Preserve for:
Preserve for:
Secondary value has two components: Evidential value and Informational value.
Records of the organisation, its structure and functioning
from a historical rather than legal point of view and of importance
for the organisation's current and future functioning
Criteria: place of office in hierarchy, its functions and
the activities carried out in executing those functions
Purpose: sufficient evidence to document the history of
the organisation.
Records covering as broad range of topics as possible:
persons, bodies, problems, conditions and phenomena considered
as important.
Criteria: uniqueness, concentration and form, number of
uses to which it could be put and number of users it could serve.
Purpose: to provide as broad a range of research material
as possible.
Schellenberg recommended that the criteria for evidential value should be more rigorous than those for informational value. In dealing with informational records, he was less concerned with their source than with the information the records contained; they could therefore be evaluated piecemeal rather than in their entirety, as he recommended for evidential records. He also recommended that informational records should be evaluated in the light of other types of information dealing with the same topic(s). For example, he considered that vital records should only be preserved from state and local administrations and not at the federal level. Like Kahn [1], he considered that consistency in making decisions was less important than diverse judgments which might well result in a more adequate documentation.
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