grigg system of reviews
3 Grigg Report, p. 29.
14 Jenkinson, "Roots," (1960) in Roger H. Ellis and Peter Walne, eds., Selected Writings of Sir Hilary Jenkinson (Gloucester: Alan Suton, 1980), p. 378. 114
were convinced that the first review would preserve records which by their informational c_o.nt.ent. were valuable for historical research purposes. This is an important distinction to make, since it exposes the obvious 'loopholes in
Grigg report's-assumption: the application of the values of the administrator does not guarantee that all information valuable for purposes of later historical researchers will be accommodated any more than the use of Schellenberg's evidential values will in all cases preserve documentation which is of informational value, and there is no logical reason why it should.
The first guide published by the Public Record Office in
1958 for use by Departmental Records Office at the first review confirms and clarifies the nature of the continuing problem of value inherent in the Grigg system. The guide states that the three values of archives, "a) to the
Government for administrative purposes, b) to the ordinary members of the public to supply information of practical value to them, c) to academic research workers," do not necessarily coincide.15 It then embarks on a comprehensive analysis of the nature and problems of applying these values, especially those relating to historical research, which explains why they cannot always coincide:
The information which the research worker requires may be found in a Department's records because the Department's work is directly concerned with the subject in which
15 Great Britain, Public Record Office, A Guide for Departmental Records Officers (HMSO, 1958), p. 31. 115
he is interested, or it may be found there fortuitously . . . The importance of the distinction ... is this: anyone familiar with a Department's work and history is in a position to select records which will be useful to the first type of research worker because he will share his view point . . . The same is not true of the second type of research worker. His sense of values is not the one shared by the Department, and it may be noted that he is likely to be the chief person to suffer under the procedure outlined in the Grigg report . . . Moreover, the interests of this type of research worker present a further difficulty in that they cannot be easily foreseen even by those familiar with current research work.15
The consequence of this problem was that effective responsibility for appraising records in the Grigg system began to shift almost immediately towards archivists in the
Public Record Office, whether that meant involving them at the first review or simply deferring appraisal to the second review. "Selection of material under this head [historical research value]," stated the 1958 guide, "will be very largely a task for the Inspecting Officer, who will be able to turn to colleagues in the Public Record Office for advice."'7
Revisions to.the guide for departmental record officers in
1962 and 1971 left out much of the analytical discussion of values, not because departmental administrators had gained the expertise to appraise records for research value without the use of guidelines, but because archivists at the Public Record
Office had taken over this task for them. By the mid-1970s, this shift had been completed, and Michael Cook could observe
16 Guide, p. 34.
17 Guide, p. 34. 116
in 197 7 that "it is no longer considered necessary to teach departmental record officers to recognize potential research value, since the inspecting officers, some of whom are now specialists in certain technical areas of knowledge, have in effect shouldered this burden. The establishment of research values has come into the professional area of the archivists. "i3
This process not only seriously contravened Jenkinsonian principles of impartiality, but in a practical way subverted the original assumptions of the Grigg report. Departmental record officers could no longer be counted upon to preserve all documents of archival value merely by applying the value of continuing administrative usefulness at the first review.
The Public Record Office was effectively given this task and became actively involved in identifying historical research values for all departmental records at both the first and second reviews. This revealed a practical acceptance of the idea, outlined already in the first guide for departmental record officers, that the preservation of records of historical research value was not ensured by implementing a strictly managed system which in essence merely imitates, albeit more efficiently, the "natural" process of selection by administrators that Jenkinson prescribed; this required judgements beyond the capacities of departmental administrators and the task of judging records for their research value in the end passed to archivists. As in the
18 Cook, p. 67. 117
United States, this managed system of selection made the process of appraisal more controlled and organized, but the appraisal process still lacked concrete value principles by which to make appraisal decisions.
Archives and archival institutions in France hold as rich and long a legacy as those of Great Britain, but the unique
French record-keeping tradition led to an approach to the management of the appraisal process which was more closely related to the American records management system. As French archival theorist Michel Duchein has pointed out, the archives produced by institutions in "Latin" countries (France, Spain, and Italy), in contrast to the records of "Germanic" countries
(Germany, The Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Britain), were not under the administrative control of separate registry offices during the period of their early use. The records-creating offices themselves produced, organized, and disposed of their records according to their own idiosyncratic methods and criteria.19 As a result, when the preservation and appraisal of all public records was made their responsibility through legislation in 1936, French archivists were faced with a mass of documents possessing a much less discrete and predictable form than the records of their Germanic colleagues. This held two consequences for the development of French approaches to the management of still-active records or pre-archivage: first of all, French archivists were much more inclined to construct
19 Michel Duchein, "Theoretical Principles and Practical Problems of Respect des Fonds in Archival Science," Archivaria 16 (Summer 1983), p. 77. 113
a theoretical continuum of use and value between current records and archives; and secondly, they were much more free to participate in the organization and appraisal of records at various stages of their use than their Western European counterparts.20 The ideas expressed by French archivists in their efforts to develop a management system of appraisal in the 1960s and 70s bear out these observations.
The national and departmental archives in France had become involved in pre-archivage in the 1950s when missionaires from the archives were assigned to various government ministries as consultants on the organization and disposition of their records.2* The nature and extent of their work, however, remained informal and lacking a theoretical direction. But in 1961, Yves Perotin, then Director of the
Archives of the Seine and the City of Paris, offered a theory of the nature and disposition of administrative archives based on an idea of the "three ages" of archives. Perotin contended, as had the American archivist Phillip Brooks in
1940, that records go through a life cycle beginning with creation, proceeding through use by the original agency, then a period of obsolescence, and culminating in disposal or permanent preservation in archives for use by historical researchers. He proposed a management system that allowed for
dU Alice Guillemain, "Les archives en formation et le pre- archivage: reflexions a propos d'un chapitre du 'Manuel d'archivistique,'" Gazette des Archives 71 (1970), 252.
