External and Internal View of Appraisal

The staff of the Bentley Historical Library adheres to the general conceptualization put forth by Theodore Schellenberg, that there are universal, general concepts of values which can be applied to the process of appraisal. These are not so much secretive as problematic in that they are so general as to have little usefulness in the precision we look for in our day-to-day appraisal. But they help us with our "bigger picture" of appraisal, since we strive to define for ourselves both a "macro-appraisal" strategy and a "micro-appraisal" application of the sort you are experiencing in your processing for this practicum. What I would like to try to do today is investigate appraisal in four different ways, at these two levels of macro- and micro-appraisal: appraisal as it is discussed in the professional literature starting with Schellenberg; appraisal as it has been studied here at the Bentley Historical Library; appraisal as it has been practiced here in the past at the Bentley; and appraisal as it is being practiced here now and anticipated as part of our future.

Starting with Schellenberg

Why start with Schellenberg? Because Schellenberg is a very important advocate of the activist view of appraisal, whose basic assertions have enduring value for us as archivists engaged in the act of appraisal. Schellenberg's first distinctions are between primary and secondary values. Primary values, to Schellenberg's way of thinking, are those most immediate to the creation of the record. A record has an administrative, legal, and fiscal value in its original purposes for its creators. It thereafter can acquire a secondary value for historical research and for other secondary uses. Schellenberg elaborated that there are evidential and informational values to be recognized in the process of appraisal. An evidential value is perhaps a little more difficult to grasp or recognize sometimes than an informational value: it is the value of what makes a process, decision, and set of relationships apparent beyond the informational content which forms the purpose of the communication.

From the holdings of the Bentley, I've selected an example of a series of records' informational value and evidential value. In 1924, the University of Michigan Alumnae Council decided to survey as many women graduates as it could locate "to discover the extent of their influence and service." The Bentley eventually received two linear feet of these surveys, or approximately 3,000 surveys in all. They are within the records here of the Alumni Association. the information contained within the surveys is incredibly rich for the demographic composition of the graduates. It is also very valuable prose about the memory of these graduates and the language they themselves would use to recall their days at Michigan. This is the informational value of the record.

What is the evidential value? I would assign the record two types of evidential value. One is the value provided by the survey design itself. The evidence of this activity of interest on the part of the council, and how it is conveyed on the form, are terribly important. One can further substantiate an assessment of the evidential value by going beyond this record to other sources about the activities of the alumni and alumnae of that time, to locate and establish contact with the university's many alumni in part for the purpose of gaining revenue for the university. You see, this survey had an ultimate purpose. Without being stated explicitly anywhere on the form, it was one part of a large campaign in 1921 by the Alumnae Council to raise one million dollars for the construction of the Michigan League building. The results of the survey were used by the Alumnae Council in their promotional material to emphasize the wide range of careers and activities taken on by women after leaving Michigan.

In addition to the evidential value of the record vis-a-vis the intentions of the Alumnae Council, there is the evidential value of the responses themselves. Many of the women used a typewriter to complete their responses. Many used the form as a carrier of communication for the first time with the university since their graduation. The fact that so many would state that this was their first contact with the university since graduation, and that they would then proceed to describe very fully rather intense memories, gives the document a powerful evidential value of the impulse to answer, on such a form and in compliance with its categories of interest, with solicitations for memory as much as money.

Schellenberg distinguished carefully between primary and secondary values, and between informational and evidential values. There was a confidence and universality to his taxonomy, which was generated out of his work at the U.S. National Archives with its obvious emphasis on large, governmental, modern records. If you look at the current Bentley Historical Library brochure on "The University Archives and Records Program at the Bentley Historical Library, you will find precisely this Schellenbergian language: "Colleges and universities have acknowledged their responsibility to preserve records that document institutional policies, procedures and activities. They do this for a variety of administrative, legal, financial, and historical reasons."

Refining Schellenberg

The first major refinement of Schellenberg was authored by a university archivist. Maynard Brichford of the University of Illinois was called upon by the Society of American Archivists to write a manual for appraisal, to be published by the society in 1977. One can see this step as a maturation both of the professional organization of archivists outside of Washington and of the other types of archives in the United States, who could see that federal records were not representative of all types of records, especially those of a more local, and even private, nature. Brichford's manual was a very important publication, and now serves almost as a bookend for a lengthy set of published deliberations over appraisal of records in a university setting. You will find that much of the North American writing on appraisal has been inspired by the conditions of an academic setting, no doubt both because archivists working at an academic institution are often motivated to conduct their own academic research and also because the nature of academic records compels us to study them with rigor. Brichford does not address university records with any specificity in his publication, but he does write his manual in a rather academic fashion, with historical analysis, citations, and theory.

