Past Imperfect? Reflections on the Evolution of Canadian Federal Government Records Appraisal
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 140 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. RÉSUMÉ Des décisions d’évaluation qui sont bien documentées, qui sont fondées sur la théorie et la pratique archivistiques bien établies et qui sont prises dans un cadre légal et politique approprié sont essentielles dans un contexte gouvernemental, et la société tient les archivistes de plus en plus imputables de leurs décisions de conserver ou de détruire des documents d’archives. Une analyse de la méthodologie de disposition et d’évaluation des documents d’archives du gouvernement canadien et des documents connexes révèle une progression à longue échelle, au fil de plusieurs époques différentes. L’expérience acquise en effectuant l’évaluation au cours de l’époque la plus récente, de pair avec une recherche au sujet du développement des pratiques de disposition des documents d’archives du gouvernement canadien pendant les 140 dernières années (y compris des preuves trouvées dans les documents d’archives et les documents opérationnels de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada), montrent qu’il existe des principes fondamentaux et des concepts clés qui peuvent et qui devraient appuyer la documentation liée à l’évaluation. On avance qu’une telle documentation devrait aussi s’appuyer sur quatre composantes de base – le contexte, la description, l’analyse et la décision – peu importe la méthodologie spécifique, le processus ou l’approche qu’un centre d’archives peut choisir d’adopter. On soutient que ces principes, concepts et composantes, bien enracinés dans l’histoire et les pratiques actuelles, devraient servir de fondement à la documentation nécessaire pour rendre compte des décisions d’évaluation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.109 | 0.172 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.015 | 0.024 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.057 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.050 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".