21 James B. Rhoads, "New Archival Techniques," Archiyum 24 (1974), p. 86. 119
a controlled, managed stage of records disposition at the
"second age" between the "first age" of administrative use and custody and the "third age" of historical use and archival custody.22 This intermediary second stage provides an administrative framework for the preservation and disposition of records during a period when the declining curve of administrative value intersects with the ascending curve of historical research value. As Perotin explained, the coinciding interests of administrations and archives need to be accommodated by recognizing and implementing an administrative structure for dealing with records which have reached the second age:
We have seen that Administration at this stage often has the tendency not to recognize its offspring. It expels them prematurely from the home or houses them in garrets under deplorable conditions. Archival Services, on their part, hesitate at this stage to accept these papers, which--properly classified-- would still be of use to the bureaus, which cannot yet be made available to the public, which have not yet been screened, and which are therefore very cumbersome. It is in this state of abandonment that loss and damage occur. To get away from this situation some intermediate depositories should be created, grouping by large administrative areas everything that is beyond the immediate use of the bureaus and that is to be retained not far away.23
.Although the notion of the "three ages" of archives and the development of intermediate storage depots would seem to bring the interests of administrator and the archivist
22 Yves Perotin, "Administration and the 'Three Ages' of Archives," American Archivist 29, No. 3, 3 68.
Perotin, p. 3 69. 120
"together, in actuality the original administrative value and the later archival value of records remained completely separate and sometimes conflicting concerns in French archival science. As a result, French archivists expended most of their energies after 1960 in identifying who should have control over the record life-cycle rather than defining values by which records should be kept or destroyed.
In 1970, two prominent French archivists offered criticisms of the system of pre-archivage based on the notion of "three ages." Michel Duchein accepted the theory, but suggested that the intermediate stage be broken down into two separate stages administered by two separate institutions: the first, serving the continuing needs of administration for the records until such requirements are exhausted; the second, the criteria of archives for determining permanent historical value.24 Although he made no overt reference to it, Duchein's proposal resembles the system of two reviews implemented in
Great Britain following the 19 54 Grigg Report whereby the original agencies make the first selection according to their administrative needs and the values of historical research are only brought to bear later by archivists in a second review.
Duchein did insist, however, that the French archival tradition could not accommodate the American system of records management. He regarded American records managers as autonomous officials specializing in the disposition of
" Duchein, "Le pre-archivage: quelques clarifications necessaires," Gazette des Archives 71 (1970), 226-236. 121
records between administrations and archives. By strictly defining the responsibilities of the officials who created the records and archivists in the process of appraisal throughout the record life-cylce, Duchein hoped to avoid the emergence of another group of records administrators operating between them.z5
On the other hand, Alice Guillemain, herself a missionaire in the Ministry of Economics and Finance, contended that using idea of "three ages" as a model for managing the disposition of records placed archivists outside of the most important aspects of record-keeping and research.
She claimed that the French archivists who wrote the Manuel d'archivistiQue between 196 5 and 197 0 dealt with the acquisition and appraisal of records only from a nineteenth- century optique historique.2o She maintained that the three- stage system of disposition, with archivists becoming involved only after the records are no longer useful to the administration, failed to serve the new kinds of social science research which require more current information.
Guillemain also pointed out that advances in information technology necessitate archivists becoming involved in the appraisal and preservation of records much earlier in the process.i7
d5 Duchein, p. 236
Eo Guillemain, pp. 252-253.
27 Guillemain, pp. 253-258. "'2 2
The ideas of Perotin, Duchein, and Guillemain were confined to an analysis of the disposition process and the nature of management systems for making this process more efficient. Like their American and British colleagues, French archivists effectively avoided dealing with the conceptual and ethical problems inherent in defining concrete values for making appraisal decisions during the disposition process. In this way, the ideas of French archival scientists after 193 0 fit the pattern of development already established in other countries.
In Germany during this period, the problem of value concepts for archival appraisal elicited extensive theoretical as well as practical inquiries. German archival theorists, when writing about the subject of archival appraisal, were more inclined to address the theoretical, conceptual, and philosophical issues before proceeding towards a practical
solution, and, as a result, generated important and unique ideas of archival value.
In the 1930s, the German archival community found itself at a crucial point in its development. German archival
science at this time was based on an enduring tradition of archival theory and practice which had been formed in the nineteenth century. As explained in Chapter II, this traditional approach to appraisal relied upon the historical verstehen or intuition of the archivist in judging the value
of records. The operation of verstehen was best served if the records were arranged according to the principle of 123
provenance so that their organic integrity and original context are preserved. However, like other western European countries in this period, the volume and complexity of documents produced by German institutions, coupled with the release of large numbers of records previously kept by the ruling aristocratic elite before and during the First World
War, rendered such an intuitive, subjective approach to appraisal unworkable.28 On another level, as Hans Booms has pointed out, much of the faith of archivists and historians in the provenance-based, intuitive approach rested on a very positive, progressive, and Idealist vision of German society and the state, and it was this vision which was perhaps the most significant casualty of the war.29
German archivists attempted to make the process more efficient by identifying duplicate and ephemeral documents early on through the use of general guidelines which could be applied to large groups of records in individual departments, branches, or offices [Gruppengrundsatze]. This served, in
Adolf Brenneke's view, to make the organic unity and organization of the records clearer by freeing the essential
88 Wilheim Rohr, "Zur Problematik des modernen Aktenwesens," Archivalische Zeitschrift 54 (1958), p. 75.
29 Hans Booms, "Society and the Formation of a Documentary Heritage: Issues in the Appraisal of Archival Sources," ed. and trans. Hermina Joldersma and Richard Klumpenhouwer, Archivaria 24 (1987), p. 79. 124
body of archival documents of irrelevant material.-1'-' But such attempts at appraisal principles were not comprehensive and concrete enough to alleviate the major practical and conceptual problems faced by German archivists.
