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

[Susan E Thomas]

Hi Rick,
 
Thanks for your observations. There's definitely potential for hornet's
nest situations when personal/employer records get mixed up.
 
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 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.
 
Susan
 
Susan Thomas
Digital Archivist/Project Manager
Bodleian Library
 
Web:  http://futurearchives.blogspot.com
<http://futurearchives.blogspot.com/> 
Tel:    +44 (0) 1865 283821
Post: Oxford University Library Services
         Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES
 


________________________________

	From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu
[mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of
RICKBARRY at aol.com
	Sent: 16 November 2009 22:40
	To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu
	Subject: [Personal_archives] Politicians vs. individual
archivsts,and hybrid personal vs. work archives
	
	
	
	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,,conte
ntMDK:20271116~isCURL:Y~menuPK:35056~pagePK:36726~piPK:437378~sp:servlet
s~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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