In the USA, which lacked an archival as opposed to a historical records tradition, and faced with an enormous backlog, the National Archives, established in 1934, rapidly acquired power to determine which records were worth preservation. Staff devised appraisal criteria, developed records management techniques and introduced the life cycle concept. But the basis for their appraisal criteria was pragmatic and, almost deliberately, ignored existing archival theory.
Though later into the field - the first National Archives Act was not passed until 1934 - the American School has had a major influence outside the United States as well as internally in developing ideas about appraisal, particularly through its espousal of the concept of records management as separate from but closely related to archives. The act of 1934 gave the National Archivist only an advisory role in disposal matters, but in 1939 a Records Disposal Act empowered him to authorise destruction when Congress was not in session and approved the development of schedules of disposable records of similar sort.
The first proposals for appraisal criteria were set out by the National Archives in 1940. [10] Aside from disposing of duplicates, a senior staff member in the Division of Independent Agencies Archives of the US National Archives, P C Brooks, suggested three criteria for assessing value:
The first of these values seeks to assess records in terms of their contribution to the ongoing functions of the agency. The second takes account of the potential needs of later administrators for precedents, of political scientists or other outsiders who want to study the agency's operation and of the archivist " who must preserve the agency's records strictly in accordance with the functions they reflect". The third criteria is less specific: it is not just individual historical "documents such as treaties, the Declaration of Independence, letters to presidents" but those records that provide a wider view of history than simply political and national development. Most records having historical value "possess such value not as individual documents but as groups of documents that, considered altogether, reflect the activities of some organisation or person or portray everyday rather than unique events and conditions".
As aids to improving the appraisal process, Brooks stressed the need for close cooperation with agency staff, for archivists to take an interest in the documents from the moment of their creation, and to work with agency staff to develop filing schemes that would serve the agency and subsequently the archivist and archival users. He advocated regular transfers, planned destruction and temporary storage for records still required by the administration but of no archival value. He considered that his proposals would be, for America at least, a useful innovation, and indeed, they proved initially highly influential.
In a later response to these proposals, Philip Bauer, [11] chief of the Labor Department Archives in the National Archives, advocated a more pragmatic approach, suggesting that "stern and true cost accounting is a pre-requisite of all orderly appraisal", based on four categories of government records' use:
The first two were deemed to justifiy higher expenditure than the last. He also proposed three criteria by which to judge the potential usefulness of records:
Herman Kahn, [12] in a rejoinder to Bauer's paper claimed that Bauer seemed to think that "the business of keeping records should be viewed in a purely commercial light and that it should play precisely the same role in our lives as the purchase of a pair of shoes". His own view was that, "We keep archives because we are civilised men and therefore must do so", and played down the importance of cost as a criteria in appraisal decisions. He accused Bauer of believing that if archivists could develop a rigid set of criteria, principles and formulas to be used in appraisal, then all appraisers would greatly improve their efficiency because they would be in a position to evaluate all records in the same way. He opposed any such approach on the grounds that "lack of a rigid definition of policy makes possible experimentation, independent thought, change - and change is life". These early ideas, which to some extent supported the moral defence approach, underwent a radical re-interpretation with the publication of Schellenberg's Modern Archives in 1956.
Schellenberg defined records in an even more limited way than Jenkinson had defined archives. [13] He re-defined archives as a species of records, the main difference between them being that archives "must be preserved for reasons other than those for which they were created or accumulated". [14] Jenkinson, in his review of the book, [15] defended the traditional theory of archives, which treats records as a species of archival documents and therefore of archives, by insisting that the theory of archives must be based on an analysis of the nature of the documents, not on the use to which they might subsequently be put. On this basis, he concluded that, " Value for Research is no doubt the reason why we continue to spend money and time on preserving archives and making them more available: but the fact that a thing may be used for a different purpose for which it is not intended - a hat, for instance, for the production of a rabbit - is not part of its nature and should not, I submit, be made an element of its definition, though it may reasonably affect its treatment".
