Last week, we looked at a paper presented by Philip C. Brooks at the 1942 Society of American Archivists annual meeting. The third paper presented in that series was by Robert H. Bahmer, who also worked at the National Archives and would go on in the 1960s to be both SAA president and Archivist of the United States. Bahmer’s paper was entitled “Scheduling the Disposition of Records.” He made a simple assertion:
“Few greater dangers threaten the comparatively small quantity of valuable records that accumulate in government offices than the intermingling with them of huge quantities of routine and valueless material; if the important records are not actually lost in the confusion, they stand a good chance of being buried so deeply that the task of the archivist who must appraise and administer them is made doubly difficult if not impossible.”
The Schedule 