With time, academic archivists and archivists in other settings as well have recognized even more the limitations of Schellenberg and company. A number of these revisionists have been university archivists. But from within Schellenberg's own parent institution came dissent, including from Leonard Rapport of the National Archives. Rapport was worried that there was not enough attention to the office or agency's larger society role beyond the evidential criteria of the record itself. He and others worried that a mechanistic application of any single appraisal model was akin to wearing an "intellectual straightjacket." You can still find this concern articulated very eloquently in the much more recent writings of Canadian archivist Terry Cook.

For some, the limitations of previous research on appraisal induced a kind of paralysis. There is, for example, a very sour rejection of any sense of progression in the thinking about appraisal in a book by Richard Berner, published in 1983, entitled Archival Theory and Practice in the United States: A Historical Analysis. He wrote that he was not even going to include appraisal in his history of American archival studies because of "the primitive nature of its development."

While Rapport and Berner grumbled that appraisal was underdeveloped, others set out to continue the work of Brichford, which was to refine the understanding of appraisal. You can find some of that refinement in the published works of my predecessors right here at the Bentley, by archivists here involved with university records.

History of Appraisal at the Bentley--Establishing the Archives

I would like to examine with you today some of the progression of the work here at the University of Michigan in the appraisal of archival records. What is interesting about this, I think, is that the work here on appraisal of university records parallels the larger professional work on appraisal and the means by which archivists communicate about it.

You heard earlier this semester that the archives of the University of Michigan were established in 1935. The history of the establishment of the archives, and its early approach to appraisal, is very important for our understanding of the Bentley's approach in 2001. The archives of the University of Michigan were established at the same time as the Society of American Archivists and the U.S. National Archives. Those responsible for the archives of the University of Michigan, to further legitimize their undertaking, made reference to their awareness of an involvement in the activities of the new Society of American Archivists and their attention to the dissemination of information about archives, emanating from the National Archives in Washington. At the same time that they were actively broadcasting their awareness of new, organizing bodies for archives and the archival profession, these on-campus advocates were also using the more traditional channel of the national historical journals to announce the establishment of the archives. This evidence of their anticipation of an eventual appraisal of University of Michigan records is still available for us to discover within the records of the Bentley Historical Library's own record group.

Some of their methodology is very common for the internal communication patterns of the University of Michigan in the 1930s. They sent a letter to heads of various departments, schools, and colleges, as a means of surveying the landscape of available records. Here is part of what their typewritten form letter stated: "You have doubtless been informed that the Regents recently appointed a Committee on University Archives ... The Committee has defined its objectives as including the collection, preservation, cataloguing, and making available under proper conditions, of all manuscript and printed material, official and unofficial, relating to the history of the University." So far so good, we have the makings of a survey.

The committee next states, "As it is manifestly impossible and undesirable to assemble all such records in one place, the Committee concluded that, as one of its first acts, a useable catalogue of existing archives, and their location, should be compiled, and voted to ask the help of the executives in charge of the various University offices in making this inventory." This is a revealing statement of a precustodial mentality. The committee is not anticipating a centralizing of all documents, in part for the simple reason that there was no physical space available for a comprehensive archive. The holdings of what is now the Bentley Historical Library's University of Michigan archives were scattered across campus. The first location for the new archives was the William Clements Library, and thereafter the basement of the Rackham building. Today there is an irony for us in reading the language of the committee, since we can now realize that we have within the past sixty years moved from a precustodial phase of the university records here, through a largely custodial phase, to the beginnings of a postcustodial phase of a strategically planned, distributed records retention, due largely to the university's digital environment.

In that survey letter of April 1936, the new Committee on University Archives asked that each contacted unit supply the committee with "such essential details as the years covered, where they are kept, and how (i.e. in files, boxes, etc.)." The committee then made a rather modest suggestion: "Merely as a suggestion, and not as a complete account of what the term archives includes, the following might be listed as things upon which a report is desirable:

• faculty minutes
• student records of various kinds
• correspondence
• reports
• printed announcements, schedules, programs, etc.
• minutes and records of committees
• photographs (framed or unframed)
• any other papers of historical importance."

