solely on the "descriptive science" of Casanova, Jenkinson, and the Dutch
authors, American archivists began their collective professional activity facing a
mounting crisis of contemporary records, only a tiny fraction of which could be
preserved as archives. When the National Archives in Washington was created in
1934, it inherited an awesome backlog of about one million metres of federal
records, with a growth rate of more than sixty thousand metres annually. By
1943, under the expansion of the state to cope with the Great Depression and
World War II, that growth rate had reached six hundred thousand metres
annually.19 This had two principal results: the first was the emergence of the
North American records management profession to help agencies cope with this
paper avalanche; and the second was a fundamental reorientation of the archi
val profession in North America, and wherever its influential ideas were read
and translated.
Margaret Cross Norton, a pioneering American archival writer and State
Archivist of Illinois, asserted in 1944 that, in light of these incredible volumes of
modern records, "it is obviously no longer possible for any agency to preserve all
records which result from its activities. The emphasis of archives work," she
noted in conscious contrast to Jenkinson, "has shifted from preservation of
records to selection of records for preservation." Philip C. Brooks, a key thinker
at the U.S. National Archives, was explicit in his criticism of Jenkinson's view
that archivists could safely remain "aloof from responsibility for how public
agencies managed their records," which would simply mean that "too many
records would be badly handled and even lost before archivists took custody of
them."20 From these concerns came the American "life cycle" concept, where
records were first organized and actively used by their creators, then stored for an
additional period of infrequent use in off-site record centres, and then, when
their operational use ended entirely, "selected" as archivally valuable and
transferred to an archives, or declared non-archival and destroyed. Like Norton,
Brooks argued for a close relationship throughout this whole "life cycle" between
archivists doing such selection of records for long-term preser[27]vation and
records managers organizing and caring for active records in departments: the
appraisal function, he argued, "can best be performed with a complete under
standing of the records of an agency in their relationships to each other as they
are created rather than after they have lain forgotten and deteriorating for
twenty years." Specifying how that selection work was actually to be done was
left for Theodore R. Schellenberg to summarize from his colleagues' work and
then articulate in his landmark books and reports. In developing these selection
or appraisal criteria, Schellenberg became "the father of appraisal theory in
the United States."21
Schellenberg asserted that records had primary and secondary values.
Primary value reflected the importance of records to their original creator;
secondary value their use to subsequent researchers. Primary value related to the
degree to which records served their creators on-going operational needs—not
unlike Jenkinson allowing the determination of long-term value to rest with the
"Administrator." Secondary values, which Schellenberg sub-divided into eviden
tial and informational values, were quite different, for they reflected the impor
tance of records for secondary research by subsequent users, not primary use by
their original creator. On this point, Schellenberg explicitly denied that his
"evidential value" was linked to Jenkinson's sense of archives as "evidence."
For Schellenberg, evidential values reflected the importance of records for
researchers, not for administrators, in documenting the functions, programmes,
policies, and procedures of the creator. These values were to be determined, after
appropriate research and analysis, by Schellenberg's archivist, not by Jenkinson's
administrator. Informational value, the other half of secondary value,
concerned the content of records relating to "persons, corporate bodies, things,
problems, conditions, and the like" incidental to "the action of the Government
itself." Deciding which informational content was important, and which was
not-deciding, that is, who gets invited into the archival "houses of memory"
and who does not—was again to be determined by the archivist, drawing on his or
her training as an historian and consulting with "subject-matter specialists," in
order to reflect as many research interests as possible.22 This search for informa
tional value was most important to Schellenberg, given its "usefulnessfor the
larger documentation of American life."23 Certainly consistent with his focus on
secondary research, Schellenberg to his credit attempted much more than the
Dutch trio or Jenkinson to build bridges between archivists and librarians, and
between archivists caring for institutional records and those responsible for
private manuscripts.24
Another major change in archival thinking was introduced by Schellenberg
and his American colleagues. The Dutch and Jenkinson believed that all material
created and received by an administration was "archives." For Schellenberg,
ARCHIEFWETENSCHAP
19 The figures are taken from James Gregory Bradsher, "An Administrative History of the Disposal of Federal
Records, 1789-1949," Provenance 3 (Fall 1985), pp. 1-21. I have made the rounded conversions from
imperial to metric measurements.
20 Margaret Cross Norton, "Records Disposal," in Thornton W. Mitchell, ed., Norton on Archives:
The Writings of Margaret Cross Norton on Archives and Records Management (Chicago, 1975), p. 232, and
"The Archivist and Records Management" in the same volume; Philip C. Brooks, "The Selection of Records
for Preservation," American Archivist 3 (October 1940), p. 226; on the contrast with Jenkinson, see Donald
R. McCoy, The National Archives: America's Ministry of Documents, 1934-1968 (Chapel Hill, 1978), p. 178.
Brooks' interventionist notion was re-articulated and explored further by Jay Atherton, "From Life Cycle to
Continuum: Some Thoughts on the Records Management-Archives Relationship," Archivaria 21 (Winter
1985-86), pp. 43-51, and the idea of front-end work by archivists on this records continuum underpins
much current thinking about electronic records. Atherton's continuum formulation was itself anticipated
by Ian Maclean of Australia: see his "An Analysis of Jenkinson's 'Manual of Archive Administration' in the
Light of Australian Experience," pp. 128-52; and Ian Maclean, "Australian Experience in Record and
Archives Management, American Archivist 22 (October 1959), pp. 387-418. The continuum concept has
recently been reactivated, with much broader implications for archival theory that are welcomingly inclusi
ve of all dimensions and sectors of archival work and ideas: social/cultural and legal/administrative
40
TERRY COOK WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE
accountabilities, public and private sectors, individual and corporate creators, document-focused rules of
evidence and functional/contextual linkages. See Frank Upward, "Australia and the Records Continuum,"
paper presented to the Society of American Archivists, San Diego, August 1996, publication forthcoming
in Archives and Manuscripts.
21 Ham, Selecting and Appraising Archives, p. 7. Schellenberg's fullest statement of his oft-cited principles is
"The Appraisal of Modern Public Records," National Archives Bulletin 8 (Washington, 1956), pp. 1-46.
An extract is available in Maygene F. Daniels and Timothy Walch, eds., A Modern Archives Reader:
Basic Readings on Archival Theory and Practice (Washington, 1984), pp. 57-70.
22 Quotations from ibid., pp. 58-63, 69.
23 Ham, Selecting and Appraising Archives, p. 8. Schellenberg's influence remains strong; a recent textbook
chapter asserted that his secondary values relating to "research uses" are still "the principal concern of
archivists." See Maygene F. Daniels, "Records Appraisal and Disposition," in Bradsher, Managing Archives,
p. 60.
24 For an analysis of Schellenberg's personal evolution, especially regarding private archives and archival rela
tions with librarians, see Richard C. Berner, Archival Theory and Practice in the United States: A Historical
Analysis (Seattle and London, 1983), pp. 47-64, and passim.
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