Valuing Archives

The field of cultural production poses a lot of challenges to economists. The strong public good characteristics of a lot of public goods, the heavy reliance on public funding and the difficulties in ascertaining the value of cultural goods make for a tricky setting for economic analysis. In the field of heritage most debates center around the question what to preserve. While heritage professionals struggle to create explicit frameworks for attributing value to heritage objects, economists and policy makers have a hard time understanding or legitimizing decisions made in these matters. Everyone seems to understand that there is some kind of value to heritage objects, but this value seems to be very difficult to make explicit or put into numbers. This thesis focuses on a part of the field of cultural heritage that has received very little attention from cultural economists: documentary heritage. The aim of this thesis is to make a comparison between the archivist’s and the economist’s discourses on value. Bringing in the pragmatic view on value set forth by John Dewey, the strengths and weaknesses of these discourses are discussed. With the findings of this theoretical investigation, the selection policy and practice of the National Archives of the Netherlands are analyzed. The case studies described concern the preservation of government records. The appraisal of government records is an affair between the National Archives and government organizations. Decisions are taken far away from the market situation that economists are wont to study. By looking at the field of archival appraisal through the lens of economic theory (and vice versa) several conclusions are drawn about the way decisions on preserving archives are made in the Netherlands.