Steering Shares: A Piece of Professional Literature that Impacted Me

Steering Shares are an opportunity to find out more about the I&A Steering Committee. This post comes courtesy of committee member Genna Duplisea, archivist and special collections librarian at Salve Regina University.

On a class message board during library school, I once remarked that Howard Zinn’s “Secrecy, Archives, and the Public Interest” (https://minds.wisconsin.edu/handle/1793/44118) was a “mic drop.” I felt his call to action across the decades. Working full-time while taking two summer classes had accelerated the pace of my life and my studies past thoughtfulness, but reading Zinn’s concise connection between archives, power, and justice reminded me why I had chosen to train as an archivist. This piece made clear the importance of “the relation between professing one’s craft and professing one’s humanity” (14). Returning to this speech almost eight years after I first read it, in one of the greatest times of societal, political, and public health upheaval I have experienced, I was stunned by how apropos his words continue to be.

Zinn’s essay, published in The Midwestern Archivist in 1977, draws on an address he gave at the 1970 SAA Annual Meeting called “The Activist Archivist” (https://americanarchivist.org/doi/pdf/10.17723/aarc.34.1.23527290p7mx1w33) He argues that insistence of neutrality as a value of professionalism causes a separation between work and belief and an assumption that the work of archivists is not inherently political (17). Archivists have made progress in embracing the understanding that archives are not neutral, though it is not a universally-held tenet. The maintenance of neutrality “leaves very little time or energy to worry about whether the [information] machine is designed for war or peace, for social need or individual profits, to help us or to poison us” (16).

In recent years, we have seen attempts to erase archival information in support of crimes against humanity and environmental degradation. The routine destruction of ICE records or the removal of Web information on climate change left over from a previous administration could be standard archival practices. However, if we keep our values separate from our assessment of these practices, our will will tend “to maintain the existing social order by perpetuating its values, by legitimizing its priorities, by justifying its wars, perpetuating its prejudices, contributing to its xenophobia, and apologizing for its class order” (18). Such controversies are not quibbles about efficient procedures; they are moves of powerful apparatuses with bearing on people’s lives.

During this pandemic, we all must pause; as Arundhati Roy writes in her recent essay, “The pandemic is a portal,” (https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca)  this rupture forces “humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew.”  We have an opportunity to ask whether the work of archivists resists or endorses harmful narratives, such as American exceptionalism, disease as a third-world problem, immigrants as dangerous, poverty as a just product of meritocracy, or science as suspect. We do not have to look for egregious prejudice to see the impact of archival information and practices on people’s lives.

Zinn remarks that problems in the United States are not problems of excess, but of normalcy; how prescient was his observation that “our economic problem is not a depression but the normal functioning of the economy, dominated by corporate power and profit” (19). We see the coronavirus rip apart people’s lives and livelihoods, and lay bare societal problems and structural inequalities. How do we make sure that we document these phenomena equitably, inclusively, and with careful attention to our own influence?

I take Zinn’s words as an argument not to return to “normal” after the pandemic, and Roy argues that nothing would be worse. The disruption of operations is an opportunity to decide how we want to remake our work. Zinn notes several biases in archives — the wealthy and powerful over the marginalized, the domination of the written word, past over present, preservation over documentation, among others — that are still challenges today. How do we want to contend with these biases in the future? To what, and to whom, do we want to give our attention? Archivists have roles to play in guiding for more equitable and activist documentation and access to information. Each of us will have to decide what that means, and I encourage everyone to take this strange time to meditate on how we can further humanize our work.

April 20, 2020June 24, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Steering ShareTags: archives profession, biases, class oppression, climate change, corporate power, environmental degradation, erasure, immigration, library school, professionalism, record destruction, SAA 1 Comment

ICYMI: Introducing the A4BLiP Anti-Racist Description Resources

Our ICYMI series provide summaries of presentations, publications, webinars, and other educational opportunities that are of interest to I&A members. If you have an issue you would like to write about for this blog series or a previous post that you would like to respond to, please email archivesissues@gmail.com. The following is from Annalise Berdini, Digital Archivist at Princeton University’s Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library and member of A4BLiP. 

Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia (A4BLiP) is a loose association of archivists, librarians, and allied professionals in the Philadelphia region responding to the issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement. The A4BLiP Anti-Racist Description Resources project began as an initiative formed by various A4BLiP members in fall of 2017, specifically after a presentation they collaborated on at the 2017 SAA Liberated Archive forum with Teressa Raiford. Teressa is a Portland-based activist and founder of the organization Don’t Shoot PDX. Following the presentation, Teressa asked the group for recommendations for how she might approach a catalog audit. She wanted to initiate a project at Oregon State Library after learning about a racist subject catalog card there that a staff member had posted on Twitter. (The card read, “Negroes see also Crime and criminals. Portland.”)  

After some discussion, A4BLiP members realized that this was an area that lacked guidance for those doing archival description; many could recount instances of seeing description applied in ways that were racist, but none of us knew of any specific recommendations for how to address this in a programmatic way. As a way to both provide a framework for our own audits of racist description and to hopefully provide guidance that would be useful to other (white) archivists, we decided to create a set of recommendations collated from existing resources that we gathered for an extensive literature review, and enhanced by some of our own experiences. Additionally, the working group felt strongly that due to the fact that most of us were white women, we needed to ask for help from Black archivists to ensure that our recommendations did not cause harm and that we were, in fact, helping other archivists create more inclusive description. We created a GoFundMe for the project so that we could pay these reviewers for their time and expertise, and successfully funded enough to recruit nine reviewers, who contributed extensive recommendations and additional resources to the project. We are incredibly grateful for their assistance, which created a much stronger and more thoughtful product. 

The A4BLiP Anti-Racist Description Resources are broken up into three sections: a set of metadata recommendations, an annotated bibliography, and an extensive bibliography. The extensive bibliography was gathered first, reviewed in detail by members of the working group, and informed the other two sections.

The metadata recommendations are comprised of practical examples for anti-racist description that we hope can be put into practice across a wide array of institutions. The section is broken up into seven areas of focus, including Voice and Style, Community Collaboration and Expanding Audiences, Auditing Legacy Description and Reparative Processing, Handling Racist Folder Titles and Creator-Supplied Description, Describing Slavery Records, Subjects and Classification, and Transparency. Our recommendations in each of these sections were informed by our literature review as well as examples from our own experiences and the experiences and recommendations of our reviewers. Some recommendations should be fairly easy to apply day-to-day, like removing flowery and valorizing language in biographical notes or using accurate strong language like ‘rape’ or ‘lynching’ when appropriate. Others are more difficult and will require institutional change, like developing and maintaining ongoing relationships with collection creators in order to learn the language they use to describe themselves —  and to use that language in our description of their records. We hope that these recommendations will give others practical places from which to start their own descriptive review processes. They are by no means exhaustive, but include what we thought to be the most helpful and important recommendations.

