THE PAPER CHASE
17
One of the areas in which modern archivists are most interested, of course, is that of systematic records disposal.
All too commonly, offices allow their archives to accumulate until they find them becoming an administrative and financial burden and then reduce their bulk by destructions based on more or less ad hoc decisions about their relative values. Alternatively, they may solve their problem by offering the whole mass of their unwanted records to the luckless archivist, if there is one, who is then faced with the task of sorting out, by whatever scratch means are available to him, what records should be kept. But in the last forty years or so, the larger producers of archives, and in particular governments, have been driven more and more to develop procedures for the systematic and regular destruction of unwanted records, the aim being to keep the total mass at a minimum consistent with the actual needs of the office.
There is no time to discuss in any detail how this is done, except to say that such disposal systems are based upon the fact that the records of any office will be found, on analysis, to be divisible into a number of classes, the components of each of which are sufficiently similar, as a rule, for the whole of them to be evaluated as one and to be disposed of in due course according to the same set of directions. A schedule can therefore be drawn up listing all of the discernible classes of records generated by an office and giving separate directions, class by class, for their disposal. If the schedule is executed satisfactorily, and updated from time to time as new classes appear and old ones are discontinued or re-appraised, records are enabled to flow steadily either into the incinerators or into archival custody according to their pre-determined values, and the office is left at all times only with the records it actually needs.
Where disposal is undertaken by these means, it obviously becomes very much the concern of archivists to ensure that the potential research values of the records concerned are not overlooked at the schedule-making stage. For if the administrator is attending strictly to his business, it is not the future uses which his records may have for students which will determine his views on their worth, but their administrative and legal uses now—their continued relevance or otherwise to the work of his office.
Administrators generally lack both the time and inclination to consider the research ends to which their records may be put, and
THE PAPER CHASE
17
One of the areas in which modern archivists are most interested, of course, is that of systematic records disposal.
All too commonly, offices allow their archives to accumulate until they find them becoming an administrative and financial bur- den and then reduce their bulk by destructions based on more or less ad hoc decisions about their relative values. Alternatively they may solve their problem by offering the whole mass of their unwant- ed records to the luckless archivist, if there is one, who is then faced with the task of sorting out, by whatever scratch means are available to him, what records should be kept. But in the last forty years or so, the larger producers of archives, and in particular governments, have been driven more and more to develop procedures for the sys- tematic and regular destruction of unwanted records, the aim being to keep the total mass at a minimum consistent with the actual needs of the office.
There is no time to discuss in any detail how this is done, except to say that such disposal systems are based upon the fact that the records of any office will be found, on analysis, to be divisable into a number of classes, the components of each of which are sufficient- ly similar, as a rule, for the whole of them to be evaluated as one and to be disposed of in due course according to the same set of directions. A schedule can therefore be drawn up listing all of the discernable classes of records generated by an office and giving separate directions, class by class, for their disposal. If the schedule is executed satisfactorily, and updated from time to time as new classes appear and old ones are discontinued or re-appraised, re- cords are enabled to flow steadily either into the incinerators or into archival custody according to their pre-determined values, and the office is left at all times only with the records it actually needs.
Where disposal is undertaken by these means it obviously be- comes very much the concern of archivists to ensure that the poten- tial research values of the records concerned are not over-looked at the schedule-making stage. For if the administrator is attending strictly to his business it is not the future uses which his records may have for students which will determine his views on their worth, but their administrative and legal uses now—their continued relevance or otherwise to the work of his office.
Administrators generally lack both the time and inclination to consider the research ends to which their records may be put, and
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