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ARCHIVES

Western Theories of Appraisal - From Europe to
America to the Perspective of an International
Societyby
Steve Stuckey
Assistant Director-General, Collection Preservation & Management
National Archives of Australia
Tokyo, November 15, 2004
The Canadian archivist and academic Terry Eastwood wrote in 1992:"No theoretical question is more perplexing for the archivist than what should be the basis ofappraisal or evaluation of archives. For all the thinking, there is as yet no generally accepted
theory of appraisal that could inform methodology and practice."
It is indeed true that appraisal - or selection of archives - is one of the most controversial aspects ofarchives theory and practice. There are two opposite views about the very nature of an archives
organisation. One view is that which says the role of the archivist begins at the time the agency thatcreates a record decides to transfer it to an archives. The other view states that it is a proper role forthe archivist to participate actively in the selection process. Some who believe this say that thisappraisal - this selection - is the single most important role of the archivist.
The purpose of my session today is not to give the definitive answer to the question of which is thebest way to select archives, although I will be expressing some personal views. I want to present thearguments from both sides, accepting that there are strongly held opinions each way. This is nothelped by the fact that different terms have different meanings around the world!
I want to mention various approaches to appraisal in Western archival theory and practice, including
those in Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America.
But, an archivist always starts by looking at the past. I shall too, and given where we are sitting
today, I shall begin with the past in Asia. One of the first recorded selection decisions was that of thefirst Qin Emperor of China, the man who united the country and began the construction of the Great
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Wall in 213BC. The Emperor ordered all previous writings destroyed when he came to the throne, so
all history would begin with him. This is a tradition that has continued at various times and in various
places through history, including during the French Revolution in 1789, when the records of thegovernment and the great noble families were destroyed because it was on their basis that taxes
were paid! It is a method that continues to be reflected in other parts of the globe, including when theinvading Iraqi army destroyed or took away much of the national archives of Kuwait, or in what was
Yugoslavia, where military commanders deliberately bombed the archives and libraries of Bosnia as away of destroying not just their resistance but their history and their memories, to quote Terry Cook.
All archival theory in the West has talked about 'importance', or 'value' or 'significance'. This theory
argues that all appraisal strategy and actual appraisal and selection decisions can only come from oneof three areas: the creator of the record, the current or future users of the records, or society at large.
In Europe, archival theory is based on the characteristics of archival documents. This states thatthese documents are by their nature all of equal value. The question of appraisal as giving value does
not arise. European theory is based on the concept of Roman law. This held the principles of therelationship between archival documents and facts (the record is the fact) and the question of publicfaith (the people believe the records).
Archives institutions in Roman society were public offices; the public had access to the records in thearchival institution. The records supported the rule of law and certain records developed a special
value because of this. They were evidence. Certain other records had a lesser value because they
were not required as evidence. Records that entered the archives were special and were kept secure.
These ideas became the basis of European thinking about archives and also the basis for European
thinking about archival theory. Archives were automatically thought of as truthful, authentic, natural,interrelated and unique. This view helped the development of the ideas of provenance and originalorder.
The European view argues that giving different values to documents within an archives is in conflictwith basic theory. All archives are impartial and authentic as evidence and tell the truth. The factthat they are unique in their context makes the collection whole. For an outsider to decide to keepsome and not others would therefore influence the value of the whole.
Archives were viewed in such early thinking as the unconscious and thus natural byproducts ofadministrative or human activity. If they were continually maintained, without tampering and in
unbroken or traceable custody, they could be considered reliable and authentic evidence of theactions of those who created them. Such an early theoretical focus on respecting the original orderand the context of creation reflected those pioneering archivists' preoccupation with arranging anddescribing older records of uncertain origin. But such archival theory, which concerns the nature ofrecords, is of no direct benefit to appraisal theory, which concerns the value of records, the reasons or
principles why some records are judged to be important and some are not. Of course, if records are
not authentic or reliable, do not have the characteristics of evidence, are not part of trustworthy
recordkeeping regimes, their value is much diminished, perhaps destroyed, but that is true of all128

