8.0 SYNTHESIS AND COMMENTARY AREA

8.1 SYNTHESIS AND COMMENTARY

DEFINITION:	This category provides an evaluation of the significance, contributions, roles, and history of the described organization as determined by the entity responsible for the description.
DISCUSSION:	Entities maintaining organizational descriptions often record evaluative and interpretive information that describes how the organization operated within its environment. While descriptive information recorded in other areas might provide much of this type of interpretive knowledge for those particular areas, this category provides an opportunity to record a summary statement that provides this evaluation for the organization as a whole.
>>Purpose:	As one of the few entities with ongoing responsibility for the documentation of an organizational unit and with access to a wide range of primary and secondary sources about its history, the entity with responsibility for maintaining the organizational description is in a good position to provide a historical perspective on the life and activities of the organizational unit. This is especially true for those organizational units that have not been or are unlikely to be the subject of in-depth scholarly research. This synthesis of information, gathered from a variety of sources and perspectives and recorded in a commentary, may highlight trends and issues that cut across chronological periods or specific areas of organizational activity, as segregated in this descriptive structure. It also serves as a record of the entity's own perspective on the significance and role of the organization, especially as that perspective provides a framework for how the entity dealt with the organization's records.
>>Nature:	As an evaluative piece of information, this category is more subject to dispute than many other categories in the organizational description. Varying interpretations will often lead to commentaries that conflict in significant ways. It is essential that this category include attribution information that identifies the source of the commentary.
SOURCES:	Information in this category will generally be developed by the entity responsible for the organizational description through background research while preparing to survey, appraise, or process records of the organization, or from reference experience in support of research into the organization's history and activities.
USES:	By documenting the entity's own perceptions of the significance and role of the described organization, the information in this category can serve to illuminate why the entity treated the records of the organization as it did or why it gave this organization the particular emphasis that it did in its various programs. This category can also serve as a preliminary framework within which a researcher can begin to understand the organization and within which he or she can relate individual pieces of descriptive information.
ACCESS:	Most of the information in this category would probably be recorded in unstructured text and one would not need to retrieve it directly through structured access points or free text searching. Because of its subjective nature, however, the nature of the information in this category and its attribution must be apparent whenever it is displayed.
TERMINOLOGY:
EXAMPLES:
INTERCHANGE:	Attribution must be continually associated with this information whenever it is exchanged.
RELATIONSHIPS:	Where the circumstances of a particular event, activity, or status are recorded with regard to other categories of organizational information, they will often present the same concerns about attribution and interpretation that this category does.
PRACTICE:
ISSUES:	This category must be carefully constructed as a synthesis and commentary and not merely as a summary statement of facts recorded in other areas of the organizational description. The purpose of this category must be carefully explained to archival repositories and is likely to raise questions about the propriety of the archivist or the repository engaging in this type of interpretive activity in the context of organizational description. It must be pointed out that it already happens and is an essential part of the repository's priority setting and allocation of effort, and feeds directly into appraisal decisions. As such, it needs to be recorded and labeled explicitly as the repository's rationale for its actions.