Canaday Center archivists follow certain guidelines when assessing materials for preservation in the repository, otherwise known as archival appraisal. Note that archival appraisal differs from monetary appraisal. The former assigns value based on research use (historical, legal, political, administrative, etc. usefulness). The latter, in a commercial setting, assigns fair market or auction value to materials.
Guidelines used to determine inclusion in the Canaday Center's holding are as follows:
- Materials must fit within the current collecting scope of the Center's collections, per our collection policies.
- Materials will be assessed by a set of criteria which include:
- Provenance;
- Authenticity and reliability;
- Order and completeness;
- Significance and quality;
- Context and relation to other materials in our collections;
- Access or use limiltations
- Materials will also be assessed for evidential value (how and why they were created), research value (content such as people, places, and things); and artifactual value (unique characteristics of a physical item).
- Physical format, condition, and unique preservation needs will be assessed to determine if the Canaday Center has the resources needed to adequately care for the materials. Materials may be declined if the resources necessary to process, preserve, and make the materials accessible to researchers are beyond the Center's capacity, or it the cost acquiring said resources outweighs the potential research value of the materials.
- Materials must be free of legal encumbrances and undue restrictions.
- The University of Toledo is a public institution and as a result, the University Archives is governed by the State of Ohio's Public Records Act, which defines the types of records that may be restricted.
- For Manuscripts collections, a signed Deed of Gift is required to define the status of any copyrighted materials, confirm any conditions imposed, and transfer ownership of those materials.
- The Canaday Center cannot and will not make promises regarding the processing, exhibition, digitization, publication, or other use of donated materials.
- The donor gives consent to the Canaday Center to process, preserve and use materials according to its needs. In some cases, this may include digitally reformatting materials or migrating existing digital content to new formats or environments.
Materials may be accepted or declined based on the archivists' assessment. In some cases, the archivists may suggest another repository that may be a more appropriate home for the materials.
Collecting Policies
No institution has either the resources or the physical space to collect every historical record. As a result, archives develop collecting policies to define what type of record to accept. The focus of our collecting policies is to give clear guidance to archive donors about the kind of material that the Canaday Center seeks to acquire, the methods by which is does so, and how the collections are managed and accessed. Current drafts of these policies are available as pages within this LibGuide.
