Tag: federal records

The fate of history in the balance: The Seattle Federal Records Center still under threat

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. The following is from Burkely Hermann, recent graduate of the University of Maryland – College Park’s graduate program in Library and Information Science, with a concentration in Archives and Digital Curation.

On February 16, John C. Coughenour, a Reagan-appointee and Senior Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, blocked the sale of the National Archives facility at Seattle, one of the Federal Records Centers (FRC) in the U.S. with a preliminary injunction. This ended the movement of records from the facility to FRCs in Missouri and California, many of which are “un-digitized records.” He called the situation a “public relations disaster” of the Public Buildings Reform Board (PBRB), the entity which proposed the sale, and said that the PBRB had “a stunning lack of appreciation of the issues” of indigenous people. While the attorney generals of Washington State and Oregon applauded the decision, as did indigenous people, genealogists, U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell, and others, the fight is not over. The Stranger said that history “requires defending in the present,” The Cut argued that the fate of the Seattle FRC “remains undecided,” and MyNorthwest noted there is “more potential trouble” in the future if noting about the facility changes going forward. On February 18, local Seattle leaders and the governor of Oregon both wrote President Biden, calling on him to stop the sale of the facility. Even with the injunction, it is short-lived, meaning that the facility remains under threat. As such, it is important to once again, as I noted in February and November of last year, to explain the negative impact the closure of this facility will have on those in the Pacific Northwest and in the U.S. as a whole.

Over the past year, there have been legal efforts to delay the closure. Kim Wyman, the Secretary of State of Washington State, began meeting with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and other stakeholders, in hopes of brokering a solution to keep the archival materials, which document “history across the Pacific Northwest” in the state of Washington. At the same time, Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson made filings in federal court, including the recent lawsuit which included almost 600 pages from indigenous peoples, individuals, and interested groups which attest to the value of the Seattle facility and materials which are held there. If the “nearly million” boxes of archival materials from the facility were moved to Missouri and California as planned, access to records about Asian American history would be made more difficult, as would records that relate to the “cultural preservation, history and treaty rights” of various indigenous nations in the Pacific Northwest. Moving the records to facilities in those states would make them less publicly accessible, destroying one of the “wellsprings” from which the “collective memory” of the region and nation is formed, as argued in the case in the amicus brief by the Korematsu Center. A recent successful lawsuit filed by Ferguson in early January, joined by 29 indigenous groups, and historic community and preservation groups, to stop the relocation and sale of the Seattle FRC, explains the problem succinctly:

“This action shows a callous disregard for the people who have the greatest interest in being able to access these profoundly important records…The facility contains the DNA of our region. It provides public access to permanent records created by Federal agencies and courts in Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington…the National Archives at Seattle is the only property among those the PBRB recommended for sale that has profound importance to the region in which it is situated and is regularly used by members of the public…These irreplaceable archives are primarily un-digitized and do not exist elsewhere.”

The closure of the facility would violate NARA’s own principles to preserve and provide access to U.S. records and document U.S. history, especially those documents essential to U.S. government actions, rights of U.S. citizens, and any other records which “provide information of value to citizens.” It also runs afoul of NARA’s commitment to drive “openness, cultivate public participation” and strengthen U.S. democracy through “public access to high-value government records.” That same commitment states that NARA will lead the “archival and information professions to ensure archives thrive in a digital world.” That seems unlikely since only about 1% of the NARA’s record holdings are digitized and even less than 1% of presidential library records have been put online.

Furthermore, moving the records from Seattle to the FRCs in California, whether in Riverside or in San Francisco, and St. Louis, Missouri, would disregard the core values of archivists outlined by the Society of American Archivists. These core values state that archivists have a duty to foster greater access and use to records, maintain records which allow “contemporary and future entities” to seek accountability, serve as responsible “stewards for primary sources,” and root their “ethics of care that prioritizes sustainable practices and policies” when it comes to archival duties. The “boxes of information” within the Seattle FRC, highlighted by one local Seattle reporter, Matthew Smith, would be made less accessible if the records were moved elsewhere in the country. If the Seattle FRC is closed, it will be a sad day for archives, records, and preservation of U.S., indigenous, and community history.

