The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the appraisal guidelines for architectural records by using a centralized measure. Due to the lack of empirical examinations in archival appraisal theory, Dr. Frank Boles insisted on the need for “micro-appraisal.” In this paper, with reference to the criteria organized by Boles, a method of analyzing the appraisal decision criteria for architectural records was adopted. Six types of guideline, including those used in North America since the 1970s, were analyzed; the guidelines were examined against the criteria that Boles summarized in 1991. We observed the following two points: first, there was an emphasis on “Original Record Purpose”and “Significance of Topic,”and second, there was a lack of consideration in regard to “Use Limitations,” “Costs of Retention,” and “Implications for the Selection Decision.”

Ransho , or Dutch books imported during the Edo period in Japan, played an eminent role in Japanese history. However, after the Meiji Restoration, they were replaced by books in English, French, etc. and became forgotten. The Ransho collection of Asakusa-bunko is one such case.

Asakusa-bunko inherited the collection of the Shojakukan, the first government library open to the public in Japan, and it possessed more than 9,000 volumes of Ransho that had been formerly owned by the Edo Shogunate. When Asakusa-bunko ceased to exist, its collection was transferred to the Ueno Museum. When the Cabinet Office Library was established in 1884, a request was made for books owned by government agencies to be concentrated in that library. The Ransho collection formerly owned by Asakusa-bunko was lost in the process of its transfer to the Cabinet Office Library.

I studied existing Ransho in the Tokyo National Museum and in the National Archives; I also examined various government records from the Meiji period to discover lost Ransho . I report on this process and on the results of my study on the lost Ransho .

In November 2014, the editorial board asked me to write on a subject; after several discussions, this sketch was planned to introduce several international collaborations in Western cultural archival communities since the 1980s to our colleagues in Northeast Asia. Dialogues have taken place to integrate two separate professional communities: one composed of professional archivists rooted in the Roman Era, and the other composed of professional records managers following a tradition that emerged in the United States in the mid1950s and spread throughout the New World. Furthermore, from the 1990s to the early 2000s, with the rise of digitization, the ICA and ISO released international standards for Archives Records Managements: ARM, in which chained information/objects-documents-records-archival entities have metadata embedded as their DNA. These standards have established an integrated professional archival science as well as an archival discipline,furnished with theory, methodology, and practice. Were we to question why and how these innovations have occurred,wouldwebeabletoelicitgood answers? Might Canadian archivist Terry Cookʼs articles from the mid-1990s, for example, which revisited the modern classic Dutch Manual , explicitly or implicitly suggest answers? Perhaps these could lead the way forward to the integration of the two professional communities. In “Introduction to the 2003 Reissue”of the Dutch Manual, the Dutch archivists P.J.Horsman, F.C.J.Ketelaar, and T. H. P. M. Thomassen show how archival scienceʼs principles and methodology originated and were formulated against the particular, century-long history of the Dutch archival community; at the same time,they point out that actually the whole of post-Napoleonic Europe was its intellectual cradle. In this sketch, we try to read the history of archives and archival science in their original Western cultural context alongside a number of writings by the Italian-Canadian archivist Luciana Duranti from the late 1980s to 1990s, as well as other articles（mainly in English）by archivists and historians. This will lend us not only an answer to the question posed above but also a richer understanding of the archival world. The writer hopes that this boat, piloted by an amateur seaman without chart and compass, will arrive safely at its destination.