In response to the crisis, a commission was appointed in
19 3 6 to study and develop solutions to the problem of archival appraisal. Two members of the commission, Hermann Meinert and
Ernst Meisner, offered the results of their work at the German
Arch ives Conference in Gotha in 1939. The nature of the discussion at this conference clarified and, partly, determined the direction of future German archival theory on appraisal.
Both Meisner and Meinert rejected once and for all the traditional, intuitive principles of FijigerspJ^ as a method for appraising modern documents and urged a shift in approach from a negative analysis, which identifies the valueless, in favour of a positive analysis, which identifies the valuable. Meisner, building on the general guidelines developed by earlier colleagues, offered three categories for judging the value of documents: 1) age (using a cut-off date),
2) value of contents, and 3) relation of the documents to the original function of the agency which created them. These categories remained broad enough to allow for considerable leeway in making a value decision. Meinert agreed that the
J|J Adolf Brenneke, pp. 38-42; Artur Zechel, "Werttheorie und Kassation: Hermann Meinert zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet," Per Archivar 18 (February 1965), col. 3.; also discussed in Booms, p; 86. 125
value of records must always be determined in accordance with the value they hold for the record-creating office and the status of that office in comparison to other offices.
Meinert also expanded on Meisner's second criterion of determining value by the informational content of the records which, he contended, is "a valuating process, for which concrete value norms must be found." Meinert suggested that such norms or standards must be derived from society itself and therefore must serve to document three general areas of societal structure: the people [Volk], the state CStaat], and culture [Kuljtur].31
Although the ideas of Meisner and Meinert were too broad and preliminary for the purposes of developing practical appraisal standards for German archives, they set out the two main areas of concentration for future archival theory on appraisal. In the first area, archivists analyzed the relationship between the nature and status of record-creating organizations or individuals and the value of the records they create. In the second area, archivists examined ways in which to determine the value of documents based on the informational content of the records and the usefulness of this information to society in general.
The first efforts made towards developing a theory of appraisal in Germany after the Second World War did not take place until the thirty-fifth German Archives Conference in
Koblenz in 1957. At this conference, Wilheim Rohr, Georg
31 Zechel, col. 3; in Brenneke, p. 42. 126
Wilhelm Sante, and Fritz Zimmerman presented papers which examined the problem of appraisal extensively and offered solutions.
Georg Wilhelm Sante developed his ideas on appraisal based on the assumption that the aims and objectives of archivists are closely linked with those of the administration which produced the records. He attempted to show that throughout the nineteenth century, archives and administrations were working towards common goals and, because of this, and the fact that the production of records remained at a manageable level, the task of deciding which records should be preserved was not only shared, but also fairly straightforward and unproblematic. Then, beginning in the late nineteenth century, both the functions and record- creating activities of institutions began to expand. The consequence of this, of course, was that administrations were losing intellectual control of their own records and thus neglecting to weed out ephemeral material from their records.
At the same time, as historians and historical scholarship began to dominate the work of German archivists, archival institutions were becoming increasingly alienated from contemporary administrations: the historian/archivists of this period concentrated their efforts on acquiring and studying medieval records while the modern record-creating institutions merely stockpiled the growing volume of records in their own registries. As a result, archivists realized too late that they were actually falling hopelessly behind in their work and 127
when these stockpiled records were transferred to archives en m.S_s.s_e._after 1918, archivists were ill-prepared to deal with them. From this analysis, Sante concluded that the key to solving the problem of appraising modern archival records must
lie in the relationship between archives and administrations.^
In light of these observations, Sante offered four propositions upon which a comprehensive appraisal policy
should be based. First of all, he rejected the traditional view that all the records of all agencies within a given
archival jurisdiction are necessarily worthy of preservation.
Instead, the archivist must determine the relative importance
of the agencies themselves in comparison with the whole
structure. "Only those agencies will be chosen," Sante proposed, "which are of greater significance, which form the
supporting framework of the administration, so to speak, and not just the mere stuffing, and which set themselves apart by their creative activity. Only such agencies are valuable for
archival purposes and will be called upon to submit their records.""3 The second proposition, that only the most
important divisions within the agencies are worthy of
documentation, merely followed the logic of the first.
Sante's third condition introduced the concept of
administering records according to length of time a record retains its value. He contended that only those records which
33 Georg Wilheim Sante, "Behorden -- Akten -- Archive: Alte Taktik und neue Strategie," Archivalische Zeitschrift 54 (1958), pp. 91-93.
33 Sante, p. 93. 128
have an enduring value should be admitted into the archives and that all records which must be kept only for a limited time for the use of the agency, even if this is a relatively long time period, must remain the responsibility of the agency.^
Fourthly, Sante questioned the traditional notion that the jurisdiction of a given archives is limited to a single, and often a government, institution. Instead, archival acquisition and appraisal activity must be expanded to take in all important private institutions in society as well. It could no longer be asserted, he insisted, that the records of the state institutions are sufficient to document society as a whole. At the same time, Sante did not think that central or state archives should necessarily take over the administration of private records, but rather should encourage and direct private institutions to preserve their own records. He used the example of eastern European archives to point out that extensive state control over economic and social life of the nation actually exacerbates the problem of appraisal since it results in even higher numbers of records being produced due to the extensive bureaucratic structure of inspection and regulation which such a system requires. -J
In the end, Sante wished to restore the close association between archives and records-creating administrations to allow a more informed and systematic selection of records based on
3h Sante, pp. 93-94.