Although the closure of the Seattle FRC has been halted by Judge Coughenour, this is only a temporary measure. In the short-term, you could contact the management team of NARA, especially chief archivist David Ferriero (david.ferriero@nara.gov), deputy chief archivist Debra Steidel Wall (debra.wall@nara.gov), and Chief Operating Officer William J. Bosanko (william.bosanko@nara.gov), and the PBRB at fastainfo@pbrb.gov, to express your opposition to the closure, while calling on President Biden to follow the judge’s decision and keep the facility open. In the long term, NARA needs increased funding and you can use the information put together by the Archival Researchers Association to contact your members of Congress to push for legislation which would increase the agency’s budget.

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“Far-reaching impacts”: Why the closure of NARA’s Seattle facility still matters

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. The following is from Burkely Hermann, recent graduate of the University of Maryland – College Park’s graduate program in Library and Information Science, with a concentration in Archives and Digital Curation.

Back on February 18, I wrote about the closure of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)’s Seattle facility, NAS for short. Recently this issue came to the fore with the publication of an article by Megan E. Llewellyn and Sarah A. Buchanan titled “Will the Last Archivist in Seattle Please Turn Out the Lights: Value and the National Archives” in the Journal of Western Archives.

The NAS facility is key to many different communities. The official page for the facility specifically highlights information they hold about Chinese immigrants and indigenous affairs, along with land records, court records, and genealogical resources. This includes tribal and treaty records of indigenous people living in the Pacific Northwest, and original case files for Chinese immigrants in the 19th century. Volunteers have been trying to index the Chinese immigrant files and create an “extensive database of family history.” This will be interrupted if the files are moved, making the database incomplete.

The NAS facility itself has regional significance. The property the facility sits on was once the location of  a prospering farm owned by Japanese immigrant Uyeji family from 1910 to 1942. [1] These immigrants were evicted from their land during World War II and put into concentration camps, like the over 120,000 Japanese Americans. The immigrant Uyeji family never returned to their home, and the land was seized by the U.S. Navy in 1945, after it had been condemned in earlier years, in order to build a warehouse. [2] The warehouse was later converted into a facility and began to be occupied by the National Archives after 1963. This transfer of ownership intersected with the history of Seattle’s development which benefited White people above those of other races, from 1923 onward.

There is more to be considered. As Llewellyn and Buchanan argue in the Journal of Western Archives, the closure of NAS is harmful, a failure at “multiple levels of government,” and was made without considering how valuable marginalized communities in the area see the records held at the facility. [3] 58,000 cubic feet are permanent records of federal agencies in the Pacific Northwest, while 6,600 cubic feet are occupied by records from the Bureau of Indian Affairs alone. [4] Neither should be destroyed per NARA guidance. This amount of cubic feet is equivalent to about 1,871 side-by-side refrigerators or about 1,234 top-mount refrigerators. [5] No matter how the size is measured, the NAS facility is well-used, as is its digital resources, by Asian-Americans, indigenous people, and various researchers. [6] Some indigenous people even called the closure and movement of records to other locations a “paper genocide.” As Bob Ferguson, the Washington State Attorney General, stated in February, moving the records from the NAS facility, to states such as California and Missouri, contradicts the purpose of the archives and impedes efforts by local families to research their ancestors.

There are other problems with the closure. Llewellyn and Buchanan pointed out, for one, the errors in the Public Buildings Reform Board (PBRB)’s assessment to close the facility, noting the significant level of foot traffic, the lack of public hearings on the closure, and NARA management agreeing with the decision to close. [7] There is also  concern that not all the records held at the NAS facility could be digitized. Some news outlets, like MyNorthwest, have rightly pointed out that large items like bound books and maps might not be “properly scanned” or digitized at all. Llewellyn and Buchanan further note the involved process of digitization, and extra costs researchers will have to pay if the records from the NAS facility are moved. [8]