The annotated bibliography includes a selection of theory-focused articles from the extensive bibliography that we chose to highlight based on their critique of descriptive practice and theory. Some of the articles, blogs, and presentations included do not necessarily focus on Black experiences or collections in the pursuit of highlighting shared strategies for anti-oppressive description. Our review in preparation for developing this resource reinforced our understanding that there is a wealth of research and dozens of important contributions to rectifying archival erasure and white supremacist description. But we recognize that few of us have as much time as we would like to read all of these works, and so we created the annotated bibliography in the hopes that it would help others quickly find resources that would help them rethink archival description.

For those looking to get started on creating more inclusive description, we recommend checking out the metadata recommendations first, particularly the sections on Voice and Style, Auditing Legacy Description, and Handling Racist Folder Titles and Creator-Supplied Description. These are probably the sections that will be most immediately applicable to most archives — how many of us have seen overly flowery and glowing biography notes of ‘great white men’, or passive language used to describe atrocities or distance humanity? How often do slavery records prioritize the enslavers before the enslaved? This is work that we as archivists can address quickly and which (hopefully) does not require overarching institutional change. 

We acknowledge that our recommendations are a starting point that highlights the work that other archivists have already done, but we hope that by gathering some of these practical recommendations, more of us can begin to undo the harm that our description often causes. The recommendations can be found through the A4BLiP site.

December 5, 2019June 22, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: ICYMITags: anti-racism, archival description, archival processing, archival theory, archives profession, erasure, inclusion, redescription, reparative processing, sexual violence, White supremacy, Whiteness 1 Comment

Archivists on the Issues: Archivists: The Superheroes of Time Travel

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. Today’s post comes from Joanna Black, the Digital Archivist at the Sierra Club’s William E. Colby Memorial Library.

Woman Data entry clerk entering data for legitimate online jobs. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

I am incredibly honored to release my first blog post as a contributor to the SAA Issues and Advocacy Section Archivists on the Issues Blog Series. In joining a distinguished pool of past writers, I hope to build on existing perspectives and suggest topics that reflect some of the broader issues archivists confront within an incredibly diverse profession. Whether one is a cataloger, digital asset specialist, processing archivist, or somewhere in between, it is imperative that archival professionals align the job with their own core values. As I reflect on the ways the archival profession creates positive change in the world and how many other livelihoods simply don’t — specifically those that utilize cheating, harming, or killing to advance a “bottom-line” — I can’t help but ask, “How do I hold my values in one hand and perform hours of data entry with the other, without losing sight of the greater goal?”

It is early afternoon toward the end of a long work week. A spreadsheet stretches wide across two oversized computer monitors. I am dizzy from scanning rows, columns, and boxes, inputting endless metadata. I pause, close my eyes to reset my vision, and gaze back at my sheet. Though at times I crave a good spreadsheet, I can only sit with one for so long until I think, “What am I doing with my life?” I have to step back and remind myself that although the spreadsheet may sometimes be a challenging part of my job, it has great significance. In preserving the “stuff” of the past — context, provenance, metadata, the nitty, gritty details that breathe life into collections — I can draw a direct connection between the duties of my nine-to-five job and the values that drive my life.

Time Travel by Randall Munroe

Without knowing it, time travel is what led me to a career in archives. While pursuing a creative writing degree at San Francisco State University and interning at the Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives, I became enthralled with archives and the notion ofaccessibility. In working with my first archival object — a 1967 recording of Allen Ginsberg chanting the “Wichita Vortex Sutra” — it became immediately clear to me that people need to know these materials from the past exist; otherwise, what’s the point of preserving them? At that moment, I knew working with archival materials had some kind of intrinsic positive power to connect people across time. By recognizing archivists’ ability to time travel through memory, my drive to correct the wrongs of the past by amplifying experiences of the historically silenced took on new momentum.

LGBT families for immigration reform, by Christopher Edwards

As an archivist today, I’ve built upon my roots in creative writing and pursue work that supports positive social and environmental justice reform. For three years, I served as the head archivist at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society, an LGBTQ non-profit that “collects, preserves, exhibits and makes accessible to the public materials and knowledge to support and promote understanding of LGBTQ history, culture and arts in all their diversity.” Since summer 2018, I have been serving as the first staff archivist at the Sierra Club’s William E. Colby Memorial Library, a special collections library documenting the club’s 127 year history in environmental justice. In both positions, I have been able to merge my personal and professional passions to build a more equitable, inclusive, and just world by protecting and disseminating truth through the archival record. Whereas creative writing was an early mode for these intentions to manifest, archival work serves my passions even more broadly. Archivists, much like poets, are truth tellers; we share not just the loud truths, but the quiet truths whispered by those whom history often erases.

Photos taken at the 2017 DC Climate March on April 29, 2017, by Mark Dixon

At a Sierra Club staff meeting last month, the Executive Director of the organization spoke about some of the club’s most recent victories. At the conclusion of his speech he said, “Our job is to change what people think is possible.” For archivists — the superheroes of time travel, the truth tellers of the past — it is especially relevant. Our individual pasts, stories, and experiences have enriched an increasingly diverse profession strengthened by differences in perspective. And with these differences, we each come to the profession out of a personal desire to make the world a more equitable, honest place. When archivists uncover truths, they stitch a small thread into a massive cultural and historic fabric, changing the pattern of that fabric for centuries to come.

Any time the spreadsheet doldrums get me down, I take a moment to remind myself of why I got into the archives profession all those years ago. Being an archivist is more than just a job; it is a means of traveling through collective memory and defending truths. Knowing that the ramifications of archival work stretch across space and time, archival professionals can be secure in knowing that we are true time travelers fueled by a passion to spread truth and promote greater justice. This is our professional foundation. The spreadsheet is simply a brick.

March 25, 2019June 24, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Archivists on the IssuesTags: archival processing, archives profession, environmental justice, erasure, LGBTQ+, memory institutions, memory work, metadata, poetry, professionalism, provenance, SAA Core Values of Archivists, special collections Leave a comment

Archivists on the Issues: Welcome to the Séance, Voices from the Archives in Contemporary American Poetry, Part 2

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. Today’s post comes from a regular writer for I&A’s blog, Cate Peebles. Cate is the NDSR Art fellow at the Yale Center for British Art, where she works with permanent-collection-related born-digital records. In this second of three micro-essays, she shares another example of recent books of poetry that exemplify “ripped from the archives” writing, each in its own distinct way. The first is here. 

