This article describes Sir Hilary Jenkinson's attitudes toward archival appraisal and a selection of critical reactions, implicit and explicit, to those attitudes. A reading of Jenkinson's writings juxtaposed against a reading of selected critical responses to his appraisal philosophy will reveal that these ostensibly opposed approaches are not speaking to each other in such a way that the latter necessarily rebuts the former. This analysis intends to investigate whether Jenkinson's attitudes toward appraisal and those of his opponents are mutually exclusive, or whether they might be in some way compatible. I propose that instead of getting appraisal incorrect, Jenkinson appears to have merely gotten it incomplete; if his recommendations for appraisal are not perfectly scalable to modern archives, then they are at least a precondition to principled selection decisions. Jenkinson might be criticized for failing to prescribe grounded techniques for appraisal. However, it can be argued that he accomplished something much more important by laying the prerequisite abstract groundwork for the development of thoughtful, rigorous, and principled methods of appraising records in the often fraught practical context. He achieved this by animating archival ideals and emphasizing that selection is never, ever lossless.

By deconstructing Jenkinson's arguments in support of particular archival characteristics that determine record value and inform appraisal theory, especially interrelatedness and impartiality, and by analyzing select critics' arguments, such as those of T. R. Schellenberg, W. Kaye Lamb, F. Gerald Ham, and Hans Booms, I will examine how the criticisms against Jenkinson's appraisal theory are relevant to the initial points made by Jenkinson. The general impression is that they work off of one another and construct a dialectic that establishes the parameters of the challenges of appraisal and sets the stage for constructive conceptual and practical developments in this arena.

It is uncontroversial that Sir Hilary Jenkinson's Manual of Archive Administration, first written in 1922, is a foundational text of archival theory.¹ Among Jenkinson's greatest contributions has been the articulation of the integral characteristics of archives: impartiality, authenticity, interrelatedness, and naturalness.² In terms of appraisal, two of these, interrelatedness and impartiality, are core. It is remarkably easy to misconstrue the term “impartiality.” To be clear, it does not imply that the records or their authors are trustworthy. Impartiality, wrote Terry Eastwood, is “Jenkinson's word for the character of truthfulness archives have because the force of having to conduct affairs causes them to speak to the matter at hand, not to posterity.”³ For his part, Jenkinson explained that impartiality arises from the logical extrapolation of the inability of records themselves to “speak” to the future. In turn, “interrelatedness” refers to the “functional and structural bonds that bind the documents together in a whole whose integrity is important to their meaning, significance, and value as evidence.” ⁴ This has otherwise been expressed by Luciana Duranti as “the archival bond.”⁵

But by which logic can we say that the construction of Jenkinson's characteristics of archives is sound? Breaking down Jenkinson's ideas on impartiality produces a reasoned chain: because archives are created as a necessary fallout of routine and are “a physical part of the facts which has happened to survive,”⁶ and because routine at the transactional level does not have an agenda beyond the fulfillment of the transaction, therefore records, as agents of routine, do not have an agenda beyond the fulfillment of a transaction. For this reason, they are called impartial, and, because of this impartiality, they are able to communicate certain objective data about the contexts and facts of their creation that other information artifacts cannot. To support Jenkinson's notion of interrelatedness, it is possible to break it down syllogistically again. From diplomatics we know that modern bureaucratic acts and procedures are not encapsulated neatly in discrete documents but are rather fragmented across many documents.⁷ It follows that if individual records cannot express complex bureaucratic processes and procedures, and if the representation of suites of processes is what informs historiography and can fulfill other functions such as reinforcement of rights, documentation of human agency, formation of patrimony, edification and education of individuals and institutions, and so on, then the network of relationships among records is integral to the meaningfulness of an archives. Logically, these conclusions, as based on the premises, are valid. Intuitively, these conclusions are also well formed and sound; if they were not, records would not occupy the privileged position that they do.

These conclusions on the signature characteristics of archives are what color Jenkinson's attitude toward appraisal, which is typified by a commitment to absolute nonintervention in practice. This is because selection activities simply cannot be reconciled with the conditions that provide impartiality and interrelatedness. Even as late as 1944, and while acknowledging that the influx of bureaucratic papers was anything but manageable, Jenkinson maintained that the archivist's role is properly one of custodianship and that the ideal archival aggregation is one that has not passed through processes of modification, evaluation, or even curious inquiry by the archivist. He wrote, for example, that the archivist must be cautious and “must not turn student,”⁸ and he delimited the correct activities of the archivist to acquiring, preserving, and making available those written documents that, through processes external to the archivist him- or herself, have “emerge[d] in new glory as historical evidences.”⁹

