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

the Report's methodology and principles.89
During the 1980s, British archival literature began to
include an occasional but growing sense of the need for the
formulation of some overall national planning in appraisal.
Principles that applied to appraisal for selection needed to be
extended to systematic acquisition policies in order to guarantee
an authentic documentation of society:
You are the custodians of the evidence of the
past and present for the future: in that lies
your responsibility and your challenge.
Appraisal is only one element in the exercise
of this function, intensely difficult and of
enormous responsibility; it nevertheless
rests with you essentially to determine what
shall survive and whether that survival will
present a worthy picture of society as you
experienced it in your day and age.90
Cook notes that local and specialized archives, libraries and
museums were beginning to join with the PRO in their attempts "to
build up banks of information which will cover their chosen field
of operation, and ideally that field will have some sort of link
with a national plan."91 The national approach to coordinated
appraisal for acquisition was essentially "information-
directed."92 Cook argues that such planning would be best
implemented within a framework of coordination which maximizes
89 _Mid, 18-19, paragraphs 55-56.
90 Felix Hull, "The Appraisal of Documents--Problems and
Pitfalls," Journal of the Society of Archivists 5 (April 1980):
291.
91 Cook, Management, 66.
92 Ibid.
87