 

Voyage of the Sable Venus

Robin Coste Lewis

Alfred A. Knopf, 2015

 

Lewis’s book, winner of the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry, confronts representation and description of the black female body throughout art history, showcasing a central, eponymous long poem that creates a narrative by listing “the titles, catalog entries, or exhibition descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,000 BCE to the present” (35). The author explains that none of the tiles have been broken or altered in any way, although she has reversed the re-classifications of historical naming conventions, including “slave, colored, and negro” to “African American” back to their originals. She writes, “I re-corrected the corrected horror in order to allow that original horror to stand”, and she also chose to include work by “black women curators and artists…” and “work by black queer artists of any gender” (35). The poem’s content is pulled directly from museum catalogs as direct commentary and revision of Western descriptive practices. Lewis’s poetry brings contradictory human emotions to what might be considered dry, didactic wall text.

The poem is visceral in its use of material language paired with descriptive titles that amplify historical violence as well as beauty, physicality and imposed aesthetic classifications. Behind the horror, or from it, Lewis shows us beauty and life. In “Catalog 1: Ancient Greece & Ancient Rome” she writes:

 

Statuette of a Woman Reduced

to the shape of a Flat Paddle

 

Statuette of a Black Slave Girl

Right Half of Body and Head Missing

 

Head of a Young Black Woman Fragment

from a Statuette of a Black Dancing Girl

 

Reverse Head of an African Princess

Statuette of a Concubine

(43)

 

This early section reads as a list whose repetitions build upon one another and accumulate ominously; even though the words describe marble and stone figurines, the language is at times similar to a police report and as the images build in the reader’s mind, a horrifying and mythical mass of disembodied heads is speaking. As the poem travels through time, its language shifts, and by the last section the staccato bluntness of the list’s diction transforms into a lyrical stream of blended voices and meditative, natural imagery:

 

What on earth have you done

to this coffee, Black Blossom?

 

Pour vous, Madame,

Paso doble as I am.

 

The Aftermath: underwater

window-shopping, Sunday

 

morning fireflies

on the water, blue shade–

 

Silence,

Poise. Prayer

(107-108)

 

As in The Work-Shy, Lewis’s writing revisits a system of oppression to claim its constraints and correct its erasures, revealing vibrant life and lives within those institutional depictions. Archives, libraries and museums are not neutral spaces, we know, and it is often through art and poetry that we can confront difficult pasts with empathy.

 

Cate Peebles is the NDSR Art fellow at the Yale Center for British Art. She holds a BA in English from Reed College, an MFA in Poetry from the New School, and an MLIS with a concentration in Archives from the University of Pittsburgh. Her first collection of poetry, Thicket, will be published by Lost Roads Press in 2018; previous work has appeared in Boston Review, Tin House, jubilat, and elsewhere.

April 11, 2018June 22, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Archivists on the IssuesTags: Black history, curators, erasure, gender identity, LGBTQ+, poetry, popular culture, racial oppression, redescription 1 Comment

Archivists on the Issues: Welcome to the Séance, Voices from the Archives in Contemporary American Poetry

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. Today’s post comes from a regular writer for I&A’s blog, Cate Peebles. Cate is the NDSR Art fellow at the Yale Center for British Art, where she works with permanent-collection-related born-digital records. 

In my last post, I focused on the prevalence of archival source material in popular recent true crime docuseries, including The Keepers, The Jinx, and Making a Murderer, and the active role of records as essential narrative components and aesthetic representations of the criminal justice system’s silences and revelations. Under the guise of entertainment, these often sensational tales offer mainstream audiences a glimpse of archives and records in action, with little to no mention of professional archivists. This inquiry has prompted the question: where else in cultural and artistic practice are archives and records used as both resource and aesthetic medium?

The image of historians and genealogists spending long afternoons in the reading room is a familiar one—backs hunched over a table as they leaf through finding aids and folders, culling primary source materials to investigate, reconstruct, and re-present personal and cultural histories. However, this is not the only outcome time spent in the archives. What about less familiar modes of archival research and representation of primary sources? In honor of April, National Poetry Month (and also the cruelest!), this post will blast through literary tradition, history, and trends to take a look at three recent books of poetry that repossess archival source material and reanimate it as lyric lines in a manner that is no less impactful than a biographer’s refined synthesis of research materials.

Since the early twentieth-century (think: Marcel Duchamp and other Surrealists), and more so since the rise of conceptual and institutional critique art in the 1960s, documents, archival practice, and research have become valid and popular mediums for artistic works. In conjunction with these movements, some contemporary literary artists, particularly poets, have adopted a mode of writing that places archival sources at the center of their work. The work is often labeled “experimental” for lack of a better nutshell in which to encapsulate this genre-fluid kind of writing. In some instances, and with certain writers in particular, the mode is referred to as “Documentary Poetry” and “Poetry of Witness”, which document a particular moment, event, or cultural movement through the use of primary sources, photographs, video, and testimonial accounts. [i]

Archival collections are often fragmentary by nature and structurally lend themselves well to the production of evocative, lyrical, and time-bending poems. Since the publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1923), which includes frenetic splicing of sources, “borrowed” fragments, and telltale inclusion of an extensive “Notes” section, many poets have been attracted to this fragmentary, academic style that highlights interaction with the past and places seemingly unrelated references, quotations, and text side by side, reverberating so to speak, to create new associative leaps through sound and image in the reader’s mind; the word “medium” springs to mind—pun intended.

Similar devices are used by other Modernist and Surrealist writers, including Andre Breton, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Virginia Woolf.  The incorporation of found language and images has become a powerful technique of giving voice to the previously silenced; it is a kind of time travel via linguistic stitching of the past into our present moment. As in archival work, voices from the past are brought into the present.

In the following three micro-essays – one below and two posted separately later this week – I share but three examples of recent books of poetry that exemplify this mode of “ripped from the archives” writing, each in its own distinct way.

[i] See: C.D. Wright’s One Big Self, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Carolyn Forché’s Angel of History, and Tyehimba Jess’ Olio. The common impulse in this mode is one of social activism and revising cultural erasures.

 

 

The Work-Shy

Blunt Research Group

Wesleyan University Press, 2016

 

Published anonymously under the collective authorship of the Blunt Research Group, a collective of writers, scholars, and artists, the book begins with a brief, expository essay: “The following poems operate under a strict constraint: they are composed entirely of phrases drawn from the case files of inmates in the earliest youth prisons in California between 1910 and 1925…The histories contained in these files were gathered and archived by the now defunct Eugenics Records Office” as well as testimonies from the “chronically insane” collected by the Prinzhorn Collection in Germany and the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in New York.

What follows in the book’s first section are the voices of predominately African American and Chicano youths, aged 12-17, many of whom were subjected to psychological and physical experimentation. Experiments which, a decade or two later, influenced the eugenics practices at Nazi concentration camps.  Many of the book’s poems are named for the ward, whose words are italicized and spliced with the words of the “fieldworkers” who studied them. (The lineation is difficult to replicate here, sadly.)

