Comments on Appraisal

While no appraisal equation will be perfect, with each appraisal a specific case, it is still helpful to have some ideas that can frame appraisal in general. I personally think the first place to start is looking at the big picture and thinking about if an item or collection fits your institution. Appraisal is not just, “Does it have value?” but is instead, “Does it have value to us?” and this relates to institutional mission and collecting policy. Appraising according to a collection policy can help ensure that new acquisitions align well on a number of levels, such as scope, user interest, and professional knowledge and skills. I believe, therefore, that a strong collecting policy is instrumental for good appraisal.

Archives collect and preserve in order to promote use, in my opinion, and so an important factor in answering, “Yes,” to “Does it have value to us?” is also the ability to adequately describe and demonstrate that value. This is where, for me, the notions of evidential and informational value of photographs come in. I am not sure if I agree with Charbonneau that photographs are most importantly informational (120), at least in an archival setting. Yes, this may be their most obvious quality, but I think as much as possible an archive should be able to know and describe the evidential values of photographs so that they are rich archival documents in both visual information and evidential context. Photographic appraisal should therefore consider, as much as possible, the ability of the archive to provide a valuable description, which is a difficult task given a visual medium, and includes having as much knowledge as possible of things such as original order, provenance, and potential primary and secondary uses. Valuable description, for me, is also description that aids discoverability and use, and so it is also intimately tied to the archive’s user audience(s). Acquisitions need to be valuable to someone, and that is your audience, which has hopefully also been informed by your collection policy. Appraisal must also take this into account.

If appraisal leads an archives staff to believe that a photographic collection fits their collection policy and can be described to users in a valuable way, then I think the next questions are about internal resources for preservation, and then external considerations such as copyright and restrictions. Whether the institution knows the format of the photographs, and has the skills and space to preserve them is important. If preservation is not a (too large) problem, then consideration can move to access, and whether the work of acquisition, preservation, and description is worth it for items that are restricted in certain ways.

A summary of appraisal as outlined above might therefore read:

a     a) Do these photographs have value to us, under our collection policy? If they do,

b     b) Can we demonstrate that value with rich description that will speak to and draw our audience? And if we can,

c     c) Can we adequately preserve them and offer them up for use, reproduction, and publication?

Again, I do not think any appraisal can follow a theoretical plan perfectly, as specifics will always come into play, but thinking about the above questions is helpful to me when considering how I might move forward if asked to take part in an appraisal, with especially close attention paid to the notions of description and preservation for photographic collections.