Jenkinson set up an intractable conflict between the best interests of the past-oriented archival aggregation and the inevitably present-oriented agenda of the archivist. In Jenkinson's terms, it is simply outside the realm of an archivist's interest and capacity to pronounce any assignment of value on archives that would influence their care (“physical defense”¹⁰), except in the very specific case of weeding exact copies.¹¹ It is important to note that Jenkinson stated that he was not opposed to appraisal and selection per se, provided that such activities are completely benign and do nothing to undermine the archives as originally received.¹² At the same time, he maintained—and with logic consistent with the pronouncement of the principles in the first place—that when some records and not others are kept, the archival bond within the aggregation is ruptured, and, by virtue of the archivist making deliberate choices to speak to posterity, impartiality is undermined. Jenkinson's views on appraisal arose most demonstrably out of these two characteristics of archives, and he formulated his opinions on appraisal through rational processes. He believed that archives represent an objective reality, and that, with the proper analysis or sensory prosthetics, the wholeness of their meaning can be detected and discerned. This is expressed in his treatment of the “Golden Rule,” which proposed that it is possible that conditions in four dimensions can be faithfully captured, stored in archives, and then reconstructed later through the right type of analysis.¹³ The cardinal characteristics of archives that he outlined were simply the codified descriptions of the threads that would permit this retrospective reconstruction; by enumerating them, he was able to explain the ways in which the potential for this reconstruction of reality could be compromised. Today, we are much less “positive” about what we know, or are even capable of knowing, about reality, and archives are not exempt from this uncertainty. Was Jenkinson's first “mistake” to assume that reality is in any way knowable? Terry Cook suggested that Jenkinson, rather than being (from our vantage point) a naïve disciple of a reductionist post-Enlightenment epistemology, was rather a relic of an orientation of morals belonging to a less cynical era. “Our world of lying presidents and corrupt commissars,” wrote Cook, “would have been entirely foreign, and doubtless repugnant, to him.”¹⁴ Continuing, Cook explained that Jenkinson's faith in knowable truth, as “revealed through archival documents,”¹⁵ was a product of the prevailing empirical positivism in which he was deeply steeped.

In Jenkinson's view, the ideal and only acceptable approach to archival appraisal and selection is to abstain altogether, and instead, “prevent the accumulation from occurring at all.”¹⁶ In effect, Jenkinson seemed to propose that the archivist influence, or even control, the records administrator, saying that “we must see that [he] does not revert too completely to primitive habits and destroy unreasonably.”¹⁷ I will address this tack and the paradoxes it implies in the discussion and conclusion of this article.

As sound as Jenkinson's principles may have been in form, and putting aside for a moment the practical difficulties of conforming to his prescriptions, Jenkinson was more grudgingly respected in his time than he was loved. He is blamed for preventing the Public Record Office's transition into modernity, preferring to continue focusing on medieval documents during his tenure there as deputy keeper. An internal memo states that Jenkinson was a “person of strong personality [with] fixed ideas on many subjects, large and small. The process of administration under [Jenkinson] consists to a large extent of endeavoring to guess what his view on any issue is likely to be. Nor is it profitable to entertain independent views.”¹⁸ Described as forwarding a view too narrow to be of utility and too exclusive to profit from acknowledgment of diverse, younger, and less traditional archives,¹⁹ Jenkinson was thought of as an unpleasant and dusty antique curio, mocked for being “not really interested in anything that has happened since 1450.”²⁰ As valuable as his thoughts are on the subject of the “sanctity of evidence”²¹ and the role of the archivist in the “moral defense”²² of said sanctity, in the time since the Manual of Archive Administration was written, a long line of archivists has cited, analyzed, and challenged the Jenkinsonian view of appraisal. The following section surveys several reactions to Jenkinson's ideas on appraisal throughout the twentieth century and attempts to briefly examine whether and how they address, rebut, integrate, or build on Jenkinson's principles. Jenkinson was at least aware that his appraisal approach did not offer a solution and stated so clearly: “upon that point [of reconciling impartiality and selection] we have no suggestions to offer.”²³

