[Personal_archives] Politicians vs. individual archivsts, and hybrid personal vs. work archives

[RICKBARRY at aol.com]

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. 
 
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 whole groups of, or  all, 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. 
 
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   
_http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/EXTARCHIVES/0,,contentM
DK:20271116~isCURL:Y~menuPK:35056~pagePK:36726~piPK:437378~sp:servlets~theSi
tePK:29506,00.html_ 
(http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/EXTARCHIVES/0,,contentMDK:20271116~isCURL:Y~menuPK:35056~pagePK:36726~piPK:4373
78~sp:servlets~theSitePK:29506,00.html) 
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  description 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.
 
Regards,
 
Rick 
 
 

 
-----Original Message-----
From: Susan E Thomas  [mailto:susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk] 
Sent: November 16, 2009 10:35  AM
To: Hobbs, Catherine
Subject: RE: [Personal_archives] Welcome and some  first questions for Susan

Hello Catherine,

....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.

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!

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?

Susan

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