At 2 o’clock in the afternoon of June 1st, 2011, Dr. Cook was invited to give a lecture about “Macro appraisal and functional analysis” in Room 209 in the Information building, followed by Mrs. Bartlett who has come to China 8 times.

At the beginning of the lecture, Professor Wang Jian introduced Dr. Cook and Mrs. Bartlett to the audiences. Terry Cook has been affiliated with the graduate-level Archival Studies program at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg, Canada, since 1998, following a long career at the then-National Archives of Canada, where he directed its government records appraisal programme. He is also an adjunct professor of Information Studies at the University of Ottawa, and has taught courses at the University of Michigan in the United States and at Monash University in Australia. In addition to publishing some eighty essays now appearing on six continents, many in translation, Dr. Cook has written or edited five books, in addition to numerous published guides and inventories for the National Archives of Canada. He has conducted multi-day institutes on appraisal, electronic records, the postmodern archive, and archival ethics across Canada and internationally, especially several times in Australia, Ireland, Spain, and South Africa; given papers on every continent at numerous conferences; and delivered plenary addresses to the International Congress on Archives in Beijing in 1996 and to the ICA’s Round Table at Quebec in 2007 and in Oslo in 2010. His current research interests focus on archival appraisal, the postmodern archive, archival theory, and the history of archives and of archival ideas.Dr. Cook has been honoured by election as a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists, Fellow of the Canadian Society of Office Automation Professionals, and Fellow of the Association of Canadian Archivists, and winner of the Ernst Posner Prize, the Kaye Lamb Prize (twice), and the South African Archivists Prize for outstanding archival publications. In 2010 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the national academy of highest recognition for scholars and scientists in all academic fields in Canada. He is the first to be recognized for archival scholarship as a separate academic discipline. Nancy Bartlett is chief archivist for the University of Michigan archives and records program and assistant director for academic and international programs at the Bentley Historical Library. Her publications have examined the relevance of diplomatics to contemporary photography, the history of pedagogy in architecture, immigration archives, cross-cultural influences in archival administration, and the role of the archivist as mediator of meaning. She was chief editor of the International Council on Archives journal, Comma, from 2000 to 2004. She has contributed essays to China Archives News. She assists the director of the Bentley Historical Library in an ongoing Joint Seminar on Archival Methods, a program shared between the Bentley Historical Library and the State Archives Administration of China and begun in 1999. Among highlights of her professional experiences have been eight visits to China, starting in 1996.

After the introduction, Ji Hongbo, who is in charge of student’s work, expressed welcome to Dr.Cook and Mrs. Nancy. At the same time, she expressed her thanks to Mrs. Du Mei and Mrs. Li Wendong, who come from State Archives Bureau, for inviting Dr. Cook to give the lecture.

Then, Dr. Cook began his lecture. Macroappraisal encompasses a theory, strategy, and methodology for doing appraisal, which was first adopted at the National Archives of Canada in 1991. Against a summary of the broader concept of macroappraisal, this lecture explore the “functional analysis” that is the theoretical and methodological core of macroappraisal. The argument suggest that archivists in appraisal should focus on issues of governance, thus going beyond trying to understand (and document) what a government (or other institution) does. It seeks thereby to put the “citizen” back in the citizen-state relationship – and among the archival records identified through macroappraisal for long-term archival preservation. Value in records is found in society and social discourse, not in anticipated research uses. Audiences were attracted by Dr. Cook’s lecture. When time went for discussion, audiences asked many valuable questions for Dr. Cook. Dr. Cook highly praised the quality of students from Renmin University. And Mrs. Bartlett thought from these interflows we can advance together. She believe there will be more and more chances for us to cooperate.

At last, Ji Hongbo, who is in charge of student’s work, gave some porcelain presents to Dr.Cook and Mrs. Bartlett. She expressed welcome and thanks again.

After the lecture, visitors were invited to visit the laboratories, including data engineering and knowledge engineering laboratory and Cache Safe Technology laboratory. They expressed praises to all the excellent equipments and leading edge researches. (By Huang Zhengyu)