35 Sante', pp. 94-95. 129
the function of these administrations. He urged archivists to venture out beyond their narrow historical interests and study the function and structure of administrations. In this way, systems could be implemented whereby "the flood [of records]
. . . could be intercepted right at its source and channeled into canals which partially bypass the archives."36 As such,
Sante was clearly a member of that school of German appraisal theory which linked the value of archives with their provenance or administrative context.
Sante set out directions for German archivists involved in developing appraisal .standards, but did not himself offer any specific criteria for judging the relative importance of the agencies producing archival records. Sante's colleague
Wilhelm Rohr, however, offered more detailed guidelines for the application of at least the first two of Sante's propositions. He simply rated the value of records produced by, for example, the federal government according to the status of the department, division, or office within the hierarchy of administration.37 In this way, the value which a certain agency or function holds for the institution as a whole serves to determine the archival value of the records it produces.
Sante and Rohr's colleague at the 1957 conference, Fritz
Zimmerman, accepted the validity of their scientific methods for provenance-based appraisal but saw a greater need to
36 Sante, p. 95.
37 Rohr, pp. 79-80. 130
develop values according to the informational content of the records. He contended that appraisal based on the age of the material or on the structure and function of the record- creating agency is essentially still a negative appraisal. A truly positive statement of values is only possible, Zimmerman claimed, when the value of the content of records is compared with the needs and values of society in general: "The value of a document depends upon the principle of whether it possesses an enduring significance for us."'30' Zimmerman therefore viewed archival value as determined not just by the agencies which created them, according to their own structural and functional characteristics, but first of all by the needs and activities of the society as a whole in which the record-creating agency operates.
Within the concept of archival value, Zimmerman distinguished between two kinds: "general values" which apply to all archivally valuable records; and "graded values" by which records are ranked on a kind of value scale. General values are determined on the simplest level by "outer" physical and economic factors such as physical material, aesthetic worth, rarity, or antiquarian interest. The "inner" factors of general value are determined by the informational content of the records.-7 It is this "inner" value which is
-8 Fritz Zimmerman, "Wesen und Ermittlung des Archivwertes: Zur Theorie einer archivalischen Wertlehres," Archivalische Zeitschrift 54 (1958), pp. 104-107 [my translation].
J7 Zimmerman, pp. 108-110. 131
the key to Zimmerman's concept of appraisal and it is best explained in his own words:
In the practical application of inner archival value, the archivist must always ask himself which significant areas of life within the pertinent records will continue to provide answers to future inquiries.4''
The obvious problem with this approach, as Zimmerman also recognized, is that it requires the archivist to make predictions about future use. But he also pointed out that the future is not completely "an unwritten page, for the present has already left its mark on it. The future has already begun in the present."4. With this philosophy,
Zimmerman set out to develop methods for attaining at least partial knowledge of future archival value.
Zimmerman first of all claimed that archivists can gain insight into possible future uses of records by determining how the material was used by researchers in the past. By keeping statistics which show which records are being used the most and for what research purposes, archivists are made aware of the records that are most important for present-day research. Since future research trends must necessarily build on the work of present-day archival researchers, Zimmerman suggested that such statistics, analyzed over a period of years, would indicate which records will most likely be used extensively in the future.4d
4'J Zimmerman, p. 110 [my translation].
41 Zimmerman, p. 110 [my translation].
42 Zimmerman, pp. 110-111. Zimmerman of course realized that the criterion of research use cannot alone serve as an appraisal criterion since any number of social, academic, or technical factors could cause researchers to concentrate on certain types of archival material while virtually ignoring other potentially valuable records. Because of this, archivists must develop archival appraisal values independent from and supplementary to those suggested by researcher use, and Zimmerman identified two kinds: those based on "practical interests" and those based on "ideal interests."
By "practical interests," Zimmerman meant simply the present-day and future usefulness for administrative, legal, or technical purposes. Archivists must therefore be aware of the documentary value of records as evidence for ongoing legal matters, for ongoing administrative activity, and for certain technical projects and processes which are still being developed. In order to determine what these practical interests are, archivists must work closely with administrators, legislators, and technicians.1*"
In positing an archival value based on "ideal interests,"
Zimmerman wished to balance the interests of the state in preserving records with the research interests of society as a whole. To accomplish this, he suggested that a kind of commission be formed which-represents the various areas of scholarship, such as history, sociology, art, literature, theology, jurisprudence, economics, geography, medicine, and
*3 Zimmerman, pp. 112-113. engineering. Such a commission would allow spokespersons for
"public interests" an opportunity to make a case for preserving records essential to their important intellectual research. With a clearer understanding of the needs of scholarship in the theoretical and artistic disciplines, archivists could, over a period of time, develop an insight into which records will be needed to serve such researchers in the future.^
Zimmerman went on further to attempt to posit a "graded archival value" by which to rank the value of records according to a relative scale. Here he was following the methodology of Sante and Rohr in trying to identify and express archival values using a comparative approach.
However, he disagreed significantly with his colleagues in that he did not regard the provenance value of the records, that is, the status of the records-creating agency within the overall administrative structure, as the key determinant. He regarded the kind of value scale which places the records of higher administrative offices above those at the lower echelons as serving mainly the interests of traditional political and military history. Rather, the value of documents should be judged according to the importance of the information they carry. Consequently, records that are related to important historical events and provide new information on important people or interesting phenomena are higher on the scale of archival value than those which
44 Zimmerman, pp. 114-116. 134
document the everyday, the obvious, and the repetitive.