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records: the letter of a Prime Minister or President and the invoices ordering new stationery.
In European theory, the archivist is impartial. It is a view that was argued early in the 20th Century
by the English archivist Sir Hilary Jenkinson, who strongly maintained that it was not the role of thearchivist to destroy any document. To do so would be to impose the archivist's own personal
judgment. Jenkinson argued that it was up to the office that created the record to decide what should
be kept or destroyed.
In short, archivists must remain impartial. This point of principle existed in the UK for more than 30
years, and was the basis for the system set up by the Grigg Committee in London in 1954. This was
the first serious review of the public records system in the United Kingdom since the Public Records
Act of 1877. It was set up to look at the way the law was working in a time in the civil service whentechnology was impacting on recordkeeping (given the wide use of the typewriter and better ways of
copying documents). It also took into account the amount of public records created during two worldwars and the increase in the size of the civil service.
The 1877 law had established a system under which records should be scheduled for destruction, but
it had been rarely used, and was beginning to break down under the pressure of modern records
creation. The Grigg Committee's proposals for selection of records for permanent preservation werelargely to do with setting up a new system, and not about appraisal theory.
It proposed:
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every department should appoint a departmental record officer responsible for the
management of non-current records, in addition to the exiting registrars who were
responsible for active records
new procedures for the management of non-current records should be established. Records
were to be divided into two main categories: files dealing with policy, administration, legal,financial and other general matters, and case files;
that the first category of papers should be reviewed by departmental staff, five years after
they had been closed. If the file was still of value to the department it was to be retained, on
the principle that what was no longer of use to the department was unlikely to be of interest
to potential future users;
that files remaining should be reviewed 25 years after the file had been closed, now using thecriterion of historical importance. Again, this review was to be carried out usually bydepartmental staff, often senior retired staff familiar with the period under review;that case files, which were the largest quantity of government files, should usually bescheduled for destruction as soon as they are no longer needed, which may be just a few
months after they were finished with. In some instances samples of these files could beselected. For some series all files may be selected for permanent retention;in general records selected for permanent retention should be transferred to the Public
Record Office before they were 30 years old.

This system was introduced in the British Civil Service and was generally in use until only a couple
1292005/3of years ago. The Public Record Office provided government agencies with some guidance on what it
considered of importance. It discussed this guidance with agencies and increasingly with members of
public user groups and published such material for public comment.
This process of appraisal allows the destruction of many valuable records for any reason that theperson or agency or government may decide. It is an approach which can lead to abuses of thesystem, undermining the value of the archives in showing how a company was managed or a country
was governed. The powerful sections of society can be given many privileges if it is those people who
determine what is kept to record what society did.
This approach can also confuse archival theory and appraisal theory. Archival theory sees thearchivist preserving original order and context, not interfering with these things but keeping thearchives as a group, and providing access to those records. Appraisal theory, on the other hand, isabout making choices (the title of an Australian document I will talk about later). Appraisal theory accepts
that someone has to intervene to decide what is kept and what is destroyed, because it is impracticalto keep everything (especially as governments became more complex in the 20th Century).
Jenkinson and other traditional European archivists were uncomfortable with archivists undertaking
this role of selection, because they did not understand the records well. Archivists were not supposed
to make 'personal judgments' because they were supposed to be impartial, and the archives
themselves had to be impartial too.
In the United States the situation was different. There was not the same history of the developmentof government administration and the role of an archives as in Europe and the United Kingdom.
Government records that survived did so more by good luck than good management. The National
Archives was established in 1934, and quickly gained the power to decide which records needed to beretained.
It was in the USA that the concept of records management was developed as different to but closely
related to archival theory. The Archives law of 1934 gave the National Archivist an advisory role indisposal but in 1939 a Records Disposal law gave him power to authorise destruction when theCongress was not sitting.
The first set of appraisal criteria were published in 1940 by an officer of the National Archives, P C
Brooks. This allowed government offices to dispose of copies, but also listed three criteria forassessing value:
1. The value of the records to the agency that created them;
2. The use of the records for administrative history;
3. The value of the records for historical research.
The first - value to the agency - is about their value to the ongoing functions of the agency. The
second is about the possible needs of future administrators for precedents as well as the possible
interest of those studying the way the government's or the agency's functions were carried out. As
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well, the needs of the archivist in documenting the history of government were noted. The third
criterion was much less specific, and related not just to individual and important documents, but also
to broader values for historical research. Brooks said at the time that most historical records "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 eventsand conditions".
Brooks said that it was important for the archivist to work with the officers in the government
agency, and to take an interest in the documents from the time of their creation, and to work withagency staff to develop filing schedules that would help the agency, the archivist and then the user of
the archives. He said there should be regular destruction of records no longer needed for agency orarchival use, as well as planned transfers to the archives.
These suggestions by the National Archives started a debate in America about what should be
retained and what destroyed. Another government records manager suggested (perhaps so explicitly
for the first time) that cost should also be considered when deciding how much might be kept. He
suggested also that there were four reasons for keeping records:bbbb

Official reference by government agencies;
Protection of citizens' private rights
Serious research by scholars
Assistance with family history and other community interests.