Jose

Joe possesses

all the bad characteristics of all the boys

was heard to say

this is the last time

        I’m coming in here

twice accused of murder twice acquitted

made a fool of himself

too much already

he wanted us to keep on goin’ with the bottle

            at age 14 went out

to work in the fruit

(27)

The Work-Shy weaves together many voices, from multiple geographic and temporal locations, to build a chorus of the unheard and forgotten. The book calls out past wrongs that were once ignored by society at large and brings the reader face to face with the present, prompting us to take a closer look at the institutional systems of oppression that surround us yet.

 

 

April 10, 2018June 23, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Archivists on the IssuesTags: archives profession, erasure, inmates, institutional records, personal archives, poetry, popular culture, Wikipedia 1 Comment

The Endangered Sounds of Community Activism’s Largest U.S. Archive

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. Below is a post from Dr. Josh Shepperd about the Pacifica Radio Archives. If you have an issue you would like to write about for this blog series or a previous post that you would like to respond to, please email archivesissues@gmail.com. Please note that opinions expressed in Archivists on the Issues posts do not indicate an official stance of SAA or the Issues and Advocacy Roundtable.

Dear Colleagues –

Please be notified about an impending crisis with one of the largest and most important radio archives in the United States. I write to you as Director of the Radio Preservation Task Force (RPTF), a Library of Congress project spanning over 120 universities, museums, and archives. We’re working to identify and map the sites and content of radio history in the United States. The task force additionally acts as a national research project in which scholars, archivists, and collectors are working together to innovate strategies to combine preservation and education into one holistic process. This sometimes includes advocacy for the protection of historical recordings when they’re endangered.

The Pacifica Radio Archives hold over 90,000 hours of community activism history, produced by Pacifica journalists, community organizers, and DJs. Recordings have been taped and preserved since the Pacifica Network began in 1949. For those unfamiliar with Pacifica, their founders innovated community radio in the United States. In contrast to other valuable noncommercial experiments such as public broadcasting, Pacifica has provided airspace to activists themselves to conduct organizing work within communities, from every background and almost any imaginable perspective. Remarkably, the archive has preserved nearly every one of these broadcasts, in the process building the most important sound chronicle of activist history in the U.S.

Radio turns out to be an unusually important and largely untapped primary source. We’re finding that historic recordings feature comprehensive nontheatrical documentation of American history after 1930. Public forums, interviews, and news reports that aired on radio exhaustively covered transnational, national, and local historical events. Additionally, radio has provided a valuable account of the evolution of local dialect, public opinion via call-in shows, the history of American sports, and a portal into local civil rights histories that might not have left a paper trail other than community organizing broadcasts.

It’s for these reasons that the RPTF enthusiastically entered into a partnership with the Pacifica Radio Archives in 2015, as one of the oldest and largest repositories of the cultural history by sound in the United States. Until recently, the Pacifica Radio Archives have also served as an exemplar for how to run a contemporary sound-based library. As a community driven project, Pacifica needed help procuring funds for operations and preservation. For this reason the RPTF put together a 10-university advocacy team of faculty researchers to help the Network write grants to digitize and preserve their collection. Pacifica was also set to host an NDSR Resident from the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.

However, just as these initiatives were set to begin, the Pacifica Executive Board of Directors unexpectedly implemented austerity measures on archive staff and maintenance, including massive pay cuts and the cancellation of these national collaborative projects, leading to the resignation of longtime Archive Director Brian DeShazor.

That so much free expert labor would be turned away by a nonprofit institution without explanation has raised many red flags to our national consortium. Further, Pacifica seems to have developed no backup plan for how to organize maintenance of their infrastructure, which has led many in the sound archive community to speculate that the recordings will become collateral damage of the Board’s reported internal dysfunction. And preservation work for the Archive’s materials needs to take place immediately. In some cases the degradation of even one reel-to-reel will amount to the loss of the only extant document of a historical advocacy.

Due to the Pacifica Board of Director’s decisions, the RPTF has been forced to change its internal recommendation from grant collaboration to advocacy that Pacifica is now an endangered collection. Please be confident that we have come to this conclusion for multiple tangible reasons, but I hesitate to speculate a single cause of Pacifica’s financial and organizational problems in this appeal. The current situation might simply be framed that fundamental components of the Pacifica Radio Network infrastructure are being dismantled without a strategic vision. The outcome that we fear most is that the archive will be treated as redundant or unsustainable, leading to its incineration. The task force has seen this happen multiple times already – at least 75% of the historical radio recordings in the United States have already been destroyed. It’s important to point out that this outcome would be an entirely elective decision, one that would result in a catastrophic reduction of our historical memory.

With full respect to the integrity of this historic institution and their principled tradition of broadcasting, we believe that a temporary deposit is in the best interest of the collection. It is of utmost importance, by our judgment, that these recordings are maintained, digitized, preserved, and made available for educational research. The abandonment of the collection would equate to the erasure of a substantial document of the history of community activism in United States. However, should these materials be at least stored at an educational institution, the RPTF would be able to continue with grant writing activities for preservation and implementation of these historic recordings in classrooms and research theses. Further, the recordings would be even more easily accessible to Pacifica’s wide listenership in a library setting.

Dr. Josh Shepperd is Assistant Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Catholic University in Washington D.C., and Director of the Library of Congress’s Radio Preservation Task Force.

August 17, 2016June 23, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Archivists on the IssuesTags: academia, community archives, digitization, donors, erasure, grants, Library of Congress, memory institutions, preservation, U.S. history Leave a comment

Research Post: The Right to Be Forgotten

I&A Research Teams are groups of dedicated volunteers who monitor breaking news and delve into ongoing topics affecting archives and the archival profession. Under the leadership of the I&A Steering Committee, the Research Teams compile their findings into Research Posts for the I&A blog. Each Research Post offers a summary and coverage of an issue. This Research Post comes from the Other Professional Associations’ Communications Research Team, which monitors the communications of other associations, for issues related to archives.

Please be aware that the sources cited have not been vetted and do not indicate an official stance of SAA or the Issues and Advocacy Roundtable.

This is the first in a series of posts about the Right to Be Forgotten. Stay tuned for additional coverage.

