Personnel files for individual public servants are initially created in the department or agency where the persons are employed. Departments, however, only hold files of individual employees as a function of delegated personnel management conventions determined by Treasury Board and the Public Service Commission, not in their capacity as autonomous records creators. The current series of selected personnel files exists in its present form exclusively as a result of National Archives and Treasury Board procedures and authorities governing in the disposition of records as applied on a decentralized basis by individual departments., Individual personnel files never belonged to a creating agency, but followed the public servant, through his or her career, growing organically as long as the individual was employed in the Public Service of Canada. The collection is comprised of personnel files of public servants serving the Government of Canada since 1867, both those subject to the Public Service Commission or its antecedents and those whose appointment is exempted from such authority. The final set of records is an aggregate created and selected on the basis of a) delegated personnel management, b) Treasury Board decisions and regulations, c) National Archives authorities or administrative procedures, d) initial selections applied by departments on a delegated basis without mechanisms for verification by the National Archives, either under authorities or under administrative arrangement., The criteria by which the exceptional selection of these files was made has varied over time but in general the criteria for designation as archival have entailed three distinct categories of qualifying factors: i) sufficient rank in the hierarchy (roughly director level or equivalent and higher in recent times); ii) individuals who have attained distinction as a result of activities inside or outside the Public Service such as leadership in a field of endeavour including election to an important public office, competitive sports, individual acts of valour that have received recognition, or participation in a significant public event, or iii) service distinguished by length, by a unique position or status in the public service, or by being killed in action while on duty. Criteria were never fully coherent, nor were they consistently applied. The personnel file for an individual evolved into multiple components, only a portion of which were retained as the archival record of the individual involved. The changing nature of the personnel file under the modern principles of Access and Privacy Legislation (1983) and revised automated reporting structures for human resource management functions fundamentally reduced the content and substance of the file while adding greatly to its bulk; these developments, among other considerations, in turn have prompted the reappraisal that newer files no longer have any archival value and the decision, therefore, no longer to apply any selection criteria to personnel files as they reach the end of their operational retention periods. [This note was originally written as the collection equivalent of an administrative history for a fonds. Due to the inherent nature of a "collection", the distinctions among administrative history, custodial history and scope and content tend to blur. The elements of an administrative history for this collection are all incorporated into this custodial history.]