The first two reasons were said to justify higher public expenditure than the last two. It also
proposed three reasons by which to judge the potential usefulness of records:bbb

the amount and character of the information in the records,
the convenience of the arrangement of the records,
and the comprehensiveness of the records.

Another archivist said that these arguments seemed to say that 'the business of keeping records
should be viewed in a purely commercial light and that it should play precisely the same role in ourlives as the purchase of a pair of shoes'. This archivist argued that "We keep archives because we arecivilised men and therefore must do so" and did not agree with the cost of keeping records being areason not to keep them. He argued that it was not correct to say that developing a rigid set ofappraisal criteria, principles and formulas would make all appraisers far more efficient because theywould be able to evaluate all records in the same way. He argued that such rigid criteria would doaway with experimentation and independent thought, something all archivists needed.
These early American ideas were radically reinterpreted by Theodore Schellenberg in 1956. His
approach sought to broaden Jenkinson's view from that only of the institution, to include the needs ofa much wider range of researchers. If a researcher can use the record, then it has value. If it is hard
to imagine or anticipate use, or to justify the expense of keeping the record, then the record does nothave use. He wrote:131

2005/3"It is quite obvious that modern archives are kept for the use of others than those who createdthem, and that conscious decisions must be made as to their value 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 werecreated or accumulated. These reasons may be both official and cultural ones."
Schellenberg suggested that the way records were kept would have a significant effect on theassessment of record values and the ease with which valuable records could be selected forpermanent 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 ofrecordkeeping, that agency officials should have the main role in deciding primary value (that is, value
to government and the agency itself), but that archivists should have primary responsibility for deciding
secondary values (that is, value for research).
Jenkinson in the United Kingdom did not fully support this approach to primary and secondary value,
which was a compromise between archives as evidence and archives for wider use. However,Schellenberg's approach was widely adopted in the United States and became influential in much of
the English-speaking world, including Canada and Australia.
This broad user-based approach to deciding value was an important step forward, but it still left thearchives institution subject to influence by a small group or groups of users, or the latest trend inhistorical research from graduate schools which leads to pressure for archivists to collect records
relevant to historical research. Any archivist trained in history or closely related social sciences intheir undergraduate degrees are unlikely to judge uses based on the needs of physical sciences,medical, environmental or other criteria.
In 1974, Gerald Ham, the President of the Society of American Archivists attempted to redefine suchuser based views. He asked:"Is there any field of information gathering that has such a broad mandate with a selection
process so random, so fragmented, so uncoordinated and even so often accidental?" resulting in"archival holdings that too often reflect only narrow research interests rather than the broad
spectrum of human experience."
Archivists concerned too with the way that electronic records were being created and destroyed
without ever being appraised also began to question this user-based valuing of records. By
concentrating on the end product, in the shape of old, paper records, rather than on the purposes andsystems by which the records were being created, this approach also tended to bring the archivist
into contact only with records managers rather than with those who actually create the record andinterpret the decisions they are recording.
The concerns being expressed by these later American theorists began to reflect the views of certain
German and Dutch archivists, who argued that there was a higher level to consider before one looked132