So, we have here the beginnings of a delineation of types of records of interest. This list can be understood as the outline of a "collecting policy," as traditionally understood. Helen Samuels, in her book Varsity Letters, points out that, "In truth, collecting policies are usually vague general statements about areas of interest and formats that will be collected."

We are very fortunate to have at least a bit of the evidence of this initial survey, including not only the dutiful listings of types of records available in individual offices but also the relative values associated with them by their creators and secretarial staff. Here is just one response, dated April 10, 1936, from the head of the botany department, Professor H.H. Bartlett: "With regard to the committee's procedure, I venture to suggest that it would be very desirable to concentrate the material to as great an extent as possible in the University Library, and to have really valuable or interesting correspondence arranged definitively by author, date, and subject in bound volumes. ... Such volumes could be readily indexed and utilized, and would present no difficulties from the standpoint of storage. ... If each volume were made up with care to eliminate rubbish and then classified and indexed, the collection would be worth a great deal. A mass of unclassified stuff would eventually suffer the fate of being thrown away. So I would favor being highly selective, and deciding that junk is junk and should be discarded before it goes into the archives. The preservation of too much trivial stuff might be expected to put a premium on a pettifogging type of antiquarian scholarship that shouldn't be encouraged."

To test the appraisal suggested by Bartlett himself, and the appraisal of my predecessors here at the Bentley, I decided to look at the Harley Bartlett personal collection here. Is it filled with jewels and free of "junk," I wondered? I decided to look in two places to find evidence of the original transactions between this repository and Bartlett which led to the formation of his collection here. He would be the first appraiser of his collection as it accrued organically in the course of his career here. We would be the second appraisers. I first searched for evidence of appraisal in our donor file for the Bartlett collection. There is no evidence of the original appraisal of the collection in the donor file. In fact, there is not even any mention of its original receipt by the archives. This then is a good example of what Frank Boles refers to as our inaccessibility to the appraisal process.

So, if we go by the collection itself and the finding aid, what do we have then? Well, we have both quite a few jewels and a little bit of junk. If you look at the correspondence of Harley Bartlett, you'll find a classic academic series of correspondence ranging from 1909 to 1960. A very first impression would be, great, that's a marvelously long spread of years, one that Maynard Brichford and others would appreciate because it meets the appraisal criterion of duration of a long sequence of a record type within a collection. We have letters dating prior to Bartlett's appointment as an assistant professor here, in 1915, to the year of his death. This kind of continuity is an archivist's dream. But, if you look more closely at this correspondence, you find another irony. The correspondence is largely incoming. Bartlett is absent from his own correspondence. There's a copy here and there in the collection of his own words. But for the most part, you can only discover Bartlett himself in the mirror of his professional colleagues, and those are mostly at a distance from Ann Arbor. There's a stray notice, inconsequential for us now, of a local meeting of the research club but, as you can well imagine, the phone and the feet were used for communicating with colleagues nearby in Ann Arbor, especially with the phone having been installed around campus in 1907. There is a value missing then in the Bartlett collection of correspondence, which otherwise measures five linear feet. However, Bartlett is not mute in his own collection, fortunately. We do have other three feet of diaries of his along with reports and professional papers.

Just how systematic or rigorous have our predecessors at the Bentley been, and how compliant with professional literature have they been? To a certain extent, the answers to both of those questions lie in the same sources. Robert Warner was the Bentley's director from 1967 to 1980. He and manuscripts curator Ruth Bordin wrote a book entitled The Modern Manuscript Library, which was published in 1966. It was often cited after its publication as another good source for guidance in archival administration. Their words in that book about appraisal were both prophetic and practiced: "to collect successfully, there must be a plan, not a spur of the moment inspiration but a carefully-drawn, thoughtful program that implements the main purpose of the library. ... the library may ask, quite naturally, will we not be overwhelmed if we use this approach systematically and diligently? ... This problem is not so formidable as it might seem at first glance. Natural attrition brings a partial solution. Through the years papers will have been lost, destroyed by fire, or will have met with similar misfortunes. Despite these contingencies the fact remains that large bodies of papers may have been saved, posing the problem of what to accept and what to reject. In beginning a collection the tendency is to accept virtually everything. Empty shelf space abounds, and there is a strong desire to please everyone and to build good will for the library. As the library matures, shelves fill up and selectivity becomes essential. Selection should really be practiced from the beginning and every effort should be made to keep acquisitions pertinent and high in quality."

