Archival appraisal practice in U.S. state archives and records management programs

Abstract

The quantity of government records has grown dramatically since the rapid development of information technology starting in the mid-twentieth century. This ever-expanding body of records has challenged the limited resources of government archives. Though U.S. government archivists constantly try to identify valuable government records among the geometrically increasing total, in order to justify spending public money on their preservation, little is known about how U.S. state archives and records management programs go about the process. The study discussed in this paper is the first to empirically investigate nationwide archival appraisal practice in U.S. state archives and records management programs. The study answered two research questions: How do U.S. state archivists and records managers conceptually define archival appraisal? How do U.S. state archivists and records managers practice archival appraisal of state government records? The study used an online survey and interviews for data collection and SPSS software and NVivo8 software for data analysis. This paper discusses the research topic and concludes with recommendations for practitioners and further studies.