Beinecke rarely engages in appraisal activities in the traditional archival sense of the term. The curator responsible for the collection makes all final decisions about acquisition and retention of material. However, the archivist processing the collection is familiar with its contents and with the relative significance of items therein, and is encouraged to make recommendations to the curator regarding retention in the processing plan or at any stage during a processing project. Archivists do routinely separate duplicates and printed material, and guidelines for these processes are outlined in Section 4.1.1.
A note about appraisal: while archivists at Beinecke rarely separate materials from collections based on their content, relevance, condition, or other factors, they do perform appraisal on collections when they make decisions about the levels to which to arrange, describe, and preserve collections. Archival appraisal, as the application of value to materials, is at the heart of processing.