Furthermore, archivists must designate the types of records which are more likely to carry valuable information, distinguishing for instance between "general files" and "case files. "*5
Zimmerman's concept of appraisal was based on an analysis of the value of the informational content of records for research purposes. His ideas departed radically from theories of appraisal based on the analysis of the administrative functions and structures which created the records. However, while his ideas swept away the relatively concrete and
comprehensive categories of provenance-based appraisal, theyv failed to replace these categories with usable value criteria.
Zimmerman viewed theories such as Sante's as "too schematic" and presented his own ideas merely as an approach from which value criteria could possibly develop.*0 In effect, Zimmerman shifted the source for determining archival value away from the relatively formal and stable environment of administrative structures towards the complex and ever-changing forum of societal activity in general, with the research community serving as a kind of interpreter.
In the 1960s, the German archival theorists who tackled the problem of appraisal seemed to opt for the provenance- based approach. One of the most sophisticated and thorough of these theorists was Johannes Papritz, who attempted to develop
45 Zimmerman, pp. 116-118.
*° Zimmerman, p. 103. 135
a practical and systematic method of appraisal according to the form and structure of the records themselves. He insisted that one cannot do appraisal without first of all ascertaining the volume and form of the material and studying the record
"body" as a whole organism. This meant that selection criteria must be developed for each different identifiable record form and with an understanding of its relationship to the whole record body.4' Papritz then went on to present a detailed history of the German registry system with an analysis of the types of records series and files built up and kept by organizations from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and the descriptive and indexing system used for retrieval. In his analysis, he described the process of appraisal as essentially a component of the process of arrangement and description.43
Papritz1s concept of appraisal was nothing more than a sophisticated and systematic application of the
Registraturprinzip as an appraisal tool. As such, it was an attempt to bring concrete theory to the traditional ideas of provenance-based appraisal advocated by the German archivists of the nineteenth century and developed further by others such as Adolf Brenneke. In the end, Papritz could offer only a methodology for studying the form and structure of records with the implication that selection criteria would naturally
4" Johannes Papritz, "Methodik der archivischen Auslese und Kassation bei zwei Strukturtypen der Massenakten," Der Archivar. 18, No. 2 (1965 ), cols. 117-118
48 Papritz, cols. 119-126. 1
flow from this process. His only reference to general
archival values was an observation of the broad criteria used
by archivists when applying this methodology, namely, that
archivists tend to seek out, on the one hand, "the special, meaningful, important, unique, and striking," and, on the
other hand, "the typical." Papritz explained how the proper
use of sampling techniques on types of records which document
repetitive and homogeneous activities could provide a
practical and effective appraisal technique for the second
category of records.*v
The most comprehensive, incisive, and influential
theoretical analysis advocating the informational content
approach to appraisal was delivered by Hans Booms, President
of the Bundesarchiv, at the German Archives Conference in
Dortmund in 1971. Initially conceived as a critique of
Marxist-Leninist archival theories on appraisal as practised
in the German Democratic Republic, Booms' presentation was in
fact a thoroughgoing, critical discussion of the role of
archives as sources of historical documentary evidence, the
nature of the society which archivists seek to document, the
development of German appraisal theory, and alternative
appraisal methods.
Booms chose to place his analysis of archival appraisal
within the widest possible context and so began with a
discussion of what he considered to be the two main elements
in any consideration of value concepts in appraisal theory:
*9 Papritz, col. 12 7. / 137
"society" and "the formation of a documentary heritage." Ke suggested that, although individuals exercise a degree of independent judgement,
it is not only more meaningful, but actually essential, to view the activity of the archivist in relationship to the societal order, since it seems clear that there exists an indissoluble connection between the values held by society and those held by the individual.50
The archivist, too, participates as a member of society, conforms to the basic values held by that society (as varied and sometimes contradictory as they may be), and is ultimately responsible to society for the work that he or she does. In
serving to form the documentary heritage through the process of appraisal, archivists are expected to transform the complex mass of documentary evidence produced by individuals and
institutions into a coherent, usable, and, above all, objectively-formed documentary source from which to realize an accurate historical image of society.5' From these observations, Booms concluded that it is the social responsibility of archivists to give account of their appraisal decisions to practitioners of historical research in terms which are as clear and objective as possible:
It is up to historians, not archivists, to revise the critical methods of historical scholarship so that the "ideological relativity of the documentation" can be identified and controlled. But it is the task, if not the societal duty, of the archivist to provide the required
Booms, p. 75.
Booms, pp. 75-81. preconditions for such a reassessment of historical methodology. Due to the scientific nature of historical enterprise, the historian has a right, in turn based on the historian's responsibility to society, to an archival documentary record that has been systematically created following principles grounded in archival theory. Therefore, archivists must objectify their notions of archival value and formulate their value coordinates so that their contribution as a constitutive element of the documentary heritage can be measured and controlled.—
Having discussed and clarified the social significance and responsibilities attached to the function of archival appraisal, Booms went on to examine the process of determining archival value itself. He first of all noted that archival value cannot be posited as an absolute; in other words, the value of something can only be established comparatively in relation to something else. Following this logic, the value of documentary records cannot be identified as an absolute characteristic of the records themselves; rather, they "become valuable only when the archivist accords them value during the appraisal process." Therefore, Booms insisted that the value of documents can only be established with reference to things, phenomena, and concepts which have already been designated as valuable. This comparative process then allows archivists to recognize and define comprehensive and concrete "value coordinates" for their work.5j
Next, with the stated intention of determining whether such value coordinates had in fact been identified, Booms
Booms, p. 81.
Booms, p. 82. 139
completed an extensive review of the history of appraisal theory in Germany since the nineteenth century. It was in fact a devastating critique of former and prevailing appraisal methods concluding with the assertion that German archival science had failed to solve the problem of archival value as he defined it.
