A Team Effort: Overcoming Digital Appraisal Anxiety Through Communication and Collaboration

Abstract

The University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library (BHL) collects physical and born-digital archival records of the University of Michigan as well as of the State of Michigan, its organisations and its people. To streamline and better inform its processes in order to provide efficient and effective access to digital archival materials, the BHL’s curation team analysed its processes for the technical and intellectual appraisal of records. This article describes the challenges associated with the technical and intellectual appraisal of digital records, analyses the work of a cross-team group of BHL archivists, and makes recommendations for the expedient and informed appraisal of large sets of born-digital records.