Duranti considers that the way Schellenberg represented his concept of evidential value amounted to an exclusive concern for secondary users and that by so doing, "he prepared the path for the complete divergence of American archival practice from the rest of the world". [16] Others have also found it confusing. For example Angelika Menne-Haritz, though paying tribute to the idea of the distinction between primary and secondary use, nevertheless considers that "there is a certain contradiction in Schellenberg's ideas and his words, that leads us in the wrong direction," pointing to frequent misunderstandings in the interpretation of informational value. [17]
Schellenberg's definition of archives appears, then, to be theoretically flawed, not because he built into it elements of value and use for research purposes, but because he drew his conclusions on purely pragmatic grounds. He wrote, "It is quite obvious that modern archives are kept for the use of others than those who created them, and that conscious decisions must be made as to their value for such use…. obviously for research use. Records kept by government for the accomplishment of its own work are not necessarily archives… to be archives, materials must be preserved for reasons other than those for which they were created or accumulated. These reasons may be both official and cultural ones".
He failed to explore the properties of archival documents, and wished only to "devise methods of treatment which work for particular records which one is aiming to turn into archives in order to be used for research purposes". In this, he was to be spectacularly successful. But, while he willingly accepted and promoted the archivist's need for rules of procedure, " he did not accept the need to base those ideas about the universal properties of archives or to examine his own basic ideas about them, which he presents as self evident truths". [18] He also rejected, as far as modern archives are concerned, Jenkinson's criterion of unbroken custody, arguing that the concepts of regular form and steady accumulation of medieval documents from which Jenkinson and others had derived this criteria could not be applied to modern records partly because of their sheer bulk, partly because of their complexity and partly because of the frequency of organisational change.
Schellenberg argued instead that archivists needed to redefine 'archives' in the light of their circumstances, particularly the problems posed by bulk: "since the major problem for modern archivists is to select archives for permanent preservation from amongst the mass of official records, the element of selection should be implicit in the definition of archives". He offered two definitions. The first of these was taken, with minor amendments, from the 1943 Records Disposal Act and encompasses "all types of documents regardless of form created or received by an institution in pursuance of its proper business and preserved or appropriate for preservation by that institution or its legitimate successor as evidence of its functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations or other activities or because of the informational value of the data contained therein." His second definition was " those records of any public or private institutions which are adjudged worthy of permanent preservation for reference or research purposes and which have been deposited or have been selected for deposit in an archival institution ….. Public archives, then, have two types of values: the primary value to the originating agency and the secondary values to their agencies and to non-government users". (See Appraisal Taxonomy for primary and secondary values.)
These ideas led him to suggest that the way that current records were kept would have a significant effect on the assessment of record values and the ease with which valuable records could be segregated for retention in archival institutions. Thus he proposed that archivists should involve themselves more closely in the work of records managers in devising more effective systems of record keeping, that agency officials should have the primary responsibility for judging primary value, but that archivists should have primary responsibility for determining secondary values, echoing Wendell Holmes's view, "most records officers are not, by education and experience, equipped to make these broader value determinations. They cannot be expected to have imagination as to the potential value of records to scholars of the future unless they themselves have taken courses that deal with research methods or that outline typical areas of research, unless they keep up with research interests and trends and have some experience of research themselves …. They work under pressure and are pragmatic, which may be good in considering administrative values but is inadequate for broader research values". [19]
Primary values, the value of the records to the organisation itself, are not at issue except in the strictly purist view that it is not for their value but for their evidence that archives are kept. It is with the secondary values that exception has been taken, and particularly the definition given by Schellenberg of the terms evidential and informational.