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at the records themselves.
In 1991 Dutch archivist Hans Booms argued that:"My basic premise ... is that in building the documentary heritage of society, archivists mustfirst establish the value of the records before they can decide what to keep and what todestroy. One thing is clear, at least since the beginning of the [20th] century, that archivists
cannot keep everything."
This theory of appraisal is founded on working out directly the values, ideas and trends in the society
creating the records, and turning these into ways of appraising the records themselves. This theory
places society, instead of the records, at the centre of any theory of appraisal. It changes the values of
the agencies that actually creates the records to a value put on social processes.
Instead of the model proposed by the American Schellenberg with its primary (agency andgovernment) and secondary (researcher) use of the records, this theory looks at the most important
structures in society as well as the functions and processes that create records. These put together
represent the spread of human experience in society, and it is this which should be documented. This
theory was described as 'macro-appraisal'.
Any such macro level model of appraisal attempts to describe those functions and activities which are
likely to produce records of high archival value before the resulting records are actually appraisedusing more traditional criteria. The assumption here is that with very few exceptions, values are not
only found in the records but also in theories of what is of significance in today's society whicharchivists also need to bring to their assessment of records.
The functions and structure of an agency together form the reasons why the agency documents
things. The records-creating agency undertakes sub-functions and establishes a number of substructures to carry out the functions they are tasked with doing. These require information systems
to organise and supply the documentation needed to carry out the functions. Through these systems
are created the records that records managers and archivists will eventually appraise. Priority istherefore given to the creator, and not to the record itself. The provenance of the record is based in
the act of creating it rather than the physical record itself.
To do this, records creators, guided by archivists and records managers, need to ask such questions
as:
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Why were these records created in the first place? It does not involve asking what therecords contain.
How were the records created and used by the original users? It does not involve asking how
they might be used by future users.
What functions and authority of the records creator do the records support? It does not
involve asking what internal structure and physical factors the records have.
What should be documented about what happened? It does not involve asking what133

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documentation should be kept.
Which records creating agencies are important?

This is a structure put forward by the Canadian archivist Terry Cook in many of his arguments
about macro-appraisal. It has influenced much later thinking about appraisal theory and practice inWestern countries, not least in Australia. It has also strongly influenced the development of theAustralian Standard on Records Management, and now the International Standard.
What I want to do now is show how the recent changes in the National Archives of Australia andselection policies reflect changes in international trends.
We have identified five objectives which appraisers must take into account when considering
whether records should be regarded as national archives. Records selected as national archives should
contribute to meeting one or more of these objectives. The objectives apply to records in any format.
In setting the objectives, we acknowledge a community view that government records may havevalue or significance in a variety of contexts, and that we should not pursue narrow selection policies.
Accordingly, we will maintain our position that records may be selected as national archives becauseof their administrative or functional significance or because they are significant or useful in othercontexts. However, the scope of our statutory role requires that our foremost consideration be therelevance of records to documenting government activity.
Objectives
The records identified under the objectives, together, should provide an adequate account of theactivities concerned, the authority under which they were carried out by the government andgovernment institutions, how implementation was effected, who was involved and affected, and thenature and extent of the outcomes. The first four objectives relate to functional context: governing
Australia and its people. The fifth objective takes in records which may have significance in othercontexts.
Our first objective is:

To preserve concise evidence of the deliberations, decisions and actions of the Government and its
agencies relating to key functions and programs and significant issues faced in governing Australia.
In relation to this objective we will concentrate on records that provide the best evidence of decisions
and activities that relate to issues affecting the nation as a whole. The records selected will include
those that document the background to, basis for and outcomes of those decisions and activities.
The significance of functions, programs, issues and associated decisions and actions will be assessed inrelation to:・how critical they are, or were, in the administration of the government or its agencies; and・their actual or potential influence or impact (whether positive or negative) on Australian and world134アーカイブズ18

affairs.
Assessments of significance will be imputed to the relevant records. Where the functions andactivities of government agencies regularly intersect with high profile or significant issues, all records
generated in the undertaking of the function may be retained.
Our second objective is:

To preserve evidence of the source of authority, foundation and machinery of the government and its
agencies.
We will focus on records that underpin the structure and functioning of the Government and its
agencies and define the nature and extent of their jurisdictions, obligations and powers.
Our third objective is:

To preserve records containing information that is considered essential for the protection and future
well-being of Australians and their environment.
We would expect such records to comprise unique, irreplaceable information that is needed bynational governments now and, probably, in perpetuity for effective planning, decision-making andtransfer of knowledge in matters such as health and safety, security, social cohesion andenvironmental management. The capacity of records to be used for these purposes should be clearly
evident.
Our fourth objective is:

