As a rule, only the (conjectural) outgoing letters from the schools authority were
present, not the incoming, complementary documents. These are probably still in
the paper files registry, although there is no indication of the link in the
corresponding electronic documents. In the case of emails, with few exceptions,
the attachments were missing, the replies or the beginning message were not
included, and/or the hyperlink contained was no longer current. The numerous
duplicates were also a major problem. It appeared that, although a couple of the
individual staff folder areas were organized very well, with comprehensible folder
structures and folder names which gave a good indication of their contents, in the
majority of cases the shared drive users appear to have operated in the manner
suggested by the Paradigm Project: 'Some record creators are increasingly reliant on
search and display technologies to present data: little is deleted and the creation of
logical directory structures as a means of arranging material is abandoned'.7 This
is exactly the situation that Bischoff described in 2014, when he noted that
'Experience shows that data "wander" through systems or, more precisely,
are passed through them'.8
2. Theoretical approaches: Should we appraise?
This was a completely new situation for the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg. There
is a great deal of literature in German on the appraisal of databases and software
applications, but unfortunately very little on our particular problem, except for the
valuable contributions of the Federal Archives on shared drives and Ulrich Schludi's
analysis of shared drives in business enterprises.9 It was also impossible to find
anything definitive in English on the problem of appraising substantially
unstructured shared drives, an impression confirmed by correspondence with
Luciana Duranti, Professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Sloyan
also observes that 'Given that quantity is widely acknowledged to be a hindrance, it
is surprising to find there is little published advice on how to tackle this or how to
appraise in an efficient way', which meant that, like us, the Wellcome Library was
forced to experiment with appraisal approaches.10 Although much has been written
about appraisal frameworks, their practical application has been under-examined.11
The classical electronic appraisal theory that was first formulated in the English-
speaking world in the 1980s and 1990s contains assumptions about digital records
that now seem wildly unrealistic. For example, the oft-repeated idea that electronic
files must be appraised in their entire administrative context, on the same basis as
paper files, could not be applied in this situation. We lacked knowledge about the
overall administrative context and the relationship of the data to it, and so did the
schools authority, due to personnel turnover and changes in duties. Another
difficulty with early English-language contributions in this area, for example
Naugler's RAMP study, is that they take account of so many appraisal criteria that
they cannot be applied to an enormous fonds with disastrously chaotic internal
structures: they are simply not scalable.12 Suggestions that electronic fonds should
be appraised repeatedly suffer from the same problem.13
Later contributions are somewhat better attuned to the realities of the modern
digital world, although Ross Harvey noted in 2007 that 'At present we lack scalable
and defensible appraisal and selection strategies for digital preservation'.14
Nevertheless, these later discussions reveal a fundamental gulf between the 'polar
opposites' that Harvey identifies:15 the keep-everything approach on the one hand,16
and the imperative to appraise advocated by Harvey on the other.17 The first point of
view, that the increasing cheapness and capacity of digital storage liberates archives
from the need to appraise digital records at all, and that archives users can rely on
search technology to use the data, has been encountering increased opposition of
late.18 Harvey notes that this perspective 'subscribes to a technological deterministic
future in which computer storage costs reduce and processing power increases', a
development which Harvey sees as restricted to bit preservation but 'not appropriate
for knowledge preservation'.19 The Paradigm Project and Sloyan also contest the idea
that archives will derive a benefit from steadily decreasing electronic storage costs:
this trend is being outstripped by the exponential generation of new electronic data,
a dynamic which shows no sign of slowing down in the near future.20 The other
costs of digital preservation must also be taken into consideration: Harvey notes
that 'selection decisions for digital materials necessarily have heavy ongoing
resource implications',21 and Sloyan refers to the need to undertake 'ongoing action
in order to maintain the accessibility of digital records in the face of file format,
software and hardware obsolescence'.22
The most famous, if admittedly extreme, example of a project on keep-everything
lines is the American Library of Congress' Twitter Archive, which has made no
attempt at appraisal.23 The project has run into difficulties due to the enormous
number of tweets involved, and the search technology which will make the data
usable has not yet materialized: a single search of the data from 2006-2010 currently
takes twenty-four hours.24 A shared drive does not present a situation as challenging
as the Twitter archive for potential use, but an extremely unstructured example can
still pose insuperable problems to researchers trying to understand their search
results. Furthermore, many users prefer to browse in the hope of finding related
material in the neighborhood of a particular document, as Sloyan notes: 'Vast
quantities of data can be intimidating and unwieldy and can prevent efficient
praktijk
7 The Paradigm Project, Appraising Digital Records: A Worthwhile Exercise (2008), http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/
workbook/appraisal/digital-appraisal.html.
8 Bischoff, 48.
9 U. Schludi, 'Zwischen Records Management und digitaler Archivierung: Das Dateisystem als Basis von
Schriftgutverwaltung und Überlieferungsbildung', in: K. Naumann und P. Müller (eds.), Das Neue
Handwerk: Digitales Arbeiten in kleinen und mittleren Archiven: Vortrage des 72. Südwestdeutschen Archivtags
(Stuttgart 2013) 20-3 5.
10 Sloyan, 24.
11 Sloyan, 24.
12 H. Naugler, The Archival Appraisal of Machine-Readable Records: A RAMP Study with Guidelines (Paris 1984);
See also C. M. Dollar, Archival Theory and Information Technologies: The Impact of Information Technologies
on Archival Principles and Methods (Macerata 1992).
13 C.A. Bailey, 'Archival Theory and Electronic Records', Archivaria 29 (1989-1990) 86.
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isabel taylor a hydra-like Russian doll: appraising and describing the shared drive
of a staatliches schulamt
14 R. Harvey, 'Appraisal and Selection', DCC Digital Curation Manual (2006) 11, http://www.dcc.ac.uk/
resources/curation-reference-manual/completed-chapters/appraisal-and-selection.
15 Harvey, 8.
16 A.J. Gilliland, 'Appraising on Shifting Sands', in: C. Brown (ed.), Archives and Recordkeeping: Theory into
Practice (London 2014) 31-62, 32; Sloyan, 22.
17 Harvey, 8.
18 Sloyan, 22.
19 Harvey, 8.
20 Paradigm Project; Sloyan, 22.
21 Harvey, 9.
22 Sloyan, 22.
23 Gilliland, 36.
24 A. McGill, Can Twitter Fit Inside the Library of Congress(2016), https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/
archive/2016/08/can-twitter-fit-inside-the-library-of-congress/494339/.
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