SUMMARY OF THE ISSUE

The Right to be Forgotten (RTBF) is a 2014 legal ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) that gives individuals the right to have information found on the Internet regarding themselves delisted (be made difficult to find) in search engines and in other data providers (such as websites). The CJEU’s ruling stems from a 2010 legal case in Spain in which a Spanish citizen filed a complaint with Spain’s national data protection agency against a Spanish newspaper, which published a true fact about the person, and Google Spain/Google Inc., whose search engine results linked to the information about the person. The citizen argued that the information about him was no longer relevant and that the search engine results infringed upon his privacy rights. (3) In February 2016, the French Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), which chairs the Article 29 Working Group (European Union privacy regulators), extended the implementation of the RTBF law to all domains (extensions) of a search engine. (7) Previously, the delisting would only happen in the country of the individual who requested (and was approved) the delisting. In February 2015, the Guardian reported that Google said it had “received 386,038 ‘right to be forgotten’ removal requests since the ruling, and has accepted approximately 42% of them.” (4)  A year later, the Guardian further reported that Google had delisted 600,000 search results. (7)

Some main points of the RTBF ruling:

1. Individuals have the right to request information about themselves found on the Internet be delisted if the “information is inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive for the purposes of the data processing.” (3)
2. According to the CJEU’s ruling the request for delisting needs to be assessed on a case-by-case basis because neither the right to the protection of personal data nor the right to freedom of expression are absolute rights. Therefore each case needs to be assessed individually considering the personal privacy of the individual versus the freedom of expression and access to information. (3)
3. The data providers (for example Google, Inc.) are tasked with the application of the RTBF ruling. Delisting of information on the Internet will be decided by the data providers, not legal or governmental bodies.
4. Data providers cannot disclose internal processes, or what has been subject to delisting on the Internet. The original publisher or owner of a website cannot be notified when something is delisted.
5. There are previous rulings in the European Union that prefigured the 2014 ruling, such as the European Union Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC of 1995. In Germany, an individual has the right to privacy and to rehabilitation after they have paid their debts to society (for example after completing a term of a prison sentence).
6. Public figures are not (usually) subject to the RTBF ruling.
7. The CJEU believes that the RTBF ruling “strikes the balance between the right to the protection of personal data and freedom of expression.” (3)

In February 2016, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), issued an official statement regarding the 2014 RTBF ruling. In the statement, IFLA addressed the issues of the RTBF ruling and its implications for libraries and urged its members to participate in policy discussion regarding RTBF. (1)

IFLA’s list of issues for libraries concerning the RTBF ruling:

1. Integrity of and access to the historical record.
2. Freedom of access to information and freedom of expression. This is based upon Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” (6)
3. Privacy of the individual.

The RTBF ruling strikes at some of our core values as archivists, librarians, and information professionals. We strive to protect privacy rights of the individual, yet we also strive to protect the integrity of our information sources, support the freedom of expression, and advocate for access to information. Further, the delisting of information, especially information that is truthful and accurate, goes against some of the core values and code of ethics outlined in the Society of American Archivists’ “Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics.” (8)

In 2015, a public debate was held in New York City on the RTBF ruling titled “The U.S. should adopt the Right to be Forgotten Online.” (5) [The video is available online.] One of the participants of the debate, Jonathan Zittrain of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said that the United States should not adopt the RTBF because he felt that the RTBF ruling was “a very bad solution to a very real problem.” He gave the following analogy that we as archivists, librarians, and information professionals can relate to regarding the delisting of information on the Internet: “It’s like saying the books can stay in the library, but you have to set fire to the card catalogs.” (5)

Some critiques of the RTBF ruling include:

• The rules (of the RTBF ruling) are vague and unclear.
• The decisions for delisting/erasure are left to corporations.
• There is no transparency or accountability to the delisting of information.
• Due to the vagueness of the ruling, the principle could expand beyond search engines.
• RTBF is censorship (particularly when delisted information is true/factual/accurate).
• The territorial scope of the RTBF ruling goes beyond the European Union.

As the IFLA statement on the RTBF ruling advised, we need to monitor how the RTBF ruling is being applied in Europe and around the world and how it affects the integrity of and access to the historical record on the Internet. Countries outside of Europe, including Japan, Colombia, Brazil, and the United States have implemented similar rulings or have delisted information on the Internet. (2) In 2018, the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will supersede previous data protection laws In Europe. (9) Understanding the new 2018 regulations and how they may affect privacy rights of the individual, freedom of expression, access to information, and the integrity of the historical record on the Internet will be crucial.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF COVERAGE OF THE ISSUE:

Sources cited:

(1) “IFLA Statement on the Right to be Forgotten.” International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. Accessed 2016 April 26. http://www.ifla.org/node/10272?og=29

(2) “Background on the Right to be Forgotten in National and Regional Contexts.” International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions.  Accessed 2016 April 26. http://www.ifla.org/files/assets/clm/statements/rtbf_background.pdf

(3) Fact Sheet on the “Right to be Forgotten” ruling (c-131/12). European Commission. Accessed 2016 April 26. http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets/factsheet_data_protection_en.pdf

(4) Gibbs, Samuel. “Google to Extend ‘Right to be Forgotten’ to all its Domains Accessed in EU.” The Guardian. (February 11, 2016). Accessed 2016 April 26. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/11/google-extend-right-to-be-forgotten-googlecom

(5) “The U.S. should adopt the “Right to be Forgotten Online.” Intelligence Squared Debates. (March 17, 2015) Video accessed 2016 April 26. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDzW-2q1ZQ

(6) United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. United Nations. Accessed 2016 April 26. http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

(7) Hern, Alex. “Google takes right to be forgotten battle to France’s highest court.” The Guardian. (May 19, 2016). Accessed 2016 June 2. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/19/google-right-to-be-forgotten-fight-france-highest-court

(8) “SAA Statement of  Core Values and Code of Ethics.” Society of American Archivists. Accessed 2016 June 2. http://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics#.V1GPnzUrKUm

(9) “Reform of EU Data Protection Rules.” European Commission. Accessed 2016 June 2. http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/reform/index_en.htm

Other sources regarding the RTBF:

Toobin, Jeffrey. “The Solace of Oblivion.” The New Yorker. (September 24, 2014). Accessed 2016 April 26. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/solace-oblivion

Scott, Mark. “Europe Tried to Reign in Google. It Backfired.” The New York Times. (April 18, 2016). Accessed 2016 April 26. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/19/technology/google-europe-privacy-watchdog.html

“Freedom: the right to be forgotten.” My Digital Rights. British Library. Accessed 2016 April 26. http://www.bl.uk/my-digital-rights/videos/freedom-the-right-to-be-forgotten

Google Transparency Report. “European privacy requests for search removals.” Google. Accessed 2016 June 2. https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/europeprivacy/?hl=en

The I&A Steering Committee would like to thank Patricia Glowinski and Blake Relle for writing this post.

The Other Professional Associations’ Communications Research Team is:

Tara Kelley, Leader
Jamillah Gabriel
Patricia Glowinski
Jasmine Jones
Blake Relle

If you are aware of an issue that might benefit from a Research Post, please get in touch with us: archivesissues@gmail.com.

July 11, 2016June 24, 2022 by wendyhagenmaier Categories: Research PostTags: archival processing, archives profession, corporate power, data mining, data protection, erasure, France, Google Workspace, Googlization, human rights, privacy, Research Teams, SAA Code of Ethics, SAA Core Values of Archivists, The Right to Be Forgotten 3 Comments

Response from I&A Poll Discovery or Not?