To preserve records that have a special capacity to illustrate the condition and status of Australia
and its people, the impact of government activities on them, and the interaction of people with thegovernment.
This objective will focus on records that exemplify or characterise the implementation and impact ofmajor government functions and programs. These records may embrace both routine and exceptional
cases, including personal case records. Complete runs of case records may be preserved where it isevident that the government functions and programs to which they relate were, or are, of greatsignificance in the government or development of Australia, or to the community.
Our fifth objective is:

To preserve records that have substantial capacity to enrich knowledge and understanding of aspectsof Australia's history, society, culture and people.
Although government records arise from and document government activity, their significance maylie in contexts other than their functional context. For example, a record documenting the routine
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approval of a construction project may concern a building that is later renowned for its architectural
significance. The significance of the record, here, largely derives from its associations outside andbeyond government.
We will take into account assessments by appraisers and stakeholders as to the significance thatrecords may have because of their association with events, phenomena, persons, places or themes.
Beyond functional context, we will select as national archives only those records that we areconvinced have the highest levels of historical, social, aesthetic, scientific, research or technicalsignificance. Preference will be given to records that can provide a broad community benefit.
In addition, some types of records may be kept because the Australian community holds them, or the
information they contain, in high esteem. This may be evident, for example, from continuing highusage rates or by the community expressing its concerns to the responsible authorities.
Recordkeeping issues
There are several recordkeeping issues, some of them of a technical nature, which may also affect theArchives' decisions concerning preservation and disposal of records. If records have serious technicaldefects, such as being unreliable, incomplete or inaccessible, we may decide to destroy them.
Other factors being equal, we will give preservation priority to records that are technically goodrecords; that is, they are complete, reliable, authentic and accessible. The existence of adequate
information about the organisational, functional and recordkeeping contexts of records will be an
important consideration. Evidence of recordkeeping strategies that comply with the International
records management standard and meet the requirements of full and accurate records will also be afactor. The areas that we will assess include:
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provenance/authenticity - whether records are what they are supposed to be;
integrity and completeness - whether records have been securely maintained to prevent
deliberate or accidental unauthorised access, alteration or removal, and whether they havecontext and structure as well as content;
accessibility and usability;
preservation feasibility - whether it is technically possible to prevent or control unwanted
alteration or deterioration;
recordkeeping relationships and dependencies - for example, where records depend on theexistence of other records or materials to render them accessible and meaningful; andmaintenance risks (including costs).

We will be using these criteria and the five selection objectives to guide appraisal decision-making.
This will be within the framework of the appraisal model suggested by the international standard, so
all records should be maintained for as long as they are required to meet business needs,
accountability requirements and community expectations, even if they are not selected as nationalarchives.
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To summarise the three approaches to appraisal and selection:
The first appraisal theory model allows the creator to determine "value" and therefore to make thearchival appraisal decision. This was the approach advocated by Sir Hilary Jenkinson, and it is anapproach that still finds some advocates. This approach has the advantage of allowing those closest to
the records, and to the functions and activities that generated them, to isolate the best records
reflecting those activities, to undertake a natural reduction of the bulk of records over time so that
only the essential core or bare minimum remains. The assumption is that the original actors in theevents and issues are best qualified to do this selection because they know the issues. Thus, a naturalresidue will emerge, which in the fullness of time, the archivist will take into custody and preserve
forever. This approach assumes, however, that creating institution are relatively stable, small in scale,and straight-forward in their functions and activities, that actions and events are institution-specificand narrowly and cleanly focused within a traditional vertical bureaucracy, and that thesecharacteristics -- small, stable, focused, and centralized -- are also reflected in the institution's
recording technologies and recordkeeping systems and in its staff and staffing structures. The trouble
began when increasingly, none of these conditions continued to exist in the vast majority of latetwentieth-century institutional record creators in Western societies.
The second approach to appraisal theory is to allow user needs (actual or anticipated) to determine
value. Best argued by Theodore Schellenberg and his American successors, and holding sway overmost of the archival world in the second half of the twentieth century, at least until very recently, thissecond approach sought to broaden the institutional bias of Jenkinson by considering the needs of amuch wider range of researchers. It is a very broad approach to determining value; if a researcher
can use the record, then it has value. If it is hard to imagine or anticipate or, increasingly in resourcehard times, demonstrate use, then the record does not have value. Schellenberg listed various
categories of use: primary and secondary uses, and within the latter category, evidential, legal,financial, and especially informational research values. Certainly consistent with his focus on society
and secondary research, Schellenberg to his credit attempted much more than had Jenkinson, theDutch, or other European authors to build bridges between archivists and librarians, and between
archivists caring for institutional records and those responsible for private manuscripts. If theresearchers found uses for records, then it can be assumed that the records must fill needs thatsociety felt, and, again, Schellenberg's privileged historians would in their work indirectly reflect aswell trends in society.
The third theoretical basis for appraisal is based on directly deciding the values and trends thatexisted at the time of the records' creation, and translating these into appraisal strategies andmethodologies. Inevitably, all societies (including the archivists residing in them) give greater or lesser
value to the way a society is structured and functions, and how individual citizens or groups of
citizens interact with that society. Such values given to particular functions in society will in turn
determine which related records are declared to be archival or which are not. The appraisal theory
that archivists such as Terry Cook and certain Australians advocate argues that such values insociety may be determined by the archivist by specifying the functions, programs and activities thatare undertaken in that society; and clients, customers, citizens, or groups who are affected by boththe functions and structures. Archival appraisal theory in this third option explores the nature of137

