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<DIV dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN
class=996514111-18112009>Hello Rodney,</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN
class=996514111-18112009></SPAN></FONT><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff
size=2><SPAN class=996514111-18112009></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN
class=996514111-18112009>Your point about who owns the hardware, or the service
account, is a good one. I think we also need to be mindful of how
communication technologies are changing professional and personal
lives. For example, a structured working week is arguably no longer
necessary in some roles: with the help of technology, individuals can arrange
their time/location between personal and professional activities much more
flexibly, potentially benefiting themselves, their family and their
employer. As you point out, these kinds of changes could well to
lead to even greater mixing of personal/professional and employer
materials. You mentioned email and text services paid for by the
employer, but it's also common for professionals to use third-party online
services where the account is a personal one: the material is not
hosted, or controlled, by their employer but it's very likely used for
work purposes in 'work time' and 'personal time'. Will employers ever be
able to regain 'control'? Should they want to? Does it depend? It seems
unlikely that individuals will want to relinquish use of these kinds
of services, which are more attractive and useful than corporate
offerings (compare MS Outlook to Google's toolset, including Google Wave -
<A
href="http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html">http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html</A>).
Moreover, individuals are getting used to being in 'control' themselves. Some
organisations may be able (and may have to) lock down in response, but the
question of locking down or not is more complex for those that don't necessarily
need to - the benefits that these third-party technologies bring probably
outweigh the risks they pose. </SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN
class=996514111-18112009></SPAN></FONT><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff
size=2><SPAN class=996514111-18112009></SPAN></FONT><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN class=996514111-18112009></SPAN></FONT><FONT
face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN
class=996514111-18112009></SPAN></FONT><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff
size=2><SPAN class=996514111-18112009></SPAN></FONT><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN class=996514111-18112009></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN
class=996514111-18112009></SPAN></FONT><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff
size=2><SPAN class=996514111-18112009>Beyond the intermingling of personal and
employer materials, we should also be concerned about the intermingling of
information created/used by different members of a household. Imagine a home
PC containing material relating to the parents' different work
activities alongside the games and chit chat of their children, and
perhaps traces of use by an occasional guest. When working with hard
disk drives, archivists need to be able to tie content to specific
individuals and purge material that a depositor never intended to give us. I
wonder if this problem will last too much longer though. I suspect that the idea
of the 'family computer' is probably in decline (though I've no evidence to
prove it); surely it's becoming increasingly likely (in families of
adequate means) to find adults and children using personal devices,
whether these are mobiles, PCs or laptops? They may also be more likely to store
data in web services rather than on the local disk or a piece of
media.</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN
class=996514111-18112009></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN
class=996514111-18112009>Thanks for your comments on organising the personal and
organisational records of the congregation. This is an interesting case; the
personal commitment of the Sisters to the Church certainly makes the
relationship between the personal and the organisational rather different.
That said, I think that your approach to managing the different steams of
records may well be similar to others working for 'in-house' rather than
'collecting' archives. It would be interesting to hear more about the kinds of
personal records that the Sisters give to the archive. What do they do
digitally, and what remains on paper?</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN
class=996514111-18112009></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN
class=996514111-18112009>Best,</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN
class=996514111-18112009></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN
class=996514111-18112009>Susan</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV align=left><FONT face=Arial size=2>Susan Thomas</FONT></DIV>
<DIV align=left><FONT face=Arial size=2>Digital Archivist/Project
Manager</FONT></DIV>
<DIV align=left><FONT face=Arial size=2>Bodleian Library</FONT></DIV>
<DIV align=left><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV align=left><FONT face=Arial size=2>Web: </FONT><FONT face=Arial
size=2><A
href="http://futurearchives.blogspot.com/">http://futurearchives.blogspot.com</A></FONT></DIV>
<DIV align=left><FONT face=Arial size=2>Tel: +44 (0) 1865
283821</FONT></DIV>
<DIV align=left><FONT face=Arial size=2>Post: Oxford University Library
Services</FONT></DIV>
<DIV align=left><FONT face=Arial
size=2> Osney Mead, Oxford,
OX2 0ES</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV class=OutlookMessageHeader lang=en-us dir=ltr align=left>
<HR tabIndex=-1>
<FONT face=Tahoma size=2><B>From:</B>
personal_archives-bounces@mailman.yale.edu
[mailto:personal_archives-bounces@mailman.yale.edu] <B>On Behalf Of </B>Rodney
Carter<BR><B>Sent:</B> 17 November 2009 19:16<BR><B>To:</B>
personal_archives@mailman.yale.edu<BR><B>Subject:</B> Re: [Personal_archives]
