The author reflects on the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the Society of American Archivists by looking at its evolution, noting things which have changed for the better within SAA, and some things which have not. Forging a national identity and membership was not a steady, nor always consensual, process, but as an organization, the SAA reached a degree of maturity in the 1970s, only to be challenged by new developments in the 1980s and 1990s such as electronic records, certification and graduate education guidelines, and growing membership diversity which lead to the development of new sections and roundtables to serve new and varied interests. Challenges continue to lie ahead for the Society. However, if its fundamental components are sound, SAA should have the flexibility and determination to meet these challenges.

Intrinsic value was established in the early 1980s as a criterion of appraisal to identify those documents to be retained in their original form. Although perpetuated as an "objective" concept and a new appraisal standard for a particular class of documents, it becomes apparent through critical analysis that its application ascribes value to documents in much the same way as any other value in the traditional "taxonomy." What follows is an evaluation of the definition of intrinsic value, the criteria by which it is to be assigned, and its invocation in the appraisal process.

The author discusses the origins of diplomatics as a distant intellectual discipline in the second half of the seventeenth century. With the strong influence of classical philology and positiveness, diplomatics became more refined and specialized. The field created a structure which is formed by certain steps to be taken in the study and analysis of a document according to a taxonomy. He concludes by examining diplomatics in the 1950s when the field, though rooted in the analysis of ancient documents, tests the borderlines between documentary analysis and historical research.

The author looks at the science of diplomatics within the context of documents generated from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The study of documents according to set diplomatics categories was complicated by the sheer bulk of documentation due to two reasons—the decentralization of the chancery and the emergence of new types of documents linked to the development of the administrative monarchy. The author advocates the application of diplomatics methods to the study of these modern documents. He also presents several examples that underscore the importance of the form of the document in undertaking the decision processes and activities of an administrative body; also that text edition remains for our own time as well as for earlier periods, the ideal testing ground for the techniques of diplomatics.

The author probes the relationship between the traditional categories of diplomatics and the characteristics of modern records. He offers a more abstract view of the notion of what constitutes a document, and probes the importance of archival documents as a source of memory and truth. Diplomatics then, the author agrees, becomes a method to understand and recover sources of memory and, at the same time, reduce the uncertainty that the abundance of these same sources engenders. He offers new perspectives on the traditional diplomatics categories of form, genesis, tradition, edition, and selection.

This paper looks at the writings of selected organizational theorists and how they reflect or contradict diplomatic principles, particularly the concept of genèse or process. The potential contributions of organizational theorists to archival theory and management are discussed. Specifically, processes are examined both as standard operating procedures that can easily be articulated and as work practices that evolve over time and often defy explanation. Finally, the relationships between processes, records, and record-keeping systems are explored along with issues of accountability and organizational culture. It is argued that a more sophisticated view of organizational processes can change the interpretative context and thus alter archivists' understanding of the role of records and recordkeeping systems in organizations.

The author challenges the archival community to consider new sources and formulation for the understanding of contemporary documentation. He looks at the evolution of the information culture from the scriptora, through print culture onto our own post-print culture. Documentation culture has evolved as well from transaction-based to more organizationally sophisticated bureaucracies. He offers two models for the evaluation of the nature of organizational design and behavior, and argues that through these models, new categories can be developed for assigning to the documentation produced by these organizations. All this leads to a new conceptual framework for the very old discipline of diplomatics.

Concerned about the potential of new technologies for the alteration of photographs, the author argues for the need to establish a new diplomatic for images. She explores the institutional and artistic origins of photographic images, and argues that the same principles used in source criticism by historians to evaluate documents should now also be applied to photographic images.

The author considers the basic building blocks of diplomatics as they might pertain to a more nuanced analysis of visual images. She argues that diplomatics offers archivists an orientation by which to consider the photographic process through its refined notions of what constitutes authority, authenticity, purpose, and extrinsic and intrinsic elements. By creating and applying a typology for institutionally based photographic media according to these notions, archivists could better appraise, preserve, and represent these images.