However, other archivists did have suggestions to offer. Schellenberg's ideas on appraisal were rooted mainly in the practical delivery of archival services and in staunching the unmanaged proliferation of records—especially after World War II.²⁴ In his criticism of Jenkinson, Schellenberg did not mince words and is famous for his denouncement of Jenkinson: “In my professional work, I'm tired of having an old fossil cited to me as an authority in archival matters. I refer to Sir Hilary Jenkinson.”²⁵ In spite of this, it is clear that Schellenberg did not necessarily reject the values inherent in protecting impartiality and interrelatedness. In relation to this, Terry Cook noted that the supposed opposition between Jenkinson as theorist and Schellenberg as practitioner is misplaced and that each was committed to both archival theory and execution. As Cook noted, “Jenkinson was never afraid to tackle the practical problems of archives administration, however much he believed the archivist was directed in his work by principle. Similarly, Schellenberg's interest in developing ideas attuned to modern conditions does not disguise his interest in the principles guiding archival work.” ²⁶

Jenkinson, as a practitioner, was acutely concerned with the grounded aspects of archive making. Drawing from The Selected Writings of Sir Hilary Jenkinson, archivist Wayne Murdoch suggested that Jenkinson's writings might be sorted into three categories that all address the hands-on logistics of archives: 1) methods for conducting what we might define as diplomatic criticism (including paleography, analysis of seals, etc.); 2) responses to the crisis of recordkeeping presented by the Second World War; and 3) prescriptions for archives and archivists, including classification of archival records.²⁷ Furthermore, toward the end of his career, Jenkinson recommended that the novice archivist strive toward becoming a “Jack-of-all-trades, with some knowledge of sorting, arranging, listing, book binding, repair, photography, and other fields”—all demonstrably practical endeavors.²⁸

Neither was Jenkinson divested from the exigencies of archival public service. The impulse to serve the public was for him the best (and perhaps only) motivation for the actuation of meaningful archives, and, owing to the undeniable and accelerating propagation of records, such archives might only be obtained via reasoned appraisal and selection. He wrote forcefully in 1957 that “The Archivist's career is one of service,” and that “He exists in order to make other people's work possible.” Via the archivist's devotion to “the Sanctity of Evidence” and “the Conservation of every scrap of Evidence attaching to the Documents committed to his charge, his aim to provide, without prejudice or afterthought, for all who wish to know the Means of Knowledge. . . . The good Archivist is perhaps the most selfless devotee of Truth the modern world produces.”²⁹

Schellenberg, as a theoretician, developed his now well-known signature theoretical constructs of evidential value and informational value among archival documents.³⁰ In his master's thesis, Richard Stapleton discussed Schellenberg's commitment to provenance as a guiding principle in arrangement, description, and appraisal, which reveals that evidential value might be understood as a species or descendant of Jenkinson's idea of impartiality. “Since records,” Stapleton wrote, interweaving words from Schellenberg (in italics), “‘are usually produced to accomplish some purpose, some activity’—unlike publications which are produced to ‘elucidate some subject’—they should then be arranged according to the manner in which they were created and not according to the subjects to which they pertain.”³¹ Furthermore, Stapleton shed light on the very same page of Schellenberg's understanding of and respect for the characteristic of interrelatedness, which is parallel, and not at all in defiance of Jenkinson's treatment. As invoked and contextualized by Stapleton, Schellenberg posited (in his 1965 follow-up to Modern Archives: The Management of Archives) that “the content of individual documents that are the product of activity can be fully understood only in the context with other documents that relate to the same activity.”³²

Implicitly, Schellenberg's main counterargument against Jenkinsonian appraisal (or, abstention from appraisal, to put a finer point on it) would be that the quality of unperturbed impartiality and interrelatedness does not serve the function of the archives, which is ultimately to make materials available to researchers³³ and, furthermore, that the impartial nature of archives is only half of the story. Schellenberg elucidated the other half of this story in his delineation of records management and archival practice values, which might well have accepted, expected, and counted on the Jenkinsonian vision of impartiality and interrelatedness.

Schellenbergian selection in particular and American selection in general, conducted in a principled manner, is the process by which the meaning of archives is refined, magnified, and contextualized. Commending earlier German ideas regarding appraisal, Schellenberg wrote approvingly of the German practice of acknowledging that some records are “obviously worthless”:

They argue that the removal of such items does not necessarily involve a dissection of an organic body that will destroy its life, but that the process gives a registry vitality, making apparent its essential characteristics—its arrangement and content—and making it more usable. The selection process, in fact, is now regarded as one of a number of steps by which a registry is transformed into an “archival group.”³⁴

In sum, Schellenberg agreed that records are created in faithful representation of the realization of the transactions they carried out, but that this “evidential value” is something separate than what should dictate long-term retention and preservation.³⁵ Schellenberg defined this quality as demanding preservation explicitly and, in the process, created the mythic divide between records management and archival practice: by declaring that the records deserving permanence are “those records of any public or private institution which are adjudged worthy of permanent preservation for reference and research purposes and which have been deposited or selected for deposit in an archival institution.”³⁶ Closer scrutiny of this statement reveals that it is nearly perfectly in line with Jenkinson's concept of how selection—with respect to maintaining the integrity of impartiality and to a lesser extent interrelatedness—should be done, if done at all, and will be taken up in the discussion and conclusion of this article.

