n.Appraisalselecting, as part of appraisal, a portion of a body of records for permanent retentionGenicot 1950, 334Here is another example of the application of what could be called the sampling principle: In criminal courts, the reports of cases which were not prosecuted constitute a bulky mass of documents which, if taken separately, are of no interest but which together are very revealing of the conditions existing in a town, for example. Therefore we can neither keep nor eliminate all of them. The best solution would appear to be to keep primarily those of the “crisis years,” 1870, 1871, 1884, 1894, 1902, 1914 to 1919, and, for normal periods, those for one year out of ten.Lewinson 1957, 292Sampling of Government archives consists in the selection of some part of a body of homogeneous records, so that some aspect of the Government’s work or the information received or developed by the Government may be represented or illustrated thereby.Steck and Blouin 1976, 19The bulk of the collection consisted of long runs of material, and by sampling the volumes we could theoretically reduce the bulk by 80 percent.Hull 1981, iiAmong the various techniques adopted for reducing the bulk of certain classes of records is “sampling,” a method, which can vary from a purely subjective choice of examples through a variety of procedures to an exact statistical process, providing an ideal objective answer for the student involved in the quantitative analysis of data.Kepley 1984, 238The archival literature on sampling and how it relates to the appraisal of archives is thin. When the term has been used, it has usually meant one of two things: to cull from a large records series the most significant files or documents for retention (subjective sampling), or to select statistically a small portion from a large universe of information that will accurately reflect all important characteristics of the larger universe (statistical sampling).Guptill 1985, 86Partial retention, or sampling, provides an alternative to total retention or destruction.Appraisalselecting, as part of appraisal, a portion of a body of records for permanent retention through a random process that ensures each file in the series or one of its subseries has an equal chance of being included in the retained set of records; random sampling; statistical samplingHindus, Hammett, and Hobson 1980, 7The Cook County plan employs sampling to retain cases for historically interesting periods; by contrast, we recommend sampling in order to retain a representative corpus of all court business over the century.Cook 1991b, 27Sampling is based on the idea that, if a portion of the whole is properly chosen, one can safely generalize about the characteristics of the whole by studying only a small fragment of it—perhaps nineteen times out of twenty with a four per cent error rate. While this lack of guaranteed certainty may make some archivists nervous, archives have a vested interest in sampling. If archivists can with reasonable assurance make statistically valid information available about an entire body of records by examining and preserving only part of it, both archival work and scholarly research will be facilitated and scarce archival resources saved.Audiovisual RecordsDigital RecordsPreservation and Conservationcapturing audio data using a measure of sound quality expressed in kilohertzCreaden 2006, 36Where in imaging, pixels per inch define resolution, in digital “sampling” of sound, the measure of resolution is sound-wave frequency per second, expressed in kilohertz (kHz).IASA 2009The sampling rate fixes the maximum limit on frequency response. When producing digital copies of analogue material IASA recommends a minimum sampling rate of 48 kHz for any material. However, higher sampling rates are readily available and may be advantageous for many content types.Cocciolo 2017, 99Although some recent research indicates that most typical users cannot tell the difference between a 24-bit/96 kHz recording and a 16-bit/44.1 kHz recording, there can be loss of some fine details in choosing the lower sampling rate and bit depth.Lawreviewing a portion of a body of digital records to determine if they are likely to contain information responsive to a legal request for recordsSedona Conference 2014, 353Sampling usually refers to the process of testing a database or a large volume of Electronically Stored Information for the existence or frequency of relevant information. It can be a useful technique in addressing a number of issues relating to litigation, including decisions about what repositories of data are appropriate to search in a particular litigation, and determinations of the validity and effectiveness of searches or other data extraction procedures.Sedona Principles 2017, 167Parties should consider using sampling techniques to narrow the burden of searching voluminous ESI [electronically stored information]. For example, employing a search methodology on a sample in a data source could reveal that a very low percentage of files in that data source contain relevant ESI. This may weigh heavily against a need to search that source further, or it may be a factor in a cost allocation analysis. Such techniques also may reveal substantial redundancy among sources (e.g., duplicate ESI is found in multiple locations) such that it is reasonable for the organization to preserve and produce ESI from only one of the sources.