Booms showed how the initial belief of German archivists in intuitive knowledge or verstehen crumbled in the face of the philosophical crisis of scepticism and the practical crisis of record volume which followed the collapse of the
German Empire in World War I. The response of archivists to this crisis was to expand the archival arrangement principle of provenance [Provenienzprinzip] into a principle of archival appraisal while vehemently denouncing any application of a principle based on subject matter [Pertinenzprinzip]), especially in appraisal, since it presented a complex mass of phenomena seemingly lacking in any prescribed order of value:
Faced with the task of appraising documents under these conditions, archivists saw themselves pinned between the Scylla of a naive and troubled faith in intuition on the one hand, and the Charvbdis of an archival world devoid of principles of value on the other. In response, they sought refuge in structural and functional criteria. A disposal process based on the Proy_ejnie_nzp^^ obscured the need for concrete value concepts in the appraisal process. This situation persisted as long as society continued to sanction the overestimation of government institutions at the expense of more informal institutions of society.Jl*
Booms, p. 88. 140
Therefore, when the values of society change so that the workings of state institutions are no longer considered to be the only activity in society worthy of documentation, as has occurred in recent decades, or when the size, structure, and administrative values of record-producing agencies themselves change, the basic justification for a comprehensive appraisal theory using a provenance-based value system must come into question as well. For these reasons, Booms concluded that
Sante, Rohr, and Papritz, who advocated appraisal values based upon an analysis of the structure and functions of the record- creating administrations and their registry systems, were ultimately "unsuccessful in their efforts to develop comprehensive and, at the same time, concrete criteria for archival appraisal."55 In addition, Booms showed how the appraisal theories of archivists in communist countries were faulty for precisely the same reasons, in spite of their claims that Marxist-Leninism provided them with an absolute system for determining archival value: concrete value principles reflecting the broad commitment to documenting the historical process of dialectical materialism could not be defined in any practical way and in the end, like their capitalist colleagues, eastern European archivists turned to provenance-based appraisal systems.56
Booms also discussed the ideas of those German archivists who had attempted to develop appraisal criteria based on an
55 Booms, pp. 88-91.
5i Booms, pp. 94-100. 141
analysis of the informational content of the records themselves. He acknowledged the important contribution of
Hermann Meinert in precipitating a "Copernican revolution" in archival appraisal by advocating the use of positive, content- oriented standards for identifying archival value. But
Meinert's principles of Volk. Staat. and Kulture were much too broad and ill-defined to serve as practical standards for appraisal. By the 1950s, Booms observed, Meinert was proclaiming that the goal of defining useable value standards was unachievable and reverted to the old faith in the intuitive abilities of experienced archivists.5' In the same way, Booms commended Fritz Zimmerman for pointing out the faults of the provenance-based appraisal theories, but declared Zimmerman's theory, based on the present and future needs of researchers, as even less satisfactory. According to
Booms, Zimmerman's preoccupation with the future needs of historians as a value criterion was an extension of the
"historical theology" of the German Idealist tradition which dominated archival science in the nineteenth century. The efforts of Zimmerman, like those of his earlier archival colleagues, "to form the archival documentary heritage of the present from evidence of the past using value standards of the future necessarily end in speculation, especially since the basic conditions of human existence fog our perception of the future. "-s
57 Booms, p. 93.
58 Booms, pp. 91-92. Booms' systematic rejection of earlier German ideas served to clear the ground and set the stage for his own attempt at an appraisal theory. In developing his ideas,
Booms' basic premise was that "we should no longer seek to derive necessary and useful principles for appraisal from analyses of function; we should strive, rather, to take them directly from the social process to which we are responsible."59 For this to be done, it is first of all necessary to make an empirical examination of the societal process itself. What is more, this examination or analysis must not be made using a "predetermined ideological scheme" such as Marxism or Liberalism, but should seek to reveal and use the value relationships predominant in the societal structure which is being examined. The problem with this approach, of course, is that society is so complex and changing that it seems to possess no inner interpretive and relational structure; archivists are therefore left with a source from which to derive their appraisal values that seems to transcend definition. As Booms observed,
The archivist must decide which specific events and development patterns should be preserved in documents, yet the value of such events and patterns can only be determined when the archivist has attained- a comprehensive view of the total societal development process and an interpretation of the way all of society has actually developed.^
59 Booms, p. 101.
60 Booms, p. 103. 143
While Booms could not claim to have found an comprehensive, objective interpretive framework for judging the value of societal structures, he did offer some means for achieving a fairly reliable method of linking societal value with appraisal value. First of all, he suggested that a social sciences methodology, whereby smaller units and structures are studied individually and then pieced together to form larger patterns, could serve such a purpose. Using such a methodology, "the archivists can form a conception of a certain period in the development of the entire section of society for which he or she is responsible." From this, a
"coarse grid representing an historical prototype or model" could be constructed which would allow archivists "to arrange groups of records within a hierarchy of value that parallels a gradient of historical events scaled according to societal significance."01
Furthermore, in order to ensure that such a scale of value accurately reflects the society which archivists wish to document, Booms insisted that "archivists must not follow the value concepts of their own time period, but rather, those of the time from which the material originated" since such a standard of value "is not a product of speculation or ideological beliefs; it does not do violence to source material by applying value standards of the present which in the near future may prove to be inadequate." This approach,
Booms maintained, ensures that archivists will be more
61 Booms, p. 103. accountable to society in making their appraisal decision since they must follow the opinions and values of society dominant at the time period which the records serve to document."
