Today, the civil society plays a key role not only in criticizing and monitoring the functions of the state and the market, but also as an active producer of public services by complementing the government and the public sector. Public records management is also becoming more and more popular. In the case of appraisal and selection, which is the core area of record management, discussions about citizen participation are becoming more serious than any other areas. The concept of ‘proactive appraisal’, which has emerged as a paradigm of citizens’ participation in appraisal, reminds us that citizens themselves are the subjects of public records and are no longer alienated from the appraisal system. The problem is, while the growth of the Korean civil society about institutional participation is spreading rapidly, but citizen participation is hard to find in the field of public records. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of citizen participation in the process of appraisal of public records, and to debunk the role of citizen participation in the appraisal processes by exploring the examples in the UK, Canada, and Australia. This paper emphasizes that the appraisal system of the national public records in crisis today could be largely restored through the domestic application of this active citizen participation cases. First of all, this study presents a conceptual appraisal model that could reflect citizen participation in the field of record management along with the analyses of the advanced cases in some western countries. Specifically, this paper focuses on presenting the models of ‘appraisal documentation’ and ‘governance-based appraisal’, reflecting the active citizen participation. This study suggests that these citizens’ participatory evaluation models should be settled in Korea in the future and we should urgently discuss ‘citizen participation appraisal’.