Politicians vs. individual archivsts,and hybrid pers...<BR></FONT><BR></DIV>
<DIV></DIV>Hello all,<BR><BR>I am just getting back to work after a week off
and am digesting the thoughtful first posts from Catherine, Susan &
Rick.<BR><BR>The issue of hybrid professional/personal fonds is a thorny one
and I found Rick's post very interesting with regards to the potential issues
that archives could face when accepting personal records which include
documents from their professional life. The intertwining of
personal/professional will undoubtedly prove to be even more complex as
technology gets evermore sophisticated, for example with email and SMS
messages sent from an individual's blackberry or other mobile device - often
which are paid by the employer but are being used for personal matters as
often as for work.<BR><BR>This, of course, is not unique to digital. I heard
an anecdote from a municipal archives (I cannot recall which one at the moment
- I imagine similar situations have occurred in numerous instances) where the
descendants of a town councilor donated the private documents to the archives
and it was found that the counselor had held on to counsel minute books - the
only copies of the ledgers. The archivist was able to fill in the gap of the
corporate record with the donation and I imagine was able to add an
interesting note in the Custodial History field (I cannot recall whether or
not the descendant was able to claim the records a for a tax receipt, although
I am pretty sure they wanted one and it had to be explained that the records
belonged to the municipality despite being stored at the family's home for
decades).<BR><BR>With digital records we have an opportunity to be able to
share records (or at least their descriptions with links to the other
institutions) between archives who have been given the personal records and
the corporate/government/other archives where the work-related records belong.
I hope that institutions look favorably on collaboration and do not get too
caught up in turf-wars.<BR><BR>Certainly the rejoining of split fonds - I am
thinking particularly of writers and artists who have given their collections
to more than one institution - is now virtually possible although I don't know
how much collaboration actually occurs.<BR><BR>In my case, working for a
religious congregation, I am responsible for both the personal and
professional of the Sisters. I am frequently confronted with what are arguably
"work" records in their private papers (typically they have been physical
records - I am only now beginning to have to grapple with their digital
files). This is complicated by the idea that the Sisters have given their life
to the service of the Church so the lines can be fuzzy at times. No hard and
fast rule has been set but where it makes sense I separate the professional
records and integrate them with the Office of the Superior, etc. otherwise I
hope that my descriptions will allow them to be found (making frequent use of
the "Related Groups of Records" note section along with the custodial history
field).<BR><BR>Rodney<BR><BR><BR><BR>
<DIV class=gmail_quote>On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 1:35 PM, <SPAN dir=ltr><<A
href="mailto:RICKBARRY@aol.com">RICKBARRY@aol.com</A>></SPAN> wrote:<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE class=gmail_quote
style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: rgb(204,204,204) 1px solid">
<DIV style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: rgb(0,0,0); FONT-FAMILY: Arial"><FONT
face=Arial color=#000000 size=2>
<DIV>Thanks, Susan. Indeed, the Bank did use "bonded" OCR combined with
scanned images of documents for many years and may still for some records.
The OCR results were passed through a spell checker and used for text
searching but produced the scanned image back to the searcher. Re the
current access of those records, I can't say. I only know what I heard. The
Bank has a tight disclosure policy so I'm not even sure I'd have
access as a retiree, unless I were writing a book or such and that then
would have to be vetted separately. In any case, the main proposition is
that personal and employer-related records is something that the
archivist/curator should handle separately and with caution.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Regards,</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Rick</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV>In a message dated 11/17/2009 9:15:46 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, <A
href="mailto:susan.thomas@bodley.ox.ac.uk"
target=_blank>susan.thomas@bodley.ox.ac.uk</A> writes:</DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: blue 2px solid"><FONT
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent" face=Arial color=#000000 size=2>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN>Hi Rick,</SPAN></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN>Thanks for your observations. There's
definitely potential for hornet's nest situations when
personal/employer records get mixed up.</SPAN></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN>I took a look at the link to the description
of your archive. It isn't immediately obvious that it contains any digital
material. Do you know why? Perhaps your (printed and digitised) email
archive isn't yet ready for access? I have to admit that the process your
email has gone through made me giggle, but I think it's probably quite
common. I've</SPAN><SPAN> come across this kind of scenario myself:
a depositor whose staff was scanning printed word-processed
documents for improved access, and even going so far as to
use OCR (optical character recognition) so that they could be
searchable. There's also a good deal of digitising equipment out there for
more regular individuals for scanning old family photos, converting
vinyl and VHS to digital, etc. I expect to see more 'digitised at home'
content in our archives in the coming years.</SPAN></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN>Susan</SPAN></DIV></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV align=left><FONT face=Arial size=2>Susan Thomas</FONT></DIV>
<DIV align=left><FONT face=Arial size=2>Digital Archivist/Project