Archivists can attain an understanding of what was considered important at the time when the documents being appraised were created by studying contemporary publications and other public statements and actions. Turning to the documents themselves, it remains for the archivist "to determine which documents, regardless of provenance, possess the optimum concentration of desired information so that a maximum of documentation is achieved with a minimum of documents."63 The objective of such a process would be to develop, with the collective participation of archivists and perhaps an advisory council representing various public interests, a "documentation plan" for different jurisdictions and historical periods of society. Once defined in a written or published form and used to appraise records, the documentation plan itself becomes part of the documentary record.64
Booms' statement that the values of the society at the time the records were created must serve as the basis for determining archival values is perhaps the most interesting of his proposals. Such an idea seems to be an attempt to
63 Booms, p. 104.
63 Booms, p. 105.
64 Booms, p. 106. 145
reconcile elements of the traditional provenance-based approach with those of his own content-based concept.
Essentially, as in the provenance-based theories, Booms followed the values of the context or environment within which the records were originally generated and used to define archival appraisal values. However, Booms' concept is different in two crucial respects. First of all, the original environment or context from which Booms insists archivists must derive their appraisal values embraces not only the narrow world of the administrative organization and its
information systems -- it takes in every aspect of the society within which that organization operated. Secondly, the value standards thus arrived at will be used not to appraise the documents directly, as though they would be the values of archivists or archival researchers at the time the documents were created, but to construct a documentation plan of the most significant elements of that society; decisions as to which records best document those elements are made according to standard analysis of the form and content of the records.
In Booms' theory, therefore, the provenance of the records, and the values inherent therein, retains an important position, but it is a much broader definition of the concept and relates to the actual appraisal of documents in an
indirect way.
In presenting his alternative methods, Booms stressed that he was not seeking to make archival appraisal "objective"
in any absolute sense--he considered this "an impossible 146
goal." Rather, he wanted to develop an appraisal process whereby archivists could "distance themselves from their subjectivity to the greatest possible extent" since the value principles used to make appraisal decisions are clearly defined and hence subject to evaluation and revision:
If such a program is instituted, the final product will be a model for forming the documentary heritage which has been developed by archivists, is sanctioned and controlled by society at large, and can be analyzed using the ^historical method of documentary criticism.0D
The very expansiveness of Booms' presentation on the problems and possible future direction of archival appraisal in itself marked it as a radical departure from the appraisal literature of his contemporaries. Yet the vastness of the conceptual theatre within which Booms chose to play out his ideas allowed him to break out of the technical and often esoteric confines of previous archival theories on the subject of appraisal to analyze their social, political, and philosophical foundations. What Booms found was a tradition of appraisal practice which derived its legitimacy from either a conscious or unconscious appeal to a general social confidence in historical intuition long since disintegrated; or else from structural theories which essentially applied the scale of administrative importance governing organizational structures to the appraisal of the records these organizations produced, thereby ignoring the wider archival responsibility to document all aspects of social activity. However much
°5 Booms, p. 106. 147
Booms recognized the need for analyses of the provenance of records as a prerequisite for the archival description of records, he insisted that only analyses of the informational content of the records which reveal how well the records document the society as a whole at the time they were created will lead to truly useful, accountable, and controlled appraisal standards. In this way, Booms, like his contemporaries, was working to apply a systematic management approach to appraisal practice. Unlike his colleagues, however, he maintained that merely setting out the methodology for a systematic process of appraisal is not enough; the values used in making decisions in this process must also be systematically developed and defined so that they reflect the values of the society which the archivist serves.
In spite of the bold steps taken by Booms towards a comprehensive theory of appraisal, many German-speaking archivists remained skeptical that such an all-encompassing, theoretical approach could ever lead to practical methods. In
1974, Gerhard Granier proclaimed that archival appraisal remained "an unsolved problem" and launched into a critique of the major points of Booms' presentation. Booms emphasized a deductive approach based on theory, Granier maintained, over and above an inductive approach based on experience. But so long as Booms' all-inclusive theory remained vague and incomplete, Grainier contended that it is better to rely on the traditional case-by-case methods of Rohr, Sante, Zimmerman, and Papritz.10 Furthermore, Granier took issue with
Booms' claim that provenance-based appraisal theories overvalued the role of the state in society: first of all, state archivists have a primary responsibility to document the structure and functions of the administration which sponsors their activities; secondly, in spite of the major political changes which have occurred since the beginning of the twentieth century, the state remains the most important and most pervasive institution in society.07
A more serious matter was Granier's criticism of Booms' idea that judgements as to what should be documented must be made using the values of the society at the time the documents were created. Booms suggested that an analysis of contemporary publications and public statements will reveal the "public opinion" which was dominant at the time. In
Granier's view, Booms' suggestion leads archivists from the frying pan into the fire for they are left to determine which among the many conflicting opinions expressed in such publications are most significant. This is difficult enough in societies where there is a free press, but under totalitarian regimes, such as the German Third Reich, the press will only reflect the opinions and values of the state- sanctioned ideology.68
ac Gerhard Granier, "Die archivarische Bewertung von Dokumentationsgut--eine ungeloste Aufgabe," Der...Archivar 27, No. 2 (1974), col. 2 34.
67 Granier, col. 23 5.
68 Granier, col. 237. 149
Moreover, Granier noted that later generations have found certain documents very valuable which according to the opinion of the time in which they were created were considered insignificant. He gave as an example the seemingly valueless accounting records produced during the late middle ages and early modern period which are now one of the most important sources for the study of late medieval and early modern economic history.0' While this last point is certainly true, it cannot serve as a criticism of Booms' concept of the role of contemporary values in archival appraisal: Booms advocated following such values to appraise the significance of the persons, things, and phenomena to be documented, not to appraise the documents directly. Nevertheless, the questions raised by Granier concerning the sources for determining public opinions and the standards for evaluating their relative significance--the foundation upon which the documentation plans are to be constructed--revealed serious weaknesses in Booms' arguments.
