A STUDY OF THE THEORY OF APPRAISAL FOR SELECTION By ...

information.2 It is, however, the French Revolution that ushered
in the modern concept of appraisal.
Ernst Posner has argued that the main currents underlying
the archival development of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries are derived from the democratic forces that were
unleashed in France with the revolution. The developments are a
reflection of the government's acknowledgement of its democratic
accountability to its citizens.^The currents include the
establishment of a national public archives administration, an
acknowledgement of government responsibility to care for the
documentary heritage of the past, and the government's commitment
to the principle of public accessibility.3^The forces of
centralization of control and state responsibility for archives
seem to have introduced the modern practice of appraisal, which
in turn propelled a theoretical discussion about methodology and
justification that is still with us today.
On June 25, 1794 (7 Messidor II), the Agence temporaire des
titres was founded to appraise pre-revolutionary records.
Appraisal was done by segregating the records into four broad
subject categories that were defined by the state: useful,
historical, feudal titles and useless.^Useful papers, which
established the right of the state to confiscate property, were
2 Luciana Duranti, "The Odyssey of Records Managers Part II:
From the Middle Ages to Modern Times," ARMA Quarterly (October
1989): 5.
3 Ernst Posner, Archives and the Public Interest: Selected
Essays by Ernst Posner, ed. Ken Munden (Washington, D.C.: Public
Affairs Press, 1967), 25-26.
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