Although acknowledged as an essential archival function, appraisal is a complex process that is not fully understood. The authors examine the premises from which T.R. Schellenberg derived many of the practices used to appraise modern records and identify some problems in the widespread use of his approach. As an alternative, they offer a model comprised of the elements that should be considered when making an appraisal decision. Three interrelated categories of elements are discussed: value-of-information, costs-of-retention, and implications-of-the-appraisal-recommendations. While the focus is upon the appraisal of university administrative records, this model represents another step toward the development of a more systematic understanding of the entire appraisal process.

This article applies current research in the history of internal communication in business to archival appraisal of business documents. It examines the communication systems typical of three American business structures: (1) the traditional, owner-managed small firm that was the major form of American business before 1880 and still exists today; (2) the larger, functionally departmentalized firm that first developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century; and (3) the multidivisional firm, with autonomous divisions based on products or geographical regions, that first developed in the 1920s. The author discusses the implication of this view of business documents for appraisal of business collections, describes problems with some common approaches to appraisal, and suggests alternative approaches.

Many state archival agencies have done little to appraise and preserve office files created by state legislators, and few private repositories have collected these papers on a systematic or comprehensive basis. Professional literature that could provide guidance, either by example or by prescription, for the disposition of these files, is virtually nonexistent. This article attempts to take a first step to remedy that situation by identifying the kinds of papers most likely to appear in legislators' files, discussing the conditions of their creation and official use, and suggesting their possible usefulness to a variety of potential researchers. Rather than finding a model or a list of ready-made appraisal decisions, however, readers are asked to consider various alternatives and to draw their own conclusions based on the needs of individual repositories with their own collecting policies and obligations to parent agencies or user constituencies.

In 1887 the Congress delegated, for the first time, legislative and judicial powers to an executive agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission. Today, under such delegations and in accordance with the constitutional right to due process, federal agencies conduct quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative proceedings that create hundreds of thousands of case files a year. Certain agencies each year select for transfer to the National Archives case files of important cases in accordance with selection schemes that were devised as far back as forty years ago. This large and inexorably increasing body of records is seldom used and almost never for the reasons for which it was selected—importance and precedent. The agencies publish in considerable detail their important and precedential decisions and the reasoning leading to these decisions; and these published reports, rather than the case files, are widely used. The relatively few users of the case files are almost always seeking in these files incidental information concerning various subjects that usually have little or no relation to the importance of the cases. The article urges appraisers to keep in mind an obligation to the taxpayer of justifying the cost of maintaining in perpetuity such an ever-increasing body of records, and to the researcher of selecting cases for which there is a reasonable expectation that their future use will justify such cost. Attempting to balance these two considerations leads to the conclusion that such appraisals are not likely to approach perfection and that the best appraisal is that which does the least harm.