In rejecting Booms' comprehensive, subject-based theory of appraisal, Granier returned to the more traditional approaches which he regarded as more practical and comraon- sensical. He identified three appraisal techniques which had served and continued to serve archivists in their attempts to manage records: identifying and preserving those records which are in every case clearly of permanent value; identifying and disposing of those which are unquestionably worthless; making
°9 Granier, col. 238. 150
services available to non-government institutions to ensure that their valuable records are preserved; and the development and implementation of sampling techniques for file series of a similar structure and form. l(> Granier concluded that archivists "should still accept what is attainable, at least until the day comes when truly better solutions are found which are not only useful, but also meet all the necessary theoretical requirements.'"*
In many ways, German archivists after 1930 were much more extensive and concise in their analyses of the complex problem of determining archival values for appraisal than their colleagues in North America and Europe. Relying on the theoretical categories established by German archival science in the nineteenth century, German archivists set out to develop objective and systematic standards for appraisal using two different approaches to the problem: the provenance-based approach, which was an extension of principles used to arrange and describe records; and the information content-based approach, which appraised records according to the subject- matter documented in the records. Not content merely to offer- systematic management processes fox- appraisal, they presented criteria for making value judgements within this process and offered clear justifications for positing these criteria.
Between 1930 and 1980, archives in Great Britain, France, and Germany faced a revolution in the quantity and quality of
70 Granier, col. 240.
71 Granier, col. 240. 151
records every bit as profound as that experienced in North
American. Like the Americans, European archivists turned to management systems of disposition to alleviate the pressure of volume and complexity which was threatening to explode traditional systems, practices, and theories of archives administration. But while the new situation in archives clearly called for more efficient, comprehensive, and consistent methods of appraisal, archivists in each country attempted to retain and build upon the value assumptions which underlay their own unique record-keeping traditions. 152
CONCLUSION
The objectives of this study were to elucidate and critically examine the value criteria archivists and records- keepers have used throughout the history of archives to decide which records will be preserved for posterity and which will be destroyed. The temporal and theoretical dimensions of the topical landscape which has been traversed is vast and complex, but a number of broad historical and conceptual patterns in the geography have emerged.
In terms of an historical survey, three general periods in the development of archival value concepts can be identified. In the pre-modern period before 1880, records were kept by the records-creating offices for the purposes for which they were created, yet some documents were selected for special preservation, without reference to their original use and value, to serve political, military, or diplomatic purposes. From the 1880s to the 1930s, historian/archivists gained a significant degree of control over the appraisal process from the records producers, introduced a dichotomy between the administrative and historical use of archives, and developed archival theories based on historicist concepts which placed an inherent value in original structure and use of archives as organic unities. In the period from 1930 to
1980, in reponse to changes in both the quality and quantity of records produced, archivists constructed comprehensive- 153
management systems for records disposition in an effort to control the life-cycle of records use; as a result, archival appraisal values were defined so as to conform to the administrative and analytical categories of these systems, but important aspects of the records-keeping traditions of each cultural jurisdiction continued to influence the development of value criteria.
Moving beyond the historical synthesis which this study has generated, it is possible to perceive general patterns in the way archivists and records-keepers have developed archival value concepts. It can be argued that, from an analysis of these historical developments, three broad conceptual activities, operating simultaneously in the appraisal process, have consistently been significant factors in determining the archival value of records.
First of all, archivists analyze and determine the aspects of reality it is most important to document. There are, in archival terms, two dimensions to this reality. Since archival records are produced by individuals and groups of individuals for a specific function, the world of the original record creators is most obvious and immediately perceivable; this reality comprises the clients or customers, projects and programs, events and circumstances, friends and relatives, employees and employers, authority structures and relationships active or operating within the immediate environment of the record creator. There is also the larger reality of people, things, and phenomena existing and evolving 154
outside of the narrower responsibilities of the record creator which may be equally or more important to document. In making such an analysis, jurisdictions, categories, and lines of development are defined so that they may be compared and evaluated in a comprehensive and reliable manner. This is a categorizing and descriptive process and, although the organization and presentation of aspects of reality in itself can influence a value comparison, it is not meant to place greater importance in, for instance, the structures and functions of the government agency producing the records over against the society within which the agency operated.
Secondly, archivists determine which records within the universe of documentation generated best document the most significant aspects of reality. An understanding of the form, structure, and original context or provenance of the documentation provides the framework of meaning for establishing the documentary value of the information. This kind of analysis has overshadowed and sometimes replaced the activity of analyzing the elements of reality which the records serve to document.
Thirdly, and this is perhaps the most profound and difficult conceptual activity in this process, archival values are formulated according to perceptions of and in reference to a value authority. The economic, political, administrative, and cultural relationships among archivists, the individuals or organizations which created the records, and the research community have traditionally been the most critical factors in 155
determining archival value. Yet it is important to realize that descriptive and practical analyses of the records, the record-creators, or the record users cannot in themselves provide a value authority--this arises from the appraisers' perception of their role in society and who they are serving in fulfilling this role. In the past, descriptive and practical propositions about the nature of the records and patterns of their use have justified appraisal decisions, but these decisions cannot be supported by existential judgements; ultimately, appraisal decisions are based on value propositions derived from an authoritative value perspective.
To be sure, the value authority of archivists is restricted in its scope by the time and culture in which it operates.
However, the archival community is developing an awareness of its unique identity as a profession with a reponsibility to serve a wide and diverse constituency and to avoid narrow allegiences to specific social institutions and groups. This development may provide the foundations for a more universal, overarching framework of reference for defining archival values. 156
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