Importantly, Schellenberg presented an appraisal methodology that, in stark contrast with Jenkinson, considered future scholarly interest as a core criterion for selection and, by extension, in the American context at least, the making of bona fide archival aggregations in the first place. As Schellenberg made so clear in his definitions of archives versus records, consideration of future use and critical judgment as to what constitutes history guided his archival philosophy. Interestingly, we are seeing the pendulum swing again, as the characteristics of archives enunciated by Jenkinson are now decoding how and why user-centered appraisal methods are problematic.³⁷ Cook wrote that “all acts of societal remembering, in short, are culturally bound and have momentous implications. As Czech novelist Milan Kundera asserts, ‘the struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ But whose memory? And who determines the outcome of the struggle?”³⁸ This increasing uncertainty as to where exactly to stop adding context and details when trying to better represent users in all their diversity might well lead to a paralyzed, yielding, and lenient archival ethic and archivists tasked with the impossible duty of creating a Theory of Everything in archival practice.

According to Trevor Livelton, Schellenberg proposed sufficient, rather than necessary, conditions for discerning archival documents. The difference between American records and English archives clarifies the requirement, for the American approach, that documents retained for the long term must already exhibit documentary value.³⁹ The contrast between “necessary,” “sufficient,” and “perfect” versus “adequate” are themes that shall inform the remainder of this survey of Jenkinson's respondents.

Moving north of the forty-ninth parallel, from the Canadian perspective, W. Kaye Lamb was invested in the view that Jenkinson's approach to appraisal was out of touch with reality. Like Schellenberg, he positioned himself as a hands-on archivist looking for workable solutions to the influx of bureaucratic papers. In his seminal essay, “The Fine Art of Destruction,” Lamb cited Jenkinson's Manual repeatedly and clearly respected the classic volume.⁴⁰ Moreover, Lamb adopted Jenkinson's view that appraisal and selection ought to be carried out, as much and as frequently as possible, by the agent of Jenkinson's so-termed administrator, the records manager, before the archives subsumes the aggregations:

The basic purpose of the records manager is to reduce volume. This he seeks to accomplish in two ways. First, he tries by more careful planning and supervision, to reduce the number of records that are brought into existence. . . . His aim is to see that an absolute minimum of material is retained permanently.⁴¹

While Lamb credited Jenkinson with envisioning a prototype of records management even in his 1922 treatise, citing Jenkinson's admission that an office might implement retention schedules and classification schemes the better to reduce its records transfers to the archives,⁴² he also challenged that administrators should be invested with the power of exclusive discretion over what is saved and what is kept, owing to their shorter view of history. On this point, it might seem that Lamb and Jenkinson diverged considerably in their ideas of the nature and value of impartiality, since Lamb took it as a matter of course that the archivist should control selection, precisely to be able to speak to posterity.

It is important to further dissect Lamb's suggestion that the administrative departments responsible for primary records creation are not the trustworthy fonts of records that he perceived Jenkinson to have claimed.⁴³ On this point, he seems to be correct that the administrators at the level of primary record creation in fact do not organize themselves or their records in a “centralized, tautly controlled, and summarized fashion.”⁴⁴ However, it may be something of a misreading to attribute a hope for such to Jenkinson; he asserted not that the received archival aggregation is good, or trustworthy, or organized, but rather that the aggregation is perfect only inasmuch as the traces left behind are the real product, shaped by the real decisions of the authority that created them. Lamb's is without a doubt a valuable conclusion, but it does not directly rebut Jenkinson's model of impartiality.

Going beyond the proposition that archival aggregations as selected by the creator do not tell an organized or controlled story, American archivist F. Gerald Ham was especially forceful in pointing out the ethical gaps in Jenkinson's appraisal model. Ham starkly, but correctly, commented on the central Jenkinsonian dilemma about appraisal: “Allowing the creator to designate what should be the archival record solves the problems of complexity, impermanence, and volume of contemporary records by ignoring them.”⁴⁵ Ham proposed that deferring the task of archival selection to bureaucrats simply because of the paralytic impasse set up between the maintenance of “impartiality” and “interrelatedness” and the need to winnow archival holdings to manageable and meaningful levels, in effect makes the archivist complicit in an ideological metanarrative.⁴⁶ Invoking Ham, Cook stated that, at its most extreme implementation, “Jenkinson's approach would allow the archival legacy to be perverted by administrative whim or state ideology . . . archival records [attain] value solely by the degree to which they [reflect] the ‘official’ view of history.”⁴⁷ It is my impression that Jenkinson was not necessarily unconcerned with these problems, but that he was articulating something parallel but different; a quality of records that Chris Hurley enunciated more poetically in his description of archival “ambience,” wherein “records are timebound, by which it is meant that they are evidence and event locked in time.”⁴⁸ However questionable the choices of the creating administrators, their choices are reverberations of the “ambience” of the records' creation.

