An element for documenting decisions and actions related to assessing the archival value and disposition of the materials being described.
The appraisal note is statement of the rationale for decisions related to appraisal and disposition of the materials being described. Such decisions may be based upon the records’ current administrative, legal, and fiscal use; their evidential, intrinsic, and informational value; their arrangement and condition; and their relationship to other records. May include information about destruction actions, sampling, and disposition schedules.
This note should document decisions made during processing (eg, extensive weeding). It may record materials the archivist did not take during the initial appraisal (before accessioning). The archivist who made the appraisal decision should be included in the note. Description of technical steps taken to perform appraisal actions for digital material should be included in the Processing information note and not here.
This note is also used slightly differently in web archiving description at the file level to describe the curator's rationale for choosing a website to collect, how often, and what content may have been excluded.
| Examples |
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| No information known about appraisal. |
| No information known about appraisal of materials donated prior to 2019. |
Duplicate copies of publications were not retained. |
Digital files from Muriel Cooper's hard drive temporary directory were deleted by digital archivist Joe Carrano after transfer to Distinctive Collections. |
This site was selected for capture as it documents the work of a top administrative office at MIT that makes decisions about MIT policy. Selection was chosen by Institute Archivist, Kari Smith, who noticed that the website is cited in the accreditation report and that it provides information on the 2019 shift in the academic schedule of MIT. It was also minimally crawled by other institutions at the time of first capture. Captured as a quarterly crawl. We use scoping rules to determine the extent of our crawls, if you would like to see the full scoping details, please contact the collector. |