Selection has always been practiced at the Bentley, but one can find stronger and weaker inclinations to collect according to the physical capacities and staffing of the archives. Thanks to the Works Progress Administration, the archives had twenty individuals on its staff in 1939 to help pack, process, and clean records. The war put an end to that level of staffing. It's probably fair to say that the physical growth of the collections has always been rather steady, but the inclination towards accessioning was fortified by the desire, ever growing in the 1960s, for a new facility of its own (witness the establishment of the Friends committee in 1967, whose major focus was to secure funds for a new building). It's more difficult to say just how steady that physical growth has been for university records in particular, since, and this is important for you to know, the records of the university and the papers of individual university administrators, faculty, students, and alumni were not categorized into distinctive types of records--organizational records on the one hand and personal papers on the other--in the past administration of the Bentley Historical Library. Again, here we have a somewhat impenetrable history of past practice, and an interesting example of a blend of a manuscript repository and an archive, a single repository which was seeking to fulfill the characteristics of both. Frank Boles has stated the distinction between the two in the following passage of his book on appraisal: "manuscript archivists tended to focus on users and content-related criteria, whereas institutional archives tended to focus on functional criteria."

History of Appraisal at the Bentley--Formalizing a Distinct University Archives

The distinction at the Bentley between university records and personal papers evolved out of a concern, growing in the 1970s, for a more systematic approach to the large, modern offices of the university and the records they were generating. Several activities emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as refinements for appraisal of university records here. First, and most importantly, there was the establishment of a distinctive program within the Bentley to administer university records. In 1979, the Bentley Library launched what it called "the University Records Program." It stated in its earliest mission statements that the program had "the dual mandate of preserving the historically valuable records of the university and overseeing the timely destruction of unneeded documentation." The first major activity of the University Records Management Program was a survey of records across campus. So, forty years after the first survey was sent out across campus, another survey was delivered to the campus community. Like the earlier survey, this one also did not have the intention of bringing into the archives the bulk of records surveyed. But in this 1970s survey, the argument for the survey was a more modern one relating to costs, growth of the physical record, accountability, risks, and efficiencies. Here is a bit of the language introducing the survey; "This year the University of Michigan has begun a program to consider the problem of University records. On the one hand the volume of university records has grown at an exponential rate, crowding prime office space. At a time when funds for increased capital expenditure are scarce, it becomes important to utilize present space more efficiently. On the other hand, there is increased pressure from federal and state agencies as well as from the experience of recent suits against the University to systematically retain certain categories of records for specific periods of time. In addition, it is important that significant historical records of the University be identified and preserved." With this introduction, the Bentley launched an investigation of "the feasibility of a full-scale records management program for the University." Even though we have yet to see a bona fide records management program in place at the Bentley, over twenty years later, there has been a very impressive and systematic accumulation of modern records here. At the most general level of appraisal and accessioning for University of Michigan records, what has occurred in the past twenty years is "an individualized approach," within the university's "autonomous structure," whereby records management occurs through "individualized work" and "consensus decision making," with an emphasis on "central administrative units," "primarily the executive officers, and records of the various university deans."

The name of the University Records Management Program was changed to University Archives and Records Program (UARP) in the early 1980s. Notice the addition of the term "archives" and the deletion of the word "management." My predecessor, Marjorie Barritt, informed me in a conversation that once she assumed leadership of UARP she recognized that large surveys and ambitious advisory intentions for records management were problematic, since the Bentley was unable to follow up in a timely fashion and unable to address both its archival mission and a newer records management role. She turned her attention to another critical need of the program, which was to strengthen the definition of a university record here and the mandate of the archives to oversee the archival identification and preservation of the record. With the support of the library's director and its executive committee, she succeeded in establishing a newer definition of the university record, one which is now found in the university's Standard Practice Guide. This is a very brief statement but one that refers to another very important tool developed by Barritt and her staff, which is the Records Policy and Procedures Manual. These two types of information have been very important to the fieldwork of the University Archives and Records Program. They have been convenient means of disseminating information about the archival concerns of the Bentley, and they are thereby a more modern effort at a shared responsibility for the ongoing custody of the record from its creation, through its active use in the office, to its ultimate destruction or transfer to the Bentley.