On June 24, 2016, we opened the I&A Poll Discovery or Not? The poll was inspired by two opinion pieces which were dated the previous week but were later pointed out to be from several years ago, regarding whether or not something could be discovered if it was in an archives. The poll remained open through July 1, 2016 and received 83 responses. Of those 83 responses, 19.5% identified as a member of the Issues & Advocacy Roundtable; 46.3% as a member of the Society of American Archivists but not the Issues & Advocacy Roundtable; 28% as an archivist but not a member of the Society of American Archivists; and 6.2% as someone who is not an archivist but wanted to weigh in.

Respondents were asked to read the two pieces and then asked what they thought. They were given four options and the results are as follows:

Respondents were asked if they had any other thoughts to share. Responses have been redacted to remove any potentially identifying information and have not been edited to fix any typos. The responses were:

• There is a comment on each of the stories from an author who claims he cited the very same document in his 2008 book. It was not the original report at NARA, but a copy in a file at Georgetown. That basically refutes the researcher’s claim that “no one knew [it] was there.” But I also think her argument is flawed in general – just because archival collections are not processed to the item level does not mean every item found in that collection is a “discovery.” Perhaps the argument is semantics – based on how someone defines the term discovery. But the original article’s point that these “discoveries” often devalue or exclude the work archivists have done with historical material is an important one. I feel the researcher’s response missed that point.

• Saying that a researcher “discovered” something in the archives is an unethical erasure of the massive amount of labor it takes to manage archives in the first place. Even if a contemporary archivist doesn’t specifically know about one piece of paper in a collection, that shouldn’t negate the labor and efforts of the repository or that one archivist’s predecessors. The records came into the archives because an archivist made the decision that they had enduring value.

• “Discovery” depends on context. If it’s unprocessed or minimally-processed material, then it’s a lot easier for archivists or researchers to feel that thrill of seeing something for the first time in years. Even if the material is processed/described/accessible, if it’s highlighted or put to a new use, that also has the glow of discovery. My kneejerk negative reaction is that popular use of “discovery” also includes processed and described materials being put to perfectly ordinary use (there’s a difference between not CARING that something exists and not KNOWING it exists and/or an innovative way in which it can be used), and tends to disregard the fact that processing archivists discover things every day.

• I agree with the researcher (who is also an archivist) that discoveries can be made and it is not to discount the efforts made by archivists. As a lone arranger archivist myself and under the time constraint of a two-year grant, I know perfectly well that I won’t know everything there is to know about my collection, it spans four generations and my best bet is to get it organized and then catalog what I can so that researchers can at least have a starting point. Archivists often do just make general decisions about a collection without sitting down and reading every item, we look at an envelope perhaps confirm the to and from and then file it where it belongs in the arrangement without ever looking at the actual content. I have even made these types of decisions when it comes to digitization, its time consuming and at times costly, you just choose those series you think most valuable to researchers but never know if one small item in the miscellaneous or another small series could be that one thing that changes a researcher’s whole angle on their topic. So yes, researchers make discoveries and their findings are very valuable to institutions, the public may not recognize the effort put in by the archives staff but those researchers do.

• It seems that archivists have a lot of internal definitions that the general public does not share. I wonder about the broader importance of this issue. It seems that, as researchers’ skills and expectations change with the emergence of digital collections, we might revisit the importance of description. There is no way to describe a collection for every future researcher’s interests, but we do have a responsibility to ensure that description establishes appropriate context rather than assuming that researchers can hit control-f and find the items they require. To me, the issue here is whether we are enabling discovery (in archivists’ parlance) for modern researchers with different expectations and training than those of years past.

• Discovery seems to me to be reliant on the concept of use and observation. I would argue that Columbus “discovered” America for Europe, for example, far more than did the Vikings who arrived there hundreds of years earlier. The former’s efforts resulted in actual change, whereas the latter’s attempts at colonization were scattered and ultimately doomed to failure. In the same way, an item may linger on the shelves for years or decades, but its value is only realized when a researcher or archivist finds it and makes use of it.

• Even in the most well processed collections, archivists make decisions about what they’ll describe. In theory, we strike the perfect balance between brevity and detail that leads the researchers straight to the smoking gun, even if we don’t describe that gun itself. But maybe we don’t. And there are always items in the collections that even the archivist didn’t realize were there. So can the answer be yes and no at the same time? Schrodinger’s Hollinger box? Anything inside is both discovered and not discovered until the box is opened?

• I don’t think the researchers analogy of King Tut’s Tomb holds water. A more acurate analogy would be saying that the tomb was “discovered” it in the 1300’s BC when it was built it is like saying Leland “discovered” the document when he wrote it. But of course in between when Leland wrote the report and when the researcher “discovered” it, there was an archivist at the National Archives who processed it…

• I would say that the situation is nuanced but is also kind of boring and therefore requires less discussion

• There are a lot of different ways we can think about “discovery.” You don’t have to be the first person in living memory to see something to “discover” it. I think “discoveries” are made in the archives all the time–it’s that aha moment, such as when a researcher finds what they were looking for. However, more to the point, archivists cannot necessarily know every single sheet of paper in their repository (although I would not say it is impossible). Even if a researcher finds an item that the archivist was unaware of, the item still falls under the responsibility of the the archivist. Users should be confident that the archivist has “taken care” of the items. I think documentation is a really important factor. Archivists do not have to describe at the item level to gain familiarity with the material and make note (if not in the finding aid, in an accession record or processing notes) of items that might be the most significant to users. Also, I think that archivists should provide means for researchers to comment on their research experiences. We should ask them: did you find what you were looking for? how could we improve our finding aids? did you find any discrepancies between the finding aid and the actual content of the boxes? Since researchers are the ones using the materials, archivists should respect their input and allow them to participate in the process of “describing” archival materials. Maybe then we can fill in some of the gaps and get a better understanding of the materials in our collections.

• the articles in question appear to be from 2012, not a month ago or this week

• I also blame MPLP. And sheer volume of materials. Archivists don’t look at item level. Why can’t this be a “discovery” with mutual shared credit (even, shared “author-ity”). Archivist led researcher to collection. Researcher found item. Neither possible w/o the other

• If we’re not describing collections at the item level, let’s give researchers their due for highlighting discoveries from collections described at the folder/box/series level. If we really think that we’re not missing interesting records when we MPLP a collection, we’re deluding ourselves.

• The original articles were written 4 years ago, not a month ago, but still quite relevant.

• Even if an item is “findable,” the archivist’s knowledge of it doesn’t move it into the public arena as a scholarly/historical resource. It needs to be a partnership of archivist and researcher to save/protect/make available on one side and to explore/spend the time/read the documents/make connections on the other.

