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

Wed Nov 18 08:24:52 EST 2009

Hello Rodney,

Your point about who owns the hardware, or the service account, is a
good one. I think we also need to be mindful of how communication
technologies are changing professional and personal lives. For example,
a structured working week is arguably no longer necessary in some roles:
with the help of technology, individuals can arrange their time/location
between personal and professional activities much more flexibly,
potentially benefiting themselves, their family and their employer. As
you point out, these kinds of changes could well to lead to even greater
mixing of personal/professional and employer materials. You mentioned
email and text services paid for by the employer, but it's also common
for professionals to use third-party online services where the account
is a personal one: the material is not hosted, or controlled, by their
employer but it's very likely used for work purposes in 'work time' and
'personal time'. Will employers ever be able to regain 'control'? Should
they want to? Does it depend? It seems unlikely that individuals will
want to relinquish use of these kinds of services, which are more
attractive and useful than corporate offerings (compare MS Outlook to
Google's toolset, including Google Wave -
http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html). Moreover, individuals are
getting used to being in 'control' themselves. Some organisations may be
able (and may have to) lock down in response, but the question of
locking down or not is more complex for those that don't necessarily
need to - the benefits that these third-party technologies bring
probably outweigh the risks they pose. 

Beyond the intermingling of personal and employer materials, we should
also be concerned about the intermingling of information created/used by
different members of a household. Imagine a home PC containing material
relating to the parents' different work activities alongside the games
and chit chat of their children, and perhaps traces of use by an
occasional guest. When working with hard disk drives, archivists need to
be able to tie content to specific individuals and purge material that a
depositor never intended to give us. I wonder if this problem will last
too much longer though. I suspect that the idea of the 'family computer'
is probably in decline (though I've no evidence to prove it); surely
it's becoming increasingly likely (in families of adequate means) to
find adults and children using personal devices, whether these are
mobiles, PCs or laptops? They may also be more likely to store data in
web services rather than on the local disk or a piece of media.

Thanks for your comments on organising the personal and organisational
records of the congregation. This is an interesting case; the personal
commitment of the Sisters to the Church certainly makes the relationship
between the personal and the organisational rather different. That said,
I think that your approach to managing the different steams of records
may well be similar to others working for 'in-house' rather than
'collecting' archives. It would be interesting to hear more about the
kinds of personal records that the Sisters give to the archive. What do
they do digitally, and what remains on paper?

Best,

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 Rodney
Carter
	Sent: 17 November 2009 19:16
	To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu
	Subject: Re: [Personal_archives] Politicians vs. individual
archivsts,and hybrid pers...

	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
<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
<http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/EXTARCHIVES/0,,cont
entMDK:20271116%7EisCURL:Y%7EmenuPK:35056%7EpagePK:36726%7EpiPK:437378%7
Esp: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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