German archivist Hans Booms, in addition to challenging the Jenkinsonian view, went further to outline a methodology for appraisal: analyze inductively, attend to the smaller social structures, confer with scholars, and invest oneself in creating an archives that reflects contemporary values.⁴⁹ He addressed the practical obstacles with clarity, stating simply that dealing with all records represents an impossible task; not only are resources such as money and time scarce, but the cognitive output required to tackle such a task would be a waste of human mental capital.⁵⁰

Booms's methods of inductive analysis are in no way at odds with the qualities of impartiality and interrelatedness; the bottom-up method would permit the type of retrospective close work for which Jenkinson implicitly hoped. This represents the discernment of the objective “whole” via the “Golden Rule.” The analytical approach proposed by Booms is the logical next step; only now, the archivist feels confident, working from a contemporary point of view, in making possible selections in context. Really, this synthesizes Jenkinson's appraisal attitude and builds upon it in a way that does not present conflict with the principles, as long as they are written largely and flexibly.

As discussed previously, Jenkinson suggested that the only way to mitigate the problem of appraisal and selection is to have a hand in controlling the records manager at the time of record creation. This is curious, because he also was clear that archivists should hold themselves separate from historiographers or even from students of history. How is it consistent for Jenkinson to recommend that archivists are out of line to be in a position to influence the interpretation of already created records, but not out of line to be in a position to influence the very forging of the information in artifacts in the first place? In a convoluted way, in this blank, conflicted space between Jenkinson's refusal to allow archivists to engage in licit appraisal activities, his edict that record proliferation must be aborted at record conception, and his anachronistic confidence in organs of power, Jenkinson has created fertile conditions for the erudite explications and solutions offered by his successors.

It is less than revelatory to say that Jenkinson's stated solution to the proliferation problem is completely paradoxical to the flow of time; the impossible volume of records is a reality, and a recommendation that the problem should not exist is of limited value. However, it seems that his advice should still be taken seriously; as they say, the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, and the second best time to plant a tree is now.

To conclude, Jenkinson's appraisal methodology is conspicuous by its total absence. Subsequent treatments that try to fill the need for appraisal methodology invariably also have a blank spot between the “assign value” and the “select accordingly” stages of the appraisal process. It is unexpected then that Jenkinsonian principles of impartiality and interrelatedness are the enthymemes in discussions of methodology that elucidate just how value might be assigned in a practical and rigorous way. Jenkinson illuminated just what archivists are tasked with considering, and risking, when deciding what to keep permanently and what to exclude. Opposition, real or imagined, to his points writes a valuable dialogue that informs better appraisal practice.

Archivists today know that appraisal is unavoidable; it must necessarily be an exercise in judgment and not a mechanical process. The polemic between the specter of Jenkinson and his archival heirs is not one of impasse; rather, it is a site of dynamic and productive inquiry and theoretical development. To invoke a familiar construction, the archival ethics conceived by Jenkinson can be seen as “Platonic forms” and are best conceptualized not as objects of aspiration, but as benchmarks for making sense of the often impossible and always necessary archival activity of appraisal. Proponents of Platonic forms posit that “true scientific understanding must always attempt to go beyond particular observation and ascend to the more universal realm of theoretical models and mathematical laws.”⁵¹ To ask whether those who categorically typify Jenkinson's appraisal attitude as absurd or futile in practice are correct or incorrect in their interpretation somehow misses the point. The real question is whether Jenkinson is helpful. To answer this, Cook sagely instructed that “the trick for neo-Jenkinsonian enthusiasts is to follow the spirit, not the letter, of his magisterial assertions.”⁵²

Jenkinson's treatment of archives may not have extended to define the steps, but it laid the foundation for performing appraisal in a principled manner, which is even more valuable in a postmodern setting where context is all and where nothing is certain. Consideration and respect for Jenkinsonian constructs of impartiality and interrelatedness are built into the guiding ethic of even his most celebrated rival:

There is no substitution for careful analytical work.⁵³

—T. R. Schellenberg

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