• This question is nuanced, but I generally thought the “yes” opinion to be closer to my views. I think it is possible that there are uncatalogued items that no archivist in recent memory knows are there (like the Lincoln report). I also think there are many times when an uncatalogued item is well known by the archivists and is not truly a “discovery” for a researcher. It’s clear that more advocacy about the nature and value of the work that archivists do is needed.

• Perhaps we can liken this to “personal discovery”….i.e. a friend could tell you your book purchases boarder on obsession long before you “discover” that truth when confronted with the bill. Archivist’s set the stage for discovery. It is up to the researcher what to do with that discovery.

• We can’t possibly remember or know what every piece of paper is or says, even if we have come across it in our work. That’s much like saying that a librarian should know what content is on every page in every book in a library’s collection. Plus, our researchers find documents that have been long forgotten and it is a new discovery not only because we located it again but, also because we just located it within this time and place with a different perspective. The analysis of history changes over time depending on new discoveries and someone may have come across a certain document decades earlier; however, there may not have been any well-documented context for it until the recent ‘discovery’.

• From nearly 40 years in the Archives biz I’d say that each person who discovers what he or she had not previously known, well, they’ve made a DISCOVERY! Does publication mean it was previously discovered? Do multiple copies mean it was previously discovered?

• Repositories differ on levels of cataloging and amounts of metadata made available. These differences are often due to funding levels and/or size of the repository. If funding challenges and lack of personnel force archives to not list creator names, describe materials of note, or even make their finding aids public electronically, findability is restricted. Yes, researchers who have time and funds to make in-depth searches make “discoveries”. But archivists would make more discoveries themselves if afforded the opportunity to catalog in a more detailed way. It’s unfortunate that MPLP often becomes “no product because no process” in lone arranger situations.

• If it’s in an archives, even if unprocessed, someone decided the materials were important & needed to be preserved & cared for. Regardless of the stage of care, it’s presence in an archives makes it accessible & thus findable on some level. If the media & scholars would just acknowledge & understand the scope of what we do across formats & time with extremely limited financial & staffing resources, I don’t think it would rankle so bad when they claim to “discover” a document. These “discoveries” never turn into additional staff or supplies though. Given that they must market themselves & their research to get tenure, I doubt the media hype will change.

• Discoveries can be made by both parties, either working together or separately. Plus, many of our institutions have poorly-described or unprocessed collections that could contain countless treasures.

• It’s naive to think that our esoteric access tools make it obvious or easy for the general public to be aware of the contents of our collections. It can also be reductive and offensive to archivists’ hard work to imply that a document was completely unknown when it simply hadn’t been written about yet. HOWEVER, if the archivists themselves are completely unaware of a document’s existence, for example in the case of folder-level processing where specific contents are not understood, then I do think it can be framed as a discovery. It’s important to still emphasize that the item was well cared for and managed within a collection, not rotting in a forgotten basement.

• Can’t they both me given credit?

July 8, 2016June 24, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: I&A PollTags: appraisal, archival description, archival processing, arrangement, decolonizing archives, discovery, erasure, government archives, grants, lone arrangers, NARA, patrons, selection, surveys Leave a comment

Leaders of AACR, LACCHA, LAGAR on Orlando & Archivists’ Role in Creating a More Diverse Society

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. Below is a post from leaders of the Archivists and Archives of Color Roundtable [now Archivists and Archives of Color Section], the Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Heritage Archives Roundtable, and the Lesbian and Gay Archives Roundtable [now Diverse Sexuality and Gender Section].  If you have an issue you would like to write about for this blog series or a previous post that you would like to respond to, please email archivesissues@gmail.com.

49 individuals were killed and 53 injured at the gay nightclub, The Pulse. The majority of those killed or injured were Latinx and members or allies of the Orlando LGBTQIA community.  It was an act of violence so painful that our hearts ache from the pain of it, and our minds are reeling from the fear of it.  The act now joins the countless others etched in our individual and communal memories.

In addition to processing our emotional response on an individual, local community, and organizational level, we are now asked to respond on behalf of SAA AACR, LACCHA, and LAGAR membership. How can a few speak for so many intersections of cultural and personal understanding? It’s not possible—but we can respond from our professional experience as archivists.

As archivists, we  know that recording and preserving the contexts surrounding acts of violence and oppression can provide those who come after us examples of the intersections of communities and relationships. Thus, the histories, hardships and accomplishments of the marginalized and underrepresented must be understood and reflected in the archives. Additionally, archives must document the ability of these groups to resist the systematic cultural erasure that occurs on a global level.

We ask that you, fellow archivists, take a moment to be aware of how your personal biases and privilege might be reflected in what and how you collect, to accept that, and work to change the ones that hinder the progress and inclusion of others. To quote the May 2011 SAA Core Values of Archivists, “Archivists embrace the importance of identifying, preserving, and working with communities to actively document those whose voices have been overlooked or marginalized.” But you cannot document those who are overlooked and marginalized if you cannot see us, or cannot confront your own biases.

As archivists, we cannot accept invisibility. As a profession, we cannot continue to accept historical erasure and whitewashing through binary historical practices.

Aaisha Haykal, Senior Chair, Archivists and Archives of Color Roundtable
Harrison Inefuku, Vice Chair, Archivists and Archives of Color Roundtable

George Apodaca, Co-Chair, Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Heritage Archives Roundtable
Margarita Vargas-Betancourt, Co-Chair, Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Heritage Archives Roundtable

Lisa Calahan, Co-Chair, Lesbian and Gay Archives Roundtable
Daniel DiLandro, Co-Chair, Lesbian and Gay Archives Roundtable

June 29, 2016June 24, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Archivists on the IssuesTags: AAC, archival processing, archives profession, biases, erasure, gender oppression, gun violence, guns, historical interpretation, inclusion, invisibility, Latino people, LGBTQ+, SAA, SAA Core Values of Archivists, underrepresented communities 8 Comments

Institutional Silences and the Digital Dark Age

The post below was first published on The Schedule, the blog for SAA’s Records and Management Roundtable (RMRT) on May 23, 2016. In it, RMRT Steering Committee Member, Eira Tansey, responds to Bertram Lyons’ Archivists on the Issues post, There Will Be No Digital Dark Age. Many thanks to Eira Tansey and the RMRT Steering Committee for allowing us to repost this response.

Over on the Issues and Advocacy Roundtable blog, Bert Lyons recently wrote a post titled “There Will Be No Digital Dark Age”. I loved this piece, since it touches on two of my favorite hobby horses: the erasure of archival labor from public discourse, and re-asserting the value of professional archival labor for a problem that routinely vexes the general public (in this case, degradation of digital cultural heritage).