Manager</FONT></DIV>
<DIV align=left><FONT face=Arial size=2>Bodleian Library</FONT></DIV>
<DIV align=left><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV align=left><FONT face=Arial size=2>Web: </FONT><FONT face=Arial
size=2><A title=http://futurearchives.blogspot.com/
href="http://futurearchives.blogspot.com/"
target=_blank>http://futurearchives.blogspot.com</A></FONT></DIV>
<DIV align=left><FONT face=Arial size=2>Tel: +44
(0) 1865 283821</FONT></DIV>
<DIV align=left><FONT face=Arial size=2>Post: Oxford University Library
Services</FONT></DIV>
<DIV align=left><FONT face=Arial
size=2> Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV><BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr
style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: rgb(0,0,0) 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV lang=en-us dir=ltr align=left>
<HR>
<FONT face=Tahoma size=2><B>From:</B> <A
href="mailto:personal_archives-bounces@mailman.yale.edu"
target=_blank>personal_archives-bounces@mailman.yale.edu</A> [mailto:<A
href="mailto:personal_archives-bounces@mailman.yale.edu"
target=_blank>personal_archives-bounces@mailman.yale.edu</A>] <B>On
Behalf Of </B><A href="mailto:RICKBARRY@aol.com"
target=_blank>RICKBARRY@aol.com</A><BR><B>Sent:</B> 16 November 2009
22:40<BR><B>To:</B> <A href="mailto:personal_archives@mailman.yale.edu"
target=_blank>personal_archives@mailman.yale.edu</A><BR><B>Subject:</B>
[Personal_archives] Politicians vs. individual archivsts,and hybrid
personal vs. work archives<BR></FONT><BR></DIV>
<DIV></DIV><FONT face=Arial color=#000000 size=2><FONT face=Arial
color=#000000 size=2>
<DIV>Thanks, Susan for your response to Catherine's insightful openers,
which had also come to my mind. I have a related issue I'd like to put
to you, but I'll submit that separately when the current issues have had
a chance to be vetted. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I agree with your observation that individuals will often have a
mix of personal and work records in their possession, especially where
they have played a personal part in the business transactions relating
to work records. However, I would caution the co-joining of such records
in institutional archives. Firstly, in many cases work records may have
been internally designated by the organization
as confidential. I'm not talking about the obvious cases of
national security agencies where sensitive records should be page marked
and unauthorized dissemination could be a criminal offense (in the US,
NARA requires that copies of formerly security classified records in
their possession be specifically page marked at time of copying to note
the NARA authority declassifying them). Rather, I'm referring
to so-called "Company-Confidential" or other organizations'
similarly classified records that are not governed by national/local
laws but rather by internal policy. Even these may be easy for the
collecting institution to spot and question if the records are
actually marked on each page to signify such a
status. However, organizations may designate <I>whole groups
of, or all,</I> internal communications as confidential and strictly for
internal dissemination only and in some cases even restricted
internal recipients without the records being individually
marked. This gives rise to potential liability of the
individual donor (possibly unknowingly or unthinkingly), and potentially
of the collecting institution based on IPR considerations. (We have
all observed emails from individuals that even with lunch dates or other
ethereal emails, have a routine signature line that states that this
communication is confidential and should be returned or destroyed if
misdirected -- a practice that some legal experts claim would
never be acceptable in a courtroom in defense of an individual if it can
be demonstrated that the sender used this signature line
indiscriminately instead of only for communications that clearly met the
organization's security policies.) Moreover, it is highly
likely that many employer records maintained by the individual were kept
in violation of organizational recordkeeping policies and schedules, as
most would likely have been designated for destruction after a certain
period or for transfer as part of the individual's parent unit
to the organization's archives. Thus, the individual might be, even
unknowingly, opening him/herself to trouble sometime down the road,
as might the institution receiving such records. At the least, the
collecting organization could be faced with a hornet's nest as
to what disposition to make upon the death of the donor, even with
a carefully written donor agreement, because the donor didn't have
the right to donate employer records in the first place. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>You asked us to share related personal experiences: When I retired
from the World Bank in 1992, I donated a few thousand records
covering the period 1972-1989 to the Bank Archives (which, as chief
of information services, I had earlier managed). Most of them might
be described as personal-Bank records in the sense that they
were records of Bank processes/transactions in which I was a party,
but not in the sense that I "owned" them, which I clearly did not
according to well defined policy. To illustrate, some of them were
'informal' email exchanges (aka 'records') reacting to a draft policy I
had written on public disclosure of information. That was a highly
controversial topic in the Bank's boardroom, especially between
directors from developing countries and those from industrialized
countries. It was a media-hybrid set, many of which were in the form
email including the first email I had ever sent using the Bank's
original email system, which I had managed earlier as chief of office
systems. I thought that those records would be of interest not
only for content purposes, but because I knew that at that time the
Archives didn't have a significant corpus of the new email record type
(as distinct from a fake test set) that could be useful for my
succeeding colleagues to have to "play with" in the context of
developing an electronic records program, and the Archivist agreed.