Both attempts to identify the university record, first through surveying and then through policy and procedure documents, were done at the most general level for the university record. Appraisal seems to have been a constant concern of the staff as these were taking place. In fact, Frank Boles and Julia Young, as the first staff members of UARP, wrote a book on appraisal. Its title is simply Archival Appraisal, but its contents are an incredibly elaborate effort at "rationalizing" appraisal through a taxonomy, which includes a value of information module, costs of retention module, and policy implication module. The value of information module has within it twenty-seven clusters including credibility, timespan, understandability, format, and on and on. The findings speak for themselves: "In the abstract the system was cumbersome and awkward. Nevertheless it reflected the broad but poorly organized insights archivists brought to selection. Over a half century, archivists had presented a number of concerns that they believed affected a particular selection decision. A taxonomy rooted in that heritage was of necessity weighted down by including so many factors. As a practical selection tool, the taxonomy was even more limited. The intellectual awkwardness of the system was compromised by the practical unwieldiness of consciously considering so many elements."

In recent literature on appraisal, you won't really find evidence of efforts to apply Boles and Young. I think the reason is that it is too ambitious and impractical a look at appraisal: it is too "macro." Boles, and others, who have continued to look at appraisal of university records have been in my estimation more successful in limiting their research on appraisal to more particular genres of records, or more specific conditions and contexts for appraisal. This brings us to another area of concentrated effort of the staff here, in addition to the surveys and the policy documents. This is the exploration of particular types of university records. Here again is where the practice of the Bentley is shared with the archival profession through research and publications.

History of Appraisal at the Bentley--Further Refining by Record Type

Marjorie Barritt looked at appraisal of student records. Our approach for this is to defer to the registrar's office for the ongoing retention of the official student record. Barritt's study is an excellent example of the need for an awareness on the part of the archivist of what constitutes the student record, and what the law is concerning this particular type of record.

Faculty papers are a second genre, with earlier successful efforts highlighted in a Bentley brochure on faculty papers. While Frank Boles was on the staff of the Bentley, he speculated on a strategy of more systematically collecting biographical materials, discipline-specific records, and records of individual faculty relating to the university as a whole.

Architectural records are a third genre. Given the tremendous size of the University of Michigan campus, the Bentley recognized the need for a more refined appraisal approach to inactive architectural records. In 1989, the UARP staff within the Bentley determined that it would document "significant buildings," with special attention paid to the function of the building, architectural or engineering innovations in its construction, distinctive architectural style, association with a noteworthy architect, or historical significance of activities within the building.

Medical research records and athletic records have also been studied in depth. And now, thanks in particular to the appointment of Nancy Deromedi in 2000, there is a much greater concentration on digitally-produced administrative records of the university.

Applying Professional Publications to Appraisal Practice

In practice, one should be able to apply earlier internal decisions and priorities along with published literature on appraisal to any level of administrative or academic records relating to the university. Let's try it with the university's College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

When I assumed the position of head of the University Archives and Records Program a few years ago, I conducted a very rudimentary survey of the major academic record groups here at the Bentley. What I found was a great disparity in accessioning from one academic school or college to another. The holdings here are remarkably strong for the university's School of Business Administration; College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; College of Engineering; and Medical School. By comparison, the College of Architecture and Urban Planning is represented by only fifty-five linear feet. How might one go about understanding and soliciting records relating to the College of Architecture and Urban Planning?

Let's do this together by taking Helen Samuels' book Varsity Letters, Maynard Brichford, and a little bit of the work by Gerry Ham. We can map Samuels' university functions onto particular records from the college's record group:

• confer credentials: college bulletin (box 1, printed) and doctoral program committee (box 19)
• convey knowledge: teaching notes (Emil Lorch collection, box 11)
• foster socialization: graduation recognition ceremony and open house (box 24)
• conduct research: faculty research activities (box 11)
• sustain the institution: accreditation review (box 7), faculty minutes (box 2)
• provide public service: study of solar car energy systems, with Federal Office Building in Saginaw, Michigan (box 9)
• promote culture: Raoul Wallenberg lecture (box 4)

As one looks at these records and further considers appraisal, one can think about what sort of informational characteristics they have; what evidential value they have; whether they have an administrative, financial, or legal value; and what research values they might have. Research values, according to Brichford, can include the following:

• uniqueness
• credibility
• understandability
• time span
• accessibility
• potential frequency, type, and quality of use

You could also consider their relationship to other university records at the Bentley, their relationship to personal papers at the Bentley, their relationship to publications and other media relating to the history of architectural education, and their relationship to other universities' records in architectural education.

Without knowing the budgetary profile of the Bentley, it's difficult for somebody not on the staff to consider processing costs, preservation costs, and storage costs, but these too would factor into our appraisal decisions.

