Doing Archival Appraisal in Canada. Results from a Postal Survey of Practitioners' Experience, Practices, and Opinions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper reports results of a self-administered postal survey of 450 Canadian archivists undertaken between 2003 and 2005. The survey of fifty-eight questions gathered information specifically about appraisal as a work process: how it is done by archivists in Canadian repositories; what resources they use; what problems and issues they have encountered; and in the light of experience, what tools, skills, and knowledge have proven to be important in doing this task. The paper reports the frequencies for eight sections of the survey. It situates the 313 responses (response rate of 70%) within their overall experience, institutional affiliation, and basic demography. The paper also discusses respondents’ opinions on the knowledge, education, and training needed to do appraisal, and assesses the sources for information they use and find useful. After reporting on the respondents’ approach to the task and the methods they use, the paper looks at the problems encountered in doing appraisal and discusses the ideas that archivists have about their accountability for decisions. Further analysis of data from the survey is proposed as the companion to the next phase of research on appraisal, interviewing archivists to explore ideas and issues in depth. RESUME Ce texte presente les resultats d’un sondage auto-administre achemine par la poste aupres de 450 archivistes canadiens entre 2003 et 2005. Le sondage qui comportait 58 questions a permis de compiler des donnees portant specifiquement sur l’evaluation comme processus de travail : comment les archivistes effectuent l’evaluation dans des depots d’archives canadiens; de quelles ressources ils se servent; quels problemes et questions ils ont rencontres; et, a la lumiere de leurs experiences, quels outils, capacites et connaissances ont ete utiles a la realisation de cette tâche. Le texte rapporte les frequences pour huit sections du sondage. Il situe les 313 reponses (taux de reponse de 70 %) dans le contexte des experiences generales, des affiliations institutionnelles et des profils demographiques des repondants. Le texte presente aussi leurs opinions en ce qui concerne les connaissances, l’education et la formation necessaires pour mener une evaluation, et il evalue les sources d’information dont ils se servent et qu’ils trouvent utiles. Apres avoir fait le tour des approches des repondants pour accomplir cette tâche et des methodes dont ils se servent, le texte examine les problemes rencontres en faisant l’evaluation, et il explore les idees que les archivistes ont au sujet de leur obligation de rendre des comptes pour leurs decisions. L’auteure propose une analyse plus poussee des donnees du sondage pendant la prochaine phase de recherche sur l’evaluation, alors que seront interviewes des archivistes dans le but d’explorer plus a fond leurs idees et leurs preoccupations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".