Bert recalls a recent NPR article covering one of the common fears of our age, that of an impending digital dark age. He left a comment on the article noting that the story left out a critical component — the work that archivists and other information professionals have been engaged in for some time so that we don’t lose all of our digital heritage, culture, records, and information to the great intertubez quicksands. He states, “We are not and have not been absent from the digital preservation questions. We are, however, hidden in the public narrative” and goes on to stress that appraisal and selection will be tantamount, particularly around questions of archival silences.

I agree with Bert’s assessment, but I also want to bring my perspective to this as a public university records manager (the other half of my job is digital archivist), that I think many archivists whose work doesn’t include an institutional records mandate often miss. I get the sense from recent archivist conferences and meetings that if we just raise our consciousness enough, if we advocate just hard enough, if we can be just squeaky enough, it’s within our power as archivists to prevent many of the issues around things like digital black holes or archival silences. Being a records manager has taught me that nothing could be farther from the truth; because those with the most power within organizations are rarely the same individuals tasked with carrying out records mandates, there will always be archival silences despite archivists’ and records managers’ best efforts. I may write in “Transfer to archives” under the disposition area of a records retention schedule, but that act of instruction is not an assurance that the records are actually preserved.

Currently, I think a lot of online and offline discussion around archival silences is dominated by archivists who work or have been professionally socialized within a manuscripts/external donor/topical collecting framework. The perspectives of people who are required by their jobs to dedicate the majority of their time to preservation of institutional records of the parent organization’s official business (be it corporate, government, university, etc) are often missing. This is unfortunate, because I believe there are as many archival silences among institutionally-mandated records as there are among archives that emphasize collecting content from external parties.

In a 2004 article on archival silences, Rodney Carter’s article approaches the paradox of powerful entities’ determination of what goes in the archive, while actively resisting full documentation of their activities. However, the majority of Carter’s article (and additional recent literature on archival silences) focused on the lacunae of marginalized groups from mainstream archives. Much of the literature on archival silences explain these silences through the biases of archivists, claims of objectivity, or chasing the trends of historians. These concerns have become a rich part of the archival literature, and have led to the rise of community archives, training activists in archival methods, post-custodial models, and other revitalized forms of practice to preserve non-institutional archives.

If archivists care about accountability, I would argue that within the context and mandates of institutional archives, silences associated with the powerful have just as many ramifications. In countless circumstances, the powerful actively resist documentation or inclusion in the archive. In a 2013 post from Records Management Roundtable member Brad Houston, he builds on a conversation with Maarja Krusten reflecting on how digital technologies have enabled records creators to easily circumvent cooperation with records policies. In a highly litigious environment, or in areas where the powerful are often more concerned with their public appearance than in fully-documenting their work, there are myriad ways in which people routinely circumvent records requirements. Just as appraisal is never a neutral activity, neither is retention scheduling (which obviously constitutes its own form of appraisal). For a very current view of the political weight around records retention scheduling, I would refer readers to the inconsistency among jurisdictions on the retention around non-evidentiary body-worn camera video .

A lack of records associated with the powerful within the context of institutionally-mandated archives denies people an important avenue to examine the evidential actions of elected officials, CEOs, and other leaders, and hold them accountable. In his work on the nature of police records in post-Katrina New Orleans, and the records of prisons (which includes an analysis of retention schedules, something I wish we saw more in our literature), Jarrett Drake notes that state records can and often are manipulated or destroyed in order to protect the powerful. Because of this, human rights archival literature has long argued that state records alone cannot be the entire corpus of evidence for bringing about justice. But the question remains — what can archivists, records managers, and others who work within an institutionally-mandated records program (the ones who write retention schedules, arrange for records transfers, and educate records creators on policies and procedures) realistically do to ensure that institutional records are authentic, and that what comes to the archives aren’t just the public relations leftovers that make the institution look good?

From my perspective, silences of the powerful highlight the fact that there are two other forms of archival silences that can be explained by factors outside of archivists’ direct control:

1. Lack of, or inconsistent cooperation with records disposition on the part of records creators. This should not necessarily be construed as active malfeasance — but for many people, disposition of their records (via destruction or transfer to archives) is a perennial after-thought. In a recent report from Archives New Zealand, it noted that in virtually every office it audited, disposal and transfer of records was “inconsistent.” Although countless archivists have called for embedding ourselves at the beginning of the record life cycle, it would appear we are nowhere close to successfully doing this on a large scale. We often forget that archivists are not the sole arbiters of what resides in an institutional archive: preservation of the records of the organization is highly dependent on individual employees’ cooperation with institutional records policies. Resistance or non-cooperation leads to myriad silences; and these gaps become problematic in ensuring institutional accountability.

2. The 30-year long cycle of poverty that afflicts archives. Obviously very well-funded archives with significant staffing and resources can, and are, still rife with bias. However, many (most) archivists, whether in institutional archives or collecting archives, are constrained in their ability to process and preserve as many records as they would like to due to a persistent lack of archival labor and resources. If every archive could double (quadruple) its staff, this would help fix many silences by being proactive about identifying record gaps, doing the hard work of maintaining relationships with originating offices or donors, establishing post-custodial relationships where appropriate, etc. Not all records are lost due to active destruction, many are often lost due to benign neglect. A 2014 report showed that 33,000 of boxes intended to be transferred to British Columbia Archives were warehoused instead due to insufficient resources . If archivists with institutional record mandates are overworked and under-resourced, is anyone surprised that all they have time for is dealing with the records that do manage to get transferred? (And even then, many institutional archives have a hard time keeping up with what does manage to come through the door, for example according to a recent OIG report, 28% of NARA’s textual holdings have not yet been processed).

And this is where I want to push back against Bertram’s post a little bit and bring it back to the digital dark age — in an environment with institutional records mandates where archivists have little power to enforce compliance with records policies and even less agency over the budgets they receive, the risk of a digital black hole is very, very real. According to last year’s Council of State Archivists report, the number of state archives FTE employees dedicated to electronic records actually decreased from 2006 to 2014, and there are now fewer state archives staff relative to overall state employees. State archives have reported that there is a consistent gap between the authority to carry out state records policies, and the resources needed to actually perform or deliver duties and services. Archivists with institutional records mandates rarely have the authority or resources to go out and get all the electronic records on their own that are required to be transferred to the archives. For us, the digital dark age remains a major risk without organizational buy-in and adequate funding, and the full support of our professional organizations for the challenges we face.

Eira Tansey works as the Digital Archivist/Records Manager at the University of Cincinnati. She is a Steering Committee Member of SAA’s Records Management Roundtable.

May 23, 2016November 29, 2023 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Archivists on the IssuesTags: appraisal, archival labor, archival silences, archives profession, biases, Digital Dark Age, digital preservation, donors, Eira Tansey, erasure, institutional records, professionalism, record destruction, selection 9 Comments