n.the usefulness or significance of that accrues to a record for only for a limited period of timeKeegan 1943, 156In considering paper for records of transitory value, care should be exercised to select a paper that is no more than adequate for the needs of the record.Pinkett 1958, 164War Department offices were cluttered with bulging files containing applications for positions, letters of transmittal, monthly personal reports of officers, records pertaining to changes of station or duty, applications of soldiers for discharge or remission of their court-martial sentences, and vast quantities of other material of transitory value.Pérotin 1966, 36–37The papers of a bureau constitute its memory. While they are on the desk of their creator one can compare them to the memory that remains in the realm of psychological consciousness. As soon as these papers are placed in their filing cabinets, conforming thus to the first age of archives, one considers them as having moved on into the subconscious, whence they can be easily recalled. The following stage, that of the piles and corridors [is comparable to] the realm of the unconscious, from which only a skillful and patient psychoanalyst knows how to extract them. Their destruction, of course, is irreversible oblivion. From this perspective the wise “bureaucrat” uses this memory as certain superior minds use theirs: he gradually forgets all that has transitory value and preserves all that merits it in the zone of more or less immediate consciousness.Fishbein 1970, 176The appraisers of the 1930’s and 1940’s did work under severe handicaps. They found an appalling mass of records, much of it of transitory value. Significant documents were often buried in trivia.Maher 1992, 215Many machine-readable data are of only transitory value, but a small quantity are permanently valuable and may be unavailable (or at least far less accessible) from any other institutional records.