Readers may be asking what can be done about the closure. Now is not the time to sit back and let the Washington State government to the heavy lifting, nor the Seattle media. In the latter case, the Seattle Times opined against the decision to close the NAS facility. In the case of Washington State, Ferguson, mentioned earlier, proposed a compromise to keep the regional facility of NARA in Washington State, worrying, like others, of the prospect of losing access to “over a century of history.” But his noble efforts have been for naught. The closure is on track, with NARA justifying it based on experience with the COVID-19 pandemic, saying the agency will be “less location dependent” in the future, with users accessing resources remotely rather than in-person. On the legal front, in August, Ferguson filed federal Freedom of Information Act lawsuits for public records against NARA, the Office of Management & Budget (OMB), and the General Services Administration (GSA). He also requested documents from the PBRB the same month. He stated that NARA and OMB failed to respond to requests he made in early February, while the GSA has not sent records it promised in the summer of this year. The PBRB, on the other hand, wanted taxpayers to pay about $65,000 to redact information from documents even though no sensitive information is present, as stated in various articles in the Seattle Times, HeraldNet, and Seattle Weekly. These efforts will likely go forward as Ferguson won the race to be the Attorney General of Washington State against Republican challenger Matt Larkin.

In the short-term, readers should email the OMB Director Russell Vought at Russell.t.vought@omb.eop.gov, the GSA Administrator Emily Murphy at emily.murphy@gsa.gov, Archivist David Ferriero at David.Ferriero@nara.gov, and the PBRB at fastainfo@pbrb.gov, opposing the closure of the NAS facility. Currently, the NAS facility has not been listed by the GSA for sale, whether on its database of real property or its database displaying federal properties being auctioned off. While COVID-19 makes the push for more remote learning attractive, it is still possible and vital to open in-person facilities, in line with existing rules and regulations to ensure the safety of the staff and patrons at specific facilities. In the long-term, if the NAS facility is closed, it could put other NARA facilities in jeopardy, as Llewellyn and Buchanan point out. [9] At the same time, archivists should advocate for a “massive investment in time, money, and planning” to digitize more of NARA’s holdings, as the aforementioned scholars argue for, [10] with not even 1% digitized at the present! Whether the facility is closed or not, there are dark times ahead for NARA, as less government spending may be on the horizon, unless the proposed budget for NARA is approved by the House of Representatives and Senate.

Notes

[1] Llewellyn, Megan E., and Sarah A. Buchanan, “Will the Last Archivist in Seattle Please Turn Out the Lights: Value and the National Archives and the National Archives,” Journal of Western Archives 11, no. 1 (October 12, 2020): 7, https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1125&context=westernarchives.  

[2] Llewellyn and Buchanan, 7-9.

[3] Ibid, 3-4.

[4] Ibid, 4-5.

[5] Karie Lapham Fay, “Dimensions of a Standard Size Refrigerator,” SFGate, December 17, 2018, https://homeguides.sfgate.com/dimensions-standard-size-refrigerator-82262.html. I used the largest size of a side-by-side refrigerator (31 cubic feet) and largest size of a top-mount refrigerator is 47 cubic feet when using the highest numbers in Fay’s article.

[6] Llewellyn and Buchanan,  5-6.

[7] Ibid, 11-17.

[8] Ibid, 17-19.

[9] Ibid, 24-25.

[10] Ibid, 21.

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Archivists on the Issues: More than a warehouse: why the closure of Seattle’s National Archives facility matters

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. The following is from Burkely Hermann, recent graduate of the University of Maryland – College Park’s graduate program in Library and Information Science, with a concentration in Archives and Digital Curation.

On January 26, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) approved the sale of the 157,000 square foot National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Seattle facility, which holds permanent federal records for Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. This decision raises the question: which is more important, access to historic records or selling a public facility in a high-value real estate market? There has been fierce opposition from historical societies in Alaska and Seattle, historical researchers, genealogical groups, indigenous leaders, university professors, archivists, and historians. They were joined by a bipartisan group of eight Alaskan state legislators and 16 Congress members. The latter, comprising Washingtonian, Alaskan, Idahoan, and Montanan politicians, was also bipartisan. Washington Governor Jay Inslee also opposed the decision, as did Washington’s Secretary of State Kim Wyman. Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson is considering suing the federal government over the closure. He reportedly submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the five-person Public Buildings Reform Board (PBRB), OMB, NARA, and the General Services Administration (GSA) regarding the closure. The Washington State Archives even created a page about the topic.

