Appraisal based on organic functional analysis: a case study in an electronic records environment

This article is a shortened version of a Master’s dissertation for the Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies. It deals with issues of appraisal. Such issues involve fundamental concepts on what records are, why they are kept, and their life cycle. The answers to these questions were sought and found in the history of archives, and in the specialist literature. The theory and the methodology adopted were then applied to a case study of a recently established organisation in Lisbon, which has, at the core of its business, information in electronic format.