position paper
It is more than clear that it will be impossible to keep
everything forever. Appraisal is the de facto standard
procedure for selecting what to keep and what to throw out in
the archival world. A possible definition of appraisal is
therefore given in the following:
Appraisal is the process of evaluating business
activities to determine which records need to be captured and
how long the records need to be kept to meet business needs,
the requirements of organisational accountability and
community expectations.
1
Appraisal therefore consists of the following main building
blocks:
comprehensive analysis of the records in question,
evaluation of business activities and legal restrictions and
their impact on the decision whether to keep the records or
not,
determination of the feasibility of preserving the records,
and
making a final appraisal decision.
Further, the process of re-appraisal plays an important role in
the continuous assessment of material held; it is not a
momentary decision by any means.
It could therefore be seen, somewhat cynically perhaps, as
paternalism over generations to follow, choosing what future
generations will have access to. In a way, it could be seen as
severe censorship based on reasons seemingly
incomprehensible to the vast majority of non-archivists out
there. The main point of critique we bring up in this article,
however, is the assumption that it is possible to rightfully
choose what material is most valuable, particularly for the
future, and that single fair-minded persons can make these
decisions in a just way.
[1] The National Archives of Australia
http://www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/disposal/appraisal/intro.html
Why Appraisal is not Utterly Useless
and why its not the Way to Go either.
A Provocative Position Paper (PPP)
[ This is one in a series of thought provoking and controversial position papers on a range of issues
surrounding digital preservation. It is our intention that these papers will promote vigorous debate
within the digital preservation community and encourage people to think about digital preservation
in new and innovative ways by exploring and challenging the received wisdom. These papers in do
not necessarily represent the views of DigitalPreservationEurope nor our recommendations on the
subject discussed. ]
In trying to keep the most important or most valuable
content, appraisal actively favours mainstream values, whilst
subcultural influences are effectively eradicated.
This process will skew future generations perceptions of our
society so that they might believe that pop music video clips
are an adequate reflexion of contemporary life, similar to the
idealised view of the middle ages held by many people.
This process works the same way that we, almost by
definition, can only look at history tendentially. Rather than
the everlasting, tremendous effort to shape the way we will be
looked at, concentrating on random selection of material
might be the best, if not the only way to reduce the volume of
data to be dealt with while still maintaining an authentic and
unbiased view of our history. It is important to remember
that the decision to submit items to an archive is a form of
pre-selection anyway and any further appraisal step can only
lead to even stronger distortions. Moreover, like it or not, a
certain degree of randomness will occur in every appraisal
process anyway. Prominent examples of appraisal will be
explored below.
Examples of monumentally successful, biased, or simply
outrageously unjustified, appraisal are offered by the most
diverse flavours of dictatorships ranging from the extreme
right to the extreme left. Many 20th century regimes are very
prominent examples of this, albeit virtually every other
period of time has seen similar developments. Most certainly
public support for them will be severely limited and
numerous research endeavours try to alleviate the damage
done. By highlighting this most extreme form of appraisal
based on the world view of the small number of people in
charge at a certain time we are able to show that this is
definitely not the right way of handling information and
independent thought.
Robert Neumayer and Andreas Rauber, Vienna University of Technology, Institute for Software Technology and Interactive Systems
{neumayer,rauber}@ifs.tuwien.ac
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Child pornography might not be worth preserving per se, but
the fact that it was there is definitely to be kept for future
generations.
Random selection of material will theoretically do this.
In addition to the material itself, random selection in a
collection of sufficient size would also include newspaper
articles on child abuse illustrating that the vast majority of
most modern societies condemn the issue, rightfully so we
may add. Similar arguments hold for spam e-mail and other
nuisances of our times.
Isnt it true that some of the graffiti found at archaeological
sites like Pompei have proven to be the most valuable and
scientifically interesting artefacts? Without doubt, these
examples are rather eye-catching and bold but make clear one
point: acting as a guardian for future generations cannot be
justified by reasons of dignity or decency; hushing up simply
wont do.
We propose the supersession of appraisal, in favour of a
process of random selection to complement the preservation
of material in its entirety where completeness is essential.
Current appraisal practices feature utterly complex or
seemingly complicated appraisal functions that require a vast
amount of resources in terms of skilled staff as well as
equipment. Rather than this procedure we propose to select
material on a random basis. Instead of pedantically
examining every single submission, we suggest to simply
keep every n-th instance submitted. This should, of course, be
done respecting an archives physical size and storage
capacity. In other words: The larger the archive the larger
the percentage of instances kept. Scalability therefore is a
problem handled very easily in stark contrast to the current
appraisal processes.
However, there might still be functional applications for
appraisal. The world has changed, and much more emphasis
has been placed on not keeping rather than keeping. Privacy
issues have been the subject of many political as well as
philosophical debates for a long time. Raised public
awareness along with prominent cases of the misuse of
private data have justifiably made appraisal important for a
seemingly different application namely to forget rather than
to keep. So everythings not lost and appraisal can still play
an important role in records and data management, even
though under quite different circumstances.
Examples of its application are surveillance as well as
medical data, information about religious beliefs, and from
many other delicate categories.
Again, random selection may offer a surprisingly high level
of privacy protection as information deliberately left
incomplete, by definition, cannot be abused that easily in a
systemic manner.
This, in combination with planned omission in the
preservation process (or, if collected, to be disposed of within
a short period of time) may provide a feasible and cost-
effective solution.
Additionally, appraisal and disposal should not be confused
with access provision. Keeping material locked away over
long periods of time itself, will further protect the privacy of
affected individuals or parties.
To sum up, the main advantages of random selection over
appraisal are:
A fair and unbiased view of contemporary life
Simplicity and cost effectiveness (yes, appraisal in its
current form costs a lot of money)
Privacy protection
A futureproof process
We therefore define quality in the context of preservation as
providing the fairest and most authentic view of cultural
heritage possible. Random sampling from a sufficiently large
collection is the least biased way of achieving these goals. In
this sense, quantity leads to quality once more.
Taking into account the aforementioned arguments, the only
reason left to support appraisal is tradition one of the last
reasons used to retain slavery if we recall. Surely, this is a far
cry, but it serves to illustrate that any form of subjective
appraisal is an unfair process by design. We propose to break
with tradition for rational reasons.
Our cultural heritage is certainly well worth the effort needed
to provide a fair, unbiased, and authentic view for future
generations.
Having presented all the main points, we draw the
conclusion that we should abandon appraisal in its current
form. We propose to replace it with a three-fold strategy
(partly relying on appraisal as a viable means of providing a
realistic and authentic view on our past):
1. Random selection for the largest part of appraisal
functions,
2. Manual/traditional appraisal for reasons of completeness,
and
3. Access limitations for reasons of privacy protection.
The remaining questions are whether quality in appraisal can
be increased with extra effort or whether it has no chance of
winning the battle against a purely statistic approach at all.
We say it cannot win; prove us wrong.
Robert Neumayer and Andreas Rauber, Vienna University of Technology, Institute for Software Technology and Interactive Systems
{neumayer,rauber}@ifs.tuwien.ac
