Recent intellectual debate has examined questions of national, ethnic, gender, class, and community identities, of individual and group identity, and of the formation of identity. A spectrum of positions has emerged from this debate. On the other, identity is conceived of as social fiction, constructed culturally for political and historical reasons. However, on the whole, serious scholars have rejected the former view. Archivists should be cognizant of this fact because they are major players in the business of identity politics, whether they are conscious of it or not.
Archivists appraise, collect, and preserve the props with which notions of identity are built.
In turn, notions of identity are confirmed and justified as historical documents validate their authority. Author Bio Elisabeth Kaplan is the archivist at the Charles Babbage Institute for the History of Information Processing at the University of Minnesota. She has worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Archives, the audiovisual department of the John F. Kennedy Library, and the archives and special collections department at Iowa State University. Developing evaluation standards for public television programs requires a historical understanding of the complex organizational structure of the American public broadcasting system, a sense of the political issues underlying its programming, and a feeling for the institutional culture of the system. These considerations along with traditional and more recent archival appraisal theory inform an interpretive and comparative evaluation model, which is demonstrated on four different types of public television programs.