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these agents and acts, and the interconnections or interrelationships between them, and assigns
greater importance, or "value" to certain functional-structural factors as compared to others. This is
why it is known as "functional appraisal." As the Dutch archivist Hans Booms noted, because thefunctional context of creation and contemporary use establishes value, it is a provenance-based
approach to appraisal. Because it looks first at functions rather than records, it has been called a "topdown" approach. Because appraisal has traditionally been about deciding the value of records, thisapproach, which decides first the value of functions, has been called "macro-appraisal."Appraisal, or determining value, has been a relatively recent inclusion in archival practice. Record
keepers have been selecting archives over other records ever since archives were first created. The
establishment of public national archives in the West after the French Revolution led to a separation
between recordkeepers in the administration of government and archivists in national archives. In the
beginning archivists were happy to receive records selected by the administration, seeing their role
purely in a custodial light as being preservation, arrangement and description of records andproviding access to theses records. To enable them to do this these archivists developed a body oftheory based on the natural characteristics of records summed up in the principles of provenance andoriginal order. As time progressed, and as administration became far more complex and many morerecords (and archives) were created, some archivists sought to gain greater control over the selection
process. Where they were successful in doing so, they needed to show that they had the necessary
theory and experience to carry out this new and enhanced role. This role to some seemed to be in
opposition to traditional archival theory, as well as relieving the administration of some part at least of
its traditional responsibility for the permanent records.
Increasingly selection of archives has been subject to the broader trends in Western society that haveseen the serious questioning of the power, privilege and influence held by any one group, such as
historical researchers. Decisions are meant to be made to reflect the broader and more equitableinterests of society as a whole. Archivists increasingly see their role as to reflect what happened insociety at any one time. They do not see their role as trying to provide for future historians material
that may be of value just to those researchers. One generation can never anticipate what future
generations will want from the records. It used to be that most research was done about how
government operated and what they did. In the last 30 years or so the trend in Western society has
been research into how government decisions impacted on people in general, "the man and woman in
the street" as they are described. Not surprisingly there is little evidence in the archives about that,
because those making the appraisal and selection decisions were making decisions based on what
they themselves had studied, which were the big events such as wars and revolutions and faminesand disasters, with some changes to society's approach to how it managed itself. There are lots ofrecords about these things that still lie unread in most Western archives.
In 1988 South African archivist Pam Wernich wrote that archivists do nothing less than "moulding
the future of documentary heritage". Archivists determine "which elements of social life are imparted
to future generations..." and "the selection of records for preservation from the vast quagmire of
official documentation represents the greatest professional challenge and the most important area ofarchival activity."138

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My friend Terry Cook, who has done much to influence my own view about archives, wrote in 1999:"As a profession, we archivists need to realise the continual gravity of this task [of appraisaland selection]. We are literally creating archives. We are deciding what is remembered andwhat is forgotten, who in society is visible and who remains invisible, who has a voice and who
does not."What many archivists are saying now is that we cannot anticipate future research; we know we will
always get that wrong. All we can pretend to do is to tell future generations what we today thought
was important in our society. Archivists therefore need to become comfortable in working withothers to analyse the relationship between the creators of the records, the functions, programs andactivities they undertake and the impact of those functions, programs and activities on society ingeneral.
Thank you.

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