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Acquisitions and Appraisal Section
The Acquisitions and Appraisal Section serves as a forum for the discussion of issues and interests pertaining to the acquisition and appraisal of public records, private papers, and other archival or manuscript collections.
Section Newsletter Now Available
June 9 : The new issue of the section newsletter has just been released.
Deaccessioning and Reappraisal Guidelines Working Group
In February 2008, the Acquisition and Appraisal Section Steering Committee presented a proposal to develop guidelines for reappraisal and deaccessioning to the Standards Committee. With the support of the Standards Committee and Council, the section leadership is moving forward with the effort. Since these guidelines will have broad professional application, interested professionals from across SAA, not just those who are members of the Acquisition and Appraisal Section, are invited to participate directly in their development. If you are interested in working on the project, please plan to attend a preliminary planning meeting at the annual conference on Thursday, Aug. 13, 12-1:30, or contact Tara Laver, chair of the Acquisition and Appraisal Section, or via phone at 225-578-6546.
Reappraisal and deaccessioning have been controversial topics since at least the publication of the 1984 winter issue of American Archivist, in which Karen Benedict, Richard Haas, Leonard Rapport, F. Gerald Ham, and Jutta Reed-Scott debated the practical and theoretical merits of each. As the historical record continues to grow and repositories’ resources do not keep pace with this growth, and with the example of successful reappraisal and deaccessioning projects at the Minnesota Historical Society and the American Heritage Center, more repositories are willing to consider employing reappraisal and deaccessioning as tools in managing their collections. NHPRC’s funding of the AHC’s large-scale project also evidences increased approval and support at the national level. Further, if attendance at SAA sessions on the topic in 2005 and 2008 is any indication, practitioners are interested in learning more about reappraisal and deaccessioning and are looking for guidance and resources. Two archivists who presented their deaccessioning experiences at the 2008 session called for the establishment of profession-wide guidelines for deaccessioning, but as Mark Greene notes in a recently published article, the archival profession has not provided guidelines or addressed the question in our code of ethics, as our colleagues in the allied professions of librarianship and museum curatorship have. Consequently, projects at archival repositories have had to rely on standards from those fields in creating their own policies.[1]
This project seeks to rectify that oversight. The guidelines produced will provide informed direction and professional sanction for archivists and repositories that choose to manage their collections in this way. They will also assist archivists to implement transparent and consistent strategic collection management, to husband their limited resources more effectively, and to serve researchers by directing their efforts to retained collections and making transferred collections available at more appropriate repositories.
1 Mark Greene, “I’ve Deaccessioned and Lived to Tell About It: Confessions of an Unrepentant Reappraiser,” Archival Issues 30:1 (2006), 17 n. 18.
Page last updated June 9, 2009.
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