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attachments were missing, the replies or the beginning message were not included, and/or the hyperlink contained was no longer current.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. 152 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/. 153

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