research, especially when much of the data serve no purpose'.25 The Wellcome
Library project therefore took the view - as we did - that traditional appraisal
concepts should still apply: although 'the difference in construction and
accessibility needs to be acknowledged', and these considerations may 'necessitate
new practices these remain underpinned by archival theory'.26
There is also a point to be made about the professional role of the archivist. By
conducting selection on paper files, archivists add value to the fonds, concentrating
its value and making it easier to use for research. Angelika Menne-Haritz argues that
the goal of appraisal is to make the fonds 'eloquent,' and Richard Cox maintains
that the archival 'core function'- appraisal - should not be neglected in the field of
electronic files and must, instead, be further developed.27 It would, in my view, be
dangerous and irresponsible for archivists to give up their key professional function
in the face of digital disorder.
3. Appraisal of shared drives in international practice
Once I had reviewed the available literature, I conducted an informal anonymous
survey via email amongst seven prominent colleagues abroad about whether they
were familiar with unstructured shared drives, whether they had attempted to
appraise similar fonds, and what their experiences had been. All of them responded,
and the reactions confirmed that this type of appraisal is still in its infancy.
A colleague at the Archives Nationales in France told me that they have not yet been
able to find a solution to the well-known problem of appraising unstructured shared
drives. A colleague in the USA, who previously worked at Microsoft and was one of
the first digital archivists in North America, commented that unstructured shared
drives are the nightmare of today's archivists. There will be no 'easy solution':
archivists in the USA, according to him, have not yet accumulated enough practical
experience with shared drives in order to understand the difficulties associated with
them. In Canada, too, archivists have noted a tendency in the direction of shared
drives, above all because they are easier to use than DMS, and the issue of
unstructured shared drives is now well-known at Library and Archives Canada.
Even at the United Nations there are problems: new directives for the administration
of files in shared drives emphasize the importance of periodically cleaning them
up,28 and a colleague there made the sinister observation that shared drives are only
the beginning of his difficulties. A colleague at the United Kingdom (UK) National
Archives informed me that for every terabyte of information in a DMS there are ten
in a shared drive, and that shared drives of up to 100 terabytes in size are not
unknown. Sir Alex Allan in his review of UK government records notes that 'almost
all departments have a mass of digital data stored on shared drives that is poorly
organized and indexed'.29
4. The first attempt: How to appraise?
Once I had determined that we could not simply turn to an already available
solution, I attempted to adapt classical appraisal methods to the situation. A first,
failed attempt involved associating the individual folders to functions that had
already been appraised as archive- worthy in the Landesarchiv's appraisal model for
conventional paper files from schools authorities. Where there were gaps in the
appraisal model, I added new functions from the authority's current diagram of
responsibilities (Geschaftsverteilungsplan) after appraising these new functions.
This was essentially an attempt at macro-appraisal within an electronic context.30
Like the Wellcome Library, I used a file profiling tool to obtain an overview of folder
and file names - but this, in contrast to their experience, was of little assistance due
to the uninformative file naming carried out by most of the schools authority's
employees.31 An attempt to shed light on the folder structure by interviewing
employees at the schools authority brought only very limited information, due to
the factors already mentioned. These differences further underscore the fact that
hard drives from individuals can be significantly easier to appraise: the Wellcome
Library were able to involve the records creators in macro-appraisal, obtaining from
one scientist a 'one-sentence description of each top-level folder', which provided
significant help during the appraisal process.32 In our situation, again in stark
contrast to the Wellcome Library's experience,33 folders could only be associated to
functions in a very few cases, and this did not solve the problem of unrelated
material inside a folder.
I was therefore not able to successfully deploy the blended approach that the
Wellcome Library applied to their hard drives, and which drew on strategies
developed for corporate records and for personal papers: 'high-level functional
appraisal geared around specific career functions' was combined with 'bottom-up
appraisal undertaken at folder level, rather than individual records level'.34 This
involved 'the spot-checking of folder contents to ensure the folder names were
accurate before final appraisal decisions were made'.35 Even in the case of the hard
drive with more subfolders and less descriptive folder and file names, Sloyan was
able to use spot-checking as an appraisal method, although she had to carry it out
more extensively.36 The fact that a considerable amount of organization was still
present even in the less well organized fonds allowed her to use this approach.
Once I had abandoned the attempt at macro-appraisal, I was left with three
possibilities: a random sampling strategy; appraisal on the basis of metadata
generated after ingest into the digital repository; and item-level autopsy.
Conducting random sampling and then manually appraising within the samples
is a frequently-suggested strategy.37 In our case, the records were insufficiently
homogenous or consistent in terms of type of information to allow for this.38
The inability to reliably represent the fonds, and the risk of inadvertently deleting
extremely important files, appeared to me to be unacceptable: the knowledge of
praktijk
25 Sloyan, 22-23.
26 Sloyan, 23.
27 A. Menne-Haritz, 'Appraisal or Documentation: Can We Appraise Archives by Selecting Content?', American
Archivist 57 (1994) 528-542, 530; R. Cox, Appraisal and the Future of Archives in the Digital Era (2011) 21,
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/5865/1Mppraisal_and_the_Future_of_Archives_in_the_Digital_Era.pdf.
28 United Nations Archives and Records Management Section, Managing Electronic Information and Records in
Shared Drives (2015) 12.
29 Sir A. Allan, Records Review: Report (2014) 19, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/
uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/370930/RECORDS_REVIEW_-_Sir_Allex_Allan.pdf.
154
isabel taylor a hydra-like Russian doll: appraising and describing the shared drive
of a staatliches schulamt
30 Harvey, 23-24; Gilliland, 47.
31 Sloyan, 25.
32 Sloyan, 24.
33 Sloyan, 26.
34 Sloyan, 24.
35 Sloyan, 26.
36 Sloyan, 26.
37 See for example R. Neumayer and A. Rauber, Why Appraisal is Not 'Utterly' Useless and Why It's Not the Way
to Go Either: A Provocative Position Paper (2007) 2, http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~neumayer/pubs/NEU07_
appraisal.pdf.
38 Sloyan, 27-28.
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