The question has been asked why any institution would undergo evaluation.
Let me describe the Billy Graham Center Archives experience as an example.
In 1983, the archives was about eight years old and the staff felt it
would be a good time to do a self-study, using the 1984 booklet published
by SAA.  We wanted to evaluate our practice against professional standards
before the practice became set in stone.  Also, since we were a small shop
without much contact with the broader realms and more populous provinces
of Archivy (love that word), we thought this was an opportunity to bring
in experienced archivists from the outside to critique and advise us.  The
institution we are a part of, Wheaton College, also at the time was
encouraging many of its departments to do a self-study, so this tied in
with larger institutional goals.
 
The experience of the evaluation was not always pleasant and forced us to
learn some painful lessons about our services and limitations.  But
overall it was a beneficial experience, particularly because of the skill
and insight of the two outside archivists who paid us a site visit at the
end of the process, David Klaassen and Maynard Britchford.  It is over ten
years since that experience, so we are now in the midst of another
self-study which we plan to complete with another site visit by a pair of
outside archivists.  We are mainly relying again on the 1984 guidelines,
with some material from McCarthy's Workbook.
 
I strongly feel that the one useful role the CIED can play is to act as a
clearing house of information on possible evaluators and to help match
institutions with outside evaluators.  Peer evaluations might have been
costly and cumbersome, but our's was immensely helpful to us both in
helping us evaluate ourselves and in giving us credibility within the
larger institution.  I believe that helping to arrange these is a service
a professional association should provide.
 
 
Robert Shuster
Director of Archives
Billy Graham Center Archives
Wheaton College
Wheaton, IL 60187
(708) 752-5910
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