Ironically, those born digital emails, which were of course created in a
proprietary standard email system that subsequently had to be
all printed out to paper when a different vendor was selected for the
replacement email system, which was in a different proprietary
standard, and the two didn't talk to each other. Some time thereafter as
I understand it -- you guessed it -- they were scanned back into
digital form for easier access. This is an example of
how organizations do sometimes have to "pay twice" to get
records into digital form. I have recently thought about putting a brief
description of this experience up in the Personal E-Recs section of my
Website. I wouldn't ask to put up the records themselves, but rather
just the description
<DIV><A
title=http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/EXTARCHIVES/0,,contentMDK:20271116~isCURL:Y~menuPK:35056~pagePK:36726~piPK:437378~sp:servlets~theSitePK:29506,00.html
href="http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/EXTARCHIVES/0,,contentMDK:20271116%7EisCURL:Y%7EmenuPK:35056%7EpagePK:36726%7EpiPK:437378%7Esp:servlets%7EtheSitePK:29506,00.html"
target=_blank>http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/EXTARCHIVES/0,,contentMDK:20271116~isCURL:Y~menuPK:35056~pagePK:36726~piPK:437378~sp:servlets~theSitePK:29506,00.html</A></DIV>
<DIV>which I hope would be authorized. My point here is that this
approach to combined personal/business records dilemma might be a
reasonable solution, i.e., to accept from the donor the strictly
personal individual records but only the <I>description</I> of the
'personal/agency/company/institution' files. This would probably
involve the receiving archivist/curator gently moving the donor in the
direction of first donating such records to his/her organization for
description. Or to accept the records initially but then return the
employer records after accessioning on the grounds that they would not
meet your collection policy. However this matter is handled, the
collecting institution will have to treat the subject with care and
sensitivity when engaging the potential donor in such a manner as not to
lose his/her interest in gifting. This might possibly be presented as an
ethical/legal matter and one that the donor would likely face with
any recipient. Better to lose the donation than to take it with issues
that may come back to bite you or your successors sometime later down
the road.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Regards,</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Rick </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>-----Original Message-----<BR>From: Susan E Thomas [mailto:<A
href="mailto:susan.thomas@bodley.ox.ac.uk"
target=_blank>susan.thomas@bodley.ox.ac.uk</A>] <BR>Sent: November 16,
2009 10:35 AM<BR>To: Hobbs, Catherine<BR>Subject: RE:
[Personal_archives] Welcome and some first questions for
Susan<BR><BR>Hello Catherine,<BR></DIV>
<DIV>....The issue of personal fonds v public record is one we faced
too. We also found some overlap with content held in the archives of the
political parties. In some ways I feel that politicians' archives are
not entirely atypical in this intermingling of personal and employer
materials. You can see similar issues in anyone's personal archive,
where organisational and personal professional records start to get
intertwined.<BR><BR>How transferable is the case study to different
contexts? As both the Bodleian and the Rylands collect widely, this is a
question that cropped up during the project. How did we think the
archives of writers or scientists might be different, and what might we
need to change as a result? This was not an area we could explore in the
context of the project, but the Bodleian is developing hybrid
(traditional + digital) archives in other areas and our experiences are
growing through this process. The questions we tend to ask an individual
don't change too much according to their profession, but some of the
answers they give do. The commercial considerations around literary
archives have the potential to frame the discussion rather differently,
as do the credit and IPR issues in science and technology. I think we
need more experience to draw out useful patterns, but we can point to
areas that would benefit from a bit more exploration. Some of these
areas touch on the records as much as the people; for instance, I'm
working with a literary hybrid archive at the moment and I'd really like
to see a tool that identifies whether a word processed document contains
comments or track changes!<BR><BR>I'd love to hear about others'
experiences with the personal archives that contain digital materials,
whether they are those of writers, scientists, or anyone else! I'm
familiar with a few case studies, including the work done on the NEH
grant 'Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary
Materials', and work done on scientist's archives at the British
Library. Have others been working actively with born-digital personal
archives? What interesting things have you
discovered?<BR><BR>Susan<BR></DIV></FONT></FONT></BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV></FONT><BR><BR>_______________________________________________<BR>Personal_archives
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