Past Imperfect? Reflections on the Evolution of Canadian Federal Government Records Appraisal
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Well-documented appraisal decisions, based on established archival theory and practice, and appropriately taken within a legal and policy framework, are essential in a government context, as archivists are increasingly held directly accountable by society for their recommendations to preserve or destroy records.An examination of Canadian federal records disposition and appraisal methodology and its documentation shows a long-term evolutionary progression through several different eras.Experience gained through the practice of appraisal within the most recent era, combined with research into the development of Canadian federal records disposition practices over the past 40 years (including evidence from the archival holdings and operational records of Library and Archives Canada) demonstrates that there are fundamental principles and key concepts that can and should support appraisal documentation.Such documentation, it is argued, should also be based on four core components -context, description, analysis, and decision -regardless of the specific methodology, process, or approach that an archives might use.It is argued that these principles, concepts, and components, rooted in history and actual practices, should be the foundation for the documentation necessary to account for appraisal decisions.All nineteen of the commission's site visit reports are found in LAC, RG 35/R77-4-7, vol., bound volume, "Minutes of the proceedings of the Departmental Commission appointed to enquire into and report upon the state of the Public Records, 897"; they are also repeated in the commission's published report. 2 LAC, RG 35/R77-4-7, vol., bound volume, "Minutes of the proceedings of the Departmental Commission appointed to enquire into and report upon the state of the Public Records, 897," Joseph Pope (Under-Secretary of State) to Henry C. Maxwell Lyte (Deputy Keeper of the Records), 7 February 897. 3 Ibid., J.J. [Carkowski] to Joseph Pope, 4 March 897, .4 LAC, RG 35/R77-4-7, vol., file "pt.2, 'Rules for the Disposal of Documents which are not of sufficient value to justify their Preservation in the Public Record Office,'" section 7, 890, 3. The three inspecting officers included the deputy keeper of the records, one assistant record keeper, and one other officer (who was required to be a "barrister of seven years' standing," if neither of the record keepers met that requirement).The inspecting officers were required to produce at least one schedule per year of records proposed for disposal, in conjunction with departmental officials.There were, however, no instructions given as to how the "legal, historical, genealogical, or antiquarian use or interest" for records was to be determined.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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) | 0.001 | 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 it