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

[Rodney Carter]

Hello all,

I am just getting back to work after a week off and am digesting the
thoughtful first posts from Catherine, Susan & Rick.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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).

Rodney



On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 1:35 PM, <RICKBARRY at aol.com> wrote:

>  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
> 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,,contentMDK:20271116~isCURL:Y~menuPK:35056~pagePK:36726~piPK:437378~sp:servlets~theSitePK:29506,00.html<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>
> 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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