[Personal_archives] censorship vs. sensitivity
RICKBARRY at aol.com
RICKBARRY at aol.com
Fri Oct 31 15:04:42 EDT 2008
In a message dated 10/31/2008 2:38:30 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
heather.dean at yale.edu writes:
Good point, Rick, regarding contracts with donors…my guess is that it's best
to get everything in writing.
I don't want to monopolize the last day of the discussion, but Heather's
reply -- please forgive Heather if it was unintentional -- suggests that
contracting might not be a commonly required practice. If true, it is a bad state of
affairs. In my opinion (easy for an consultant to say, eh?), this
requirement should be an important element of the ARM policies of any institution
involved in accepting personal collections, if for no other reason as part of its
risk management program. Without clear donor contracts, the institution opens
itself to possible large cans of worms, especially upon death of the donor,
the ultimate certainty of which is also something that should be addressed in
such policies. In one instance that I am personally involved with at the
moment in an advisory capacity, I noticed that some of a collection of personal
archives of a deceased military officer to a university (by one of his
children) to a university that is accepting them includes several papers that may
very well still be classified under national security laws. Unless/until that
matter isn't cleared up, the university could be at considerable risk
legally, grant-fund-wise, etc. It's especially delicate, because to determine if
such papers are still classified, the university may have to subject them to
review by the Department of Defense. If they are, the university keeps its own
skirts clean because the reviewing authority will not return them, but at the
same time the university may inadvertently subject the surviving child (who
wouldn't likely have even thought about this matter) to legal consequences for
possessing them in the first place. My advice was to return those papers to
the donor and ask that they go through the process of getting the papers
declassified before returning them to the university for repatriation to the
collection.
Regards,
Rick
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