Diverse judgments may also spread the burden of preserving the documentation of a country among its various archival institutions, making one preserve what another may discard. Certain Federal records may thus be more appropriately preserved in regional depositories than at the National Archives because the information they contain is in such detail that it can be preserved only in concentrated form at the national level or because the information they contain is predominantly of a local or regional rather than a national interest. Thirdly, since appraisal standards cannot be made absolute or final, they should be applied with moderation and common sense. An archivist should keep neither too much nor too little. Fourthly, appraisals of records should not be based on intuition or arbitrary suppositions of value they should be based instead on thorough analyses of the documentation hearing on the matter to which the records pertain.
Analysis is the essence of archival appraisal.
While appraising the evidential values of records the archivist must take into account the entire documentation of the agency that produced them. He should not make his evaluations on a piecemeal basis or on the basis of individual organizational units within an agency. He should relate the particular group of records under consideration to other groups to understand its significance as evidence of organization and function. His appraisals, it is apparent, are dependable to the degree to which he has analyzed the origins and inter-relations of records. Similarly, while appraising the informational values of records, the archivist must take into account the entire documentation of society on the matter to which the information relates.