Appraising the Records of the FBI

Kimberly Tryka

This talk will provide an overview of how the National Archives appraised the records of the FBI from the mid-1940s until the mid-1970s) and the onslaught of an important legal case. The lawsuit against the National Archives claimed that it’s appraisal practices were allowing important documents to be destroyed. This landmark lawsuit led to the formation of a joint FBI/NA task force given the responsibility of re-appraising the FBI's files and creating a retention schedule. The talk will discuss the sampling techniques used by the joint FBI/NA task force and why such techniques were necessary, and why they did not work for all the FBI's records.

Kimberly Tryka holds a Ph.D. in Planetary Science from the California Institute of Technology and is presently finishing an MLIS degree, with an archives/records management focus, at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences. The basis of her talk is a paper that has been accepted and is being revised for publication in ARCHIVARIA.

Monday September 25, 2000

11:30 AM

Room 503

University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences Building

135 N. Bellefield