Designing and Developing a Structural Model of Performance Indicators for National Archives: Application and methodology for thematic Analysis

Despite the emphasis of experts and general recognition of the importance of performance measurement systems and application of key performance indicators in organizations, no standard has been developed or scientific study found national archives.Here wepropose a structural model for this purpose.

In the first phase, which lasted about a year, strategic records, performance management system records and performance measurement indicators of twelve national archives were collected. In the second phase, using the thematic analysis method (context-based) in Nvivo10 software, the structural model of performance measurement indicators of these national archives was designed and developed.

236 significant performance measurement indicators were coded at different levels of structure and content. These codes were classified into 33 sub and 6 main themes (identification and appraisal, description and organization, records-archives interaction, preservation, staff index and archival authority).By reviewing the relative frequency of the main themes, it was found that the records-archives interaction theme with 42% had the highest and the main theme of description and organization with 3% had the lowest importance among the performance indicators in the national archives of the world.Due to the lack of a scientific sample or a specific standard for the performance measurement system, there is no aggregated and citable pattern and benchmark for practical action. So, this is the first step to cover the theoretical-practical gap by extracting performance measurement indicators of twelve national archives to understand the relative importance of designing a performance measurement system.