- Evidential Value: Do the records provide evidence of particular activities of DEL's life (ie. his personal life, his education, his teaching career and his writing career)? This might include things like personal documents (birth certificate, degrees, etc.), photographs, correspondence from family, friends, colleagues, and publishers/editors.
- Informational Value: Do the records provide information about DEL, or provide additional context to his life and writings? Is there research value to the records? This is going to be the hardest to appraise because the numerous magazine/newspaper articles and other such clippings that DEL inserted into these albums will fall in this category, and that's the grey area for me. To keep or not to keep, it will be difficult to decide. But more on that later....
- Intrinsic Value: Does the thing itself (the object, not just the information contained in/on the object) hold value? For example, is there any value in keeping the albums intact? In my opinion the preservation requirements far out-way the need to keep the albums intact. And the albums themselves are in no way valuable. They're cheap magnetic albums probably bought in bulk based on the number of them that are identical. But intrinsic value can be applied to other items as well, and may come into play as I progress through the appraisal process.
As you can well see from the absence of posts (since my last in January), I've been putting off this next step.
It's a rather daunting task mostly because it involves going through each of the 130ish volumes and evaluating all the bits and pieces. It would be so much easier if there was some sort of rhyme or reason to what is in the albums, but there's not. So I just have to bite the bullet and start at Box 1, Volume 1 and push on through to the end. Wish me luck!
