Teaching Appraisal in an American (U.S.) Archives Program

The author, a professor at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, discusses the use of selected archival literature to nurture an appraisal mindset, particularly within the American context. She then addresses in some detail types of appraisal case studies and the variety of ways that they may be used as teaching tools.     

Reading Colonial Records Through an Archival Lens: The Provenance of Place, Space and Creation

Analyzes attitudes and use of archives by post-colonial scholars who find that colonial records offer the voices of the master narrative but do not reflect the voices of the oppressed and voiceless. Argues that framing records within social provenance and a ‘community of records’ offers archival solutions to the dilemmas of locating all voices within the spaces of records. “As for what we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over which my ancestor held sway, no documentation of complex civilizations, is any comfort to me. Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to, me, what I became after I met you.” Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place