The Work of Appraisal in the Age of Digital Reproduction

With apologies to Walter Benjamin, I would like to reflect on some of the challenges and strategies associated with the appraisal of digital archives that we've faced here at the Bentley Historical Library. The following discussion will highlight current digital archives appraisal techniques employed by the Bentley, many of which we are hoping to integrate into the forthcoming Archivematica Appraisal and Arrangement tab.
Foundations and Principles
In working with digital archives, the Bentley seeks to apply the same archival principles that inform our handling of physical collections, with added steps to ensure the authenticity, integrity, and security of content.
By and large, appraisal tends to be an iterative process as we seek to understand the intellectual content and scope of materials to determine if they should be retained as part of our permanent collections. If we're really lucky, curation staff and/or field archivists might be able to review content (or a sample thereof) prior to its acquisition and accession, a process that helps us pinpoint the materials we are interested in and avoid the transfer of content that we have identified as out of scope or superfluous.
This pre-accession appraisal may not be possible for various reasons (technical issues, geographic distance, scheduling conflicts, etc.), but in the vast majority of cases, we have some level of understanding about the nature of digital content and its relationship to our collecting policy by the time it's received, from a high-level overview or item-level description in a spreadsheet.
Whatever the case, appraisal is a crucial part of our ingest workflow, as it helps us to:
Establish basic intellectual control of the content, directory structure, and/or original storage environment to facilitate the arrangement and description of content.
Identify content that should be included in our permanent collections as well as superfluous or out-of-scope materials that will be separated (deaccessioned).
Determine potential preservation issues posed by unique file formats, content dependencies, or other hardware/software issues.
Address copyright or other intellectual property issues by applying appropriate access/use restrictions.
Discover and verify the presence of sensitive personally identifiable information such as Social Security and credit card numbers.
As we strive to employ More Product, Less Process (MPLP) strategies to the greatest extent possible, it is important to employ tools and strategies that will avoid inefficiencies and ensure that appraisal occurs at an appropriate level of granularity. I should also note that we take a nimble and common-sense approach to appraisal: not all procedures will be required for all accessions and in cases where donors provide detailed descriptive information for fairly homogeneous content, appraisal may be fairly minimal.
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