While reading this article, I was impressed by the choice of an architect as a professional stand-in for appraisal theory and archival appraisal. Terry Cook could’ve picked any profession really but an architect is such a great choice in relation to macro-appraisal because of how broad an architects social and physical dynamics and interactions can be and also how varied the purpose of a architect’s design can be. It really seems like the perfect choice for this subject and I kind of got hung up in the second part of this article trying to think of a comparable or better example that wouldn’t necessarily overlap with an architect directly. A novelist? Some sort of mass transit (commercial plane, train, bus, etc.) designer? It’s tough to come up with a topic that suits this subject as well as an architect.

I think this alternative, less glamorous view of archives "less like mirrors than like chessboards" really gets at what Yale has been writing about so far in this essay. Archives and the work that archivists do seem to often get either underplayed or misinterpreted. Some of the specific ends achieved, like the duality of record keeping in 1940's Germany referenced in the Yale's introduction, indicate that archives are not just optical devices. This quote is a very simple but effective way of describing archives and I will keep it in mind.