Appraisal and Deaccession: A Case Study with the Mark Ellingson Collection

The job of an archive is to collect and preserve primary source material that is consistent with its mission and to make sure that it is accessible to the public. It is the work of the archivist to choose what is useful to collect and preserve. Archivists also have to consider the preservation needs of all items that make it into the collection. They also have to review the collection for items that do not conform to the mission and therefore must be deaccessioned. My thesis involves applying the best practices of appraisal and deaccession to the Mark Ellingson Collection, a collection of documents and objects owned by former RIT president Mark Ellingson, in the RIT Archives Collections. I will create and begin to apply a tool for use in the appraisal of the Mark Ellingson Collection that will start the compilation of a list of suggestions for the deaccession of items that do not fit in the collection. This tool will be used to identify which items in the collection belong in the archive and which should be deaccessioned, as many materials in the collection do not fall under the RIT Archive Collections’ mission