[Personal_archives] Politicians vs. individual archivsts, and hybrid pers...

Tue Nov 17 13:35:52 EST 2009

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.

Regards,

Rick

In a message dated 11/17/2009 9:15:46 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,  
susan.thomas at bodley.ox.ac.uk writes:

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,,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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