By evidential value, Schellenberg means evidence in public records about the functioning and organisation of the originating government bodies, "not the value that inheres in public records because of the merit of the evidence they contain. I do not refer, in a Jenkinsonian sense, to the sanctity of the evidence in archives that is derived from 'unbroken custody', I refer rather, and quite arbitrarily to a value that depends on the importance of the matter being evidenced ". [20]
By informational value, he means "the usefulness of records for the larger documentation of American life", always his paramount concern, and thus turns the focus of archives from the record to its potential uses, especially for American historians, in order to document that larger life. In doing so, "unlike Jenkinson, Schellenberg anticipated the future rather than defended the past, and he joined management techniques to historical scholarship in archives". [21]
Despite Jenkinson's theoretical reservations, Schellenberg's taxonomy of values - primary and secondary, evidential and informational - which offered a practical framework that appeared to provide a compromise between archives as evidence and archives for use, were widely adopted in the United States and became increasingly influential in much of the English speaking world.
A number of later American writers have however seized on his emphasis on use to elevate it beyond what it will bear as the main criteria, claiming that " the real or anticipated use by scholars and particularly by academic historians should be central to appraisal …. secondary use defining the very nature of archives themselves " . As early as 1970, Meyer Fishbein had stated that: " Recent trends in historiography are of prime importance to us" [22] Maynard Brichford took the view that, "Successful appraisal is directly related to the archivist's primary role as representative of the research community. The appraiser should approach records by evaluating demand as reflected by past, present and prospective research use. In reaching a decision, archivists consider long term needs for documenting sources and the potential demands of scholars". [23] Lawrence Dowler contended that it is from the study of "the relationship between the use of information and the ways in which it is or can be provided … that the value of records and the information they contain will be determined and archival practices defined". [24] Elsie T Freeman (now Finch) went even further: "archival theory is mere rules of order and practice (sometimes called principles) … a look at how and why users approach records will give us new criteria for appraising records … and turn archival practice upside down". [25] These ideas however, run counter to traditional views that origin, structure and function (provenance and original order) take primacy over content, use and importance (pertinence).
Gerald Ham in his 1974 presidential address to the Society of American Archivists attempted to counter such speculative, user defined views - the archivist as a weathervane moved by the changing winds of historiography - by asking, "Is there any other field of information gathering that has such a broad mandate with a selection process so random, so fragmented, so unco-ordinated and even so often accidental?", resulting in "archival holdings that too often reflect narrow research interests rather than the broad spectrum of human experience". [26] Duranti puts the point more robustly: "It is obvious that, if what qualifies documents as archival is their nature, the idea of attributing value to them is in profound conflict with archival theory; while it is in complete harmony with it if the qualifying element is use, as Schellenberg pragmatically claimed". [27]
Many of Ham's specific criticisms may have been met through, for example, the development of collaborative archival documentation strategies, [28] but the point remains that good strategies may fail if the theories behind them are defective. More generally, Ham's criticisms led American and Canadian archivists to reconsider their attitudes to appraisal in the light of growing doubts as to the effectiveness of the taxonomic approach as a means to document the "broad spectrum of human experience", the goal that had been posed by Ham. They increasingly called into question the appraisal of records based on the attribution of value using Schellenberg's taxonomy on the grounds that it was self-fulfilling: records which possessed the necessary codified values were deemed archival, those that did not, were rejected. By concentrating on end products (old records), rather than the purposes and systems by which records are created, it also tended to bring the archivist into contact with records managers rather than the serious records creators who collectively articulate the corporate mind.
Again, the taxonomic approach suffers from the proportion of records 'at the bottom', too many for the archivist to appraise. It operates, in line with the general orientation of diplomatics, by moving from the bottom up, from the record to the function, from the information to the user, from the specific to the general, from the matter to the mind and simply breaks down in the face of the realities of modern bureaucracies and their records.
Instead, North American archivists began to explore new societal approaches to appraisal, developing new conceptions of archival theory and methodology, and in the process "shifting from a dialogue with the state to a dialogue with society". [29][30]
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