and the tasks required to carry them out; selection and evaluation of informa
tion used in these activities should reflect the appraised value of the tasks....
In general, information needed to reconstruct the critical functions of
government is what should be retained...."41 For the Dutch as for the Canadians,
appraisal is not focused, in the first instance, on the records or on individual
documents, but on the government functions or tasks or activities that generate
records.
The Canadian project is much broader in scope, however, for it also involves the
interaction of the citizen with the state and the impact of state actions on the
citizens as revealed through case file series, whereas the Dutch project focuses
primarily on policy and internal tasks and is not as concerned with case-level
implementation and related records. While the Dutch PIVOT project is radical in
its functional methodology, it remains more statist than societal in its focus.
Another new theoretical approach certainly employing "societal" rather than
"statist" thinking has been elaborated by Helen Samuels in the United States,
with her concept of the "documentation strategy." Recognizing that the scale of
modern record-keeping can only be understood by some level of analysis above
that of the record and its creating institution, Samuels conceived the documen
tation strategy as a multi-institutional, cooperative analysis that combines many
archives' appraisal activities in order to document the main themes, issues,
activities, or functions of society. The documentation strategy integrates in its
analysis official government and other institutional records with personal
manuscripts and visual media, as well as published information and even oral
[33] history. Its focus is not in the first instance provenancial, however, but on
themes such as educating college students or developing the computer
industry.42 Not surprisingly, therefore, the documentation strategy approach has
been criticized because it carries, unless applied on a very narrow and local basis,
the threat of overlapping themes/functions and thus the possibility of duplica
tion of archivists' research work and of records acquisition. Moreover, the
themes or subjects chosen will always be in dispute, and thus the approach
reflects some of the "weathervane" faults of the American Schellenbergian tradi
tion.43 For these reasons, the documentation strategy is most appropriate for the
world of personal manuscripts and non-corporate records rather than for
government or institutional records, or as a supplement to the latter to be used
in collection strategies to target related creators of private fonds for acquisition.
Samuels recognized this Schellenbergian fallacy in her earlier work, and has
since developed the concept of the "institutional functional analysis" in her
important book "Varsity Letters: Documenting Modern Colleges and
Universities", which, despite its title, has applicability for any institutional
archives. Here she argues that archivists first need, not unlike what Hans Booms
recommended in 1991, and as practised by the National Archives of Canada and
the Dutch PIVOT project, to research and understand the functions and activi
ties of their own institutions, and she outlines a precise methodology for such
functional analysis leading to a strategic plan to appraise each institution's
records. In retrospect, Samuels agrees that she really developed her two broad
concepts in reverse order of logic: once the "institutional functional analysis"
has allowed the archivist to appraise the records of his or her parent or spon
soring institution, then the archivist can intelligently engage in a wider, inter-
institutional "documentation strategy" to locate related personal records that
might complement or supplement the institutional archives. With both con
cepts, the key issue for Samuels is that, on a much broader scale than archivists
traditionally have done, "analysis and planning must precede collecting."44
By bridging the world of corporate records archivists with that of personal
manuscript archivists, by focusing on the entire interrelated information
universe (records in all media as well as publications and other cultural arti
facts) of all relevant creators rather than just a portion of them, by advocating a
research-based, functional approach to institutional appraisal rather than the
old search for "values" in the content of records, Samuels provides an important
direction for coping with the voluminous records of complex modern organiza
tions and contemporary societies, and thus for revitalizing archival theory.
Samuels' approach of searching for connections between formal institutional
archives and private manuscript archives was anticipated in Canada by the "total
archives" concept which, from the early 1970s, articulated a long-evolving
Canadian tradition.45 That tradition is certainly shared by other countries, but
rarely with the balance between public and private archives at the national level
that Canada displays, and indeed in virtually all non-business [34] archival insti
tutions across the country. The Canadian "total archives" approach involves the
integration of the official role of archives as guardians of their sponsors' contin
uing corporate requirements for recorded evidence of their transactions and the
cultural role of archives as preservers of societal memory and historical identity,
ARCHIEFWETENSCHAP
41 T.K. Bikson and E.F. Frinking, Preserving the Present: Toward Viable Electronic Records (The Hague, 1993),
pp. 33-34.
42 The original statement is Helen Willa Samuels, "Who Controls The Past," American Archivist 49 (Spring
1986), pp. 109-24. A later article updates the theme, and contains additional cross-references; see Richard
J. Cox and Helen W. Samuels, "The Archivist's First Responsibility: A Research Agenda to Improve the
Identification and Retention of Records of Enduring Value," American Archivist 51 (Winter-Spring 1988),
pp. 28-42. Two other oft-cited examples are Larry Hackman and Joan Warnow-Blewett, "The
Documentation Strategy Process: A Model and a Case Study," American Archivist 50 (Winter 1987), pp. 12-
47; and Richard J. Cox, "A Documentation Strategy Case Study: Western New York," American Archivist 52
(Spring 1989), pp. 192-200 (quotation is p. 193). The working out of Samuels's approach, without the
theoretical underpinnings, was first evidenced in Joan K. Haas, Helen Willa Samuels, and Barbara Trippel
Simmons, Appraising the Records of Modern Science and Technology: A Guide (Chicago, 1985).
43 For critiques, see David Bearman, Archival Methods, (Pittsburgh, 1989), pp. 13-15; and Terry Cook,
"Documentation Strategy," Archivaria 34 (Summer 1992), pp. 181-91.
44 Helen Willa Samuels, Varsity Letters: Documenting Modern Colleges and Universities (Metuchen, N.J.,
and London, 1992), p. 15, and passim. See also her overview of both documentation strategies and institu
tional functional analyses in Helen W. Samuels, "Improving our Disposition: Documentation Strategy,"
48
TERRY COOK WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE
Archivaria 33 (Winter 1991-92), pp. 125-40. Curiously, Samuels publicly launched (and later published in
this latter essay) her new approach at the same 1991 conference of the Association of Canadian Archivists
in Banff at which Hans Booms made the significant modification of his own ideas, in part because of his
concern that his older documentation plan of assessing public opinion might be confused with Samuels's
older documentation strategies, with which he disagreed! Both of these major thinkers on appraisal
matters, therefore, unbeknownst to each other, added significant new dimensions to their ideas, and
moved in the same provenance-based, functions-driven direction for the same reason at the same time, in
exact step with the new Canadian macroappraisal approach. For Booms on Samuels, see his "Uberlief-
erungsbildung," p. 32. For Samuels's own rejection of the American tradition of defining value through
use and for her insistence on the centrality of provenance, see Varsity Letters, pp. 8, 13, and 16. For
another, complementary approach to developing strategic plans for appraisal, see Joan D. Krizack,
Documentation Planning for the U.S. Health Care System (Baltimore, 1994).
45 The best analysis is Wilfred I. Smith, "'Total Archives': The Canadian Experience" (originally 1986), in
Nesmith, Canadian Archival Studies, pp. 133-50. For a supportive but critical view, see Terry Cook, "The
Tyranny of the Medium: A Comment on 'Total Archives'," Archivaria 9 (Winter 1979-80), pp. 141-49.
49