Let me help you along on this a little further. With the architectural records that we already have as fully processed records, how well are we doing in documenting the following functions:

conferring credentials: very well. We have a complete set of records relating to the requirements for degrees, and a fairly good set of records for faculty discussions about changing individual courses and adding new programs. This has always been a priority of the Bentley.

conveying knowledge: not very well at all. We have very little in the way of actual teaching materials. This is a problem for many of the academic disciplines here on campus and elsewhere. The problem is exacerbated for architecture because of the nature of conveying knowledge in this particular discipline. Some of the most concentrated source material for the evidence of conveying knowledge is at the Media Union, in the architecture slide collection. We have not sought out the papers of many individual faculty from architecture, although we have gained much ground here in the wonderful materials given to us by the family of Professor William Muschenheim.

fostering socialization:, our documentation here is somewhat good. We have wonderful artifactual evidence of the dances held by the architecture students, which were the envy of other students around campus. The more organized the socialization, the better represented here, since we house the records of the architecture fraternity, which is Alpha Rho Chi. Some of these records are beautifully illustrative of the energies and talents of the students. They have great intrinsic value.

conducting research: here we're gaining ground. We have been woefully weak in evidence of the research at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning. This is a shame since this college was the first in the country to launch a major, modern research agenda for itself. There have been two problems: one is that we as archivists haven't done enough to recognize this as an important area for the College of Architecture and Urban Planning but just as problematic is the evasive quality of some of that research. Let me give you one dramatic example: in 1940, the College of Architecture and Urban Planning hosted a conference to examine the "Coordination in Design with Regard to Education in Architecture and Allied Design." Top names were invited both from academia and practice: Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Laszlo Maholy-Nagy, Eliel Saarinen--they were all in attendance. Their host, the dean of the College of Architecture and Urban Planning, declared that this meeting would be a clearinghouse rather than a final repository for ideas and that therefore there would be "no committees ... no reports ... no resolutions ... no manifestos." In other words, no record. There's next to no evidence of one of the most important phases of research here at Michigan.

sustaining the institution: This is where the archives are particularly strong. You can find wonderful runs of minutes of the college, even when it was very fractious and divided in the 1960s. You can find the vision of the new dean clashing strongly with the powerful resistance of his own faculty, all within the minutes of the college. This too has been an area of emphasis.

providing public service. From sources beyond the records of the college itself, it's apparent that there's much that has gone under-documented, including public service classes for communities around the state, where architecture faculty would go and lecture on building a home. It could be because another unit of the university--the extension service--was ultimately responsible for this sort of activity that the college itself did not document it in detail.

promoting culture. The College of Architecture and Urban Planning is most visible to the wider academic community once a year, when it hosts its Raoul Wallenberg annual lecture. This event is well attended, well publicized, and ultimately well documented through the printing of the lecture and even occasionally through the taping of the lecture as well.

We've just gone through Samuels' functional approach. What about Brichford's values? These records are unique and they're credible. They're less immediately understandable, but they are more so than some other types of academic units' records. Their representation over time is not complete. They are, on the other hand, fairly accessible. And they have what I would consider a high degree of potential use.

What more do we need to consider here? There are two types of context, the records and how I managed to make the just-mentioned evaluations. I agree with Ham and other authors that it is very important to understand the context of the records being considered in appraisal. One can look at bibliographic records, at the university's organizational chart, and at the website of the college for additional, contextual information. One should also look at what related records there are at the Bentley.

The other, equally important, context is that of the academic enterprise of teaching architecture at other universities. I've tried to build this context for myself by conducting bibliographic searches both for collections elsewhere and for background literature on the teaching, research, and practice of architecture. A book I've used often is Architecture 101, A Guide to the Design Studio, by Andy Pressman, for gaining what Ham refers to as "the record in the context of parallel or related documentary sources."

Conclusion

In conclusion, I'd assert that appraisal is as much an art as a science. Any strategy must work alongside opportunities which unexpectedly present themselves and it must also recognize constraints of an operation limited in its resources. There is a relevant observation in the book by Haas, Samuels, and Simmons entitled Appraising the Records of Modern Science and Technology. They write that, "the process of science and technology is rarely neat, orderly, and predictable; nevertheless this guide is organized around an idealized sequence of activities." I think that the same can be said for the life of a university in general, and the effort at an appraisal strategy. White I've presented to you today is the distillation of much planning, good fortune, a wide-eyed view of the profession around us, networking, the realization that we'll always have much more work ahead of us than what we've accomplished to date, and that it won't ever be as "neat, orderly, and predictable" as we would like but that our foundation is good and our commitment to pushing our understanding further is large.