History Associates Incorporated, which cautioned their clients to plan ahead for the facility’s closure, noted the process would take 18 months. They also included the estimate from Susan Karren, NARA’s Seattle director that only “.001% of the facility’s 56,000 cubic feet of records are digitized and available online,” and stated that permanent records may be inaccessible when transferred between facilities. According to NARA, no actions are being taken imminently which affect users of the facility, and NARA has requested to stay in the facility for three years following the sale. With such hullabaloo on this topic, one question is relevant: why does this closure matter to us, as fellow archivists?

NARA’s Seattle facility in Sand Point is more than a “giant U.S. government warehouse” or “excess property” as described in bureaucratic language. This facility holds records on indigenous people in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. It also holds: Chinese Exclusion Act case files which have been diligently indexed by local volunteers for the past 28 years; Forest Service teletypes about the Mount St. Helens explosion in 1980; federal case records from the early 1900s; and other important local documents. Such records make the NARA facility part of the “historical ecosystem” in the Northwestern United States, providing the public “direct access to government documents, from genealogical records to court files.” These aspects make the facility a “high value” federal property (or “asset”) which has a “deferred maintenance backlog of $2.5 million.” Additionally, no public PBRB meeting transcripts showed discussion of the closure. In one meeting, “warehouse[s]” used by NARA for “long-term storage” was touched on and at another there was a passing mention of Seattle.

Some may point to existing digitization efforts. Sure, some of Alaska’s records have been digitized, but record series are often digitized by FamilySearch and the project is only five years old. For instance, some records relating to Alaska have been digitized like crew lists, immigrant lists, draft cards, and naturalization records, as is the case with Washington and Idaho. But these are primarily 20th century records, with very few 19th century records. The letter from congress members criticizing the decision also called this out, stating that “NARA’s partnership with FamilySearch to digitize records has…not resulted in actual access to records that have been prioritized by stakeholders,” a unique and rare criticism of the NARA-FamilySearch partnership. The limitations of existing digitization undermines NARA’s reasoning that some of their “popular records” are already digitized or available online, asserting that public access to their archival records will stay in place.

Access to “archived knowledge” is vital and inherent to archival ethics. Moving records away from those who can use it, dividing it between two existing facilities in Riverside, California, and Kansas City, Missouri, is an act of cruel inaccessibility. Furthermore, splitting the records between two locations, regardless of the reason, leads to a strain on those facilities, which need additional storage space. NARA itself admits that the closure will negatively affect those who use the facility. They pledge to engage with researchers in a “smooth” transition when the facility is shuttered, even though this change will undoubtedly disadvantage various stakeholders, whether state archivists, government employees, scientists, students, or others. In a recent invitation-only meeting, they showed their commitment to the closure of the facility, pledging to work with indigenous groups.

The PBRB’s executive director Adam Bodner claimed that the closure of the facility was a decision by NARA staff. If true, this would put them at odds with users and stakeholders who want the facility to remain open. On pages A-68 to A-71 of their report, the PBRB concluded that NARA wanted to move to a more modern facility and that the 10 acres the facility sat on would be great for residential housing, apparently worth tens of millions of dollars as one article claimed. The PBRB also stated that NARA could only fulfill its storage needs at another facility because the current facility does not meet NARA’s “long-term storage needs.” In the process, some records will be moved to a temporary facility. Reportedly, NARA justified the closure by the fact that the facility is the third-least visited NARA site in the country and has “high operating costs.” Such arguments don’t consider the fact that the 73-year-old building could be retrofitted for the agency’s needs or records could be moved closer rather than split between two locations. This closure also stands against NARA’s stated goal that public access is part of its core mission and violates the Society of American Archivists’ Code of Ethics, stating that archivists “promote and provide the widest accessibility of materials.”

In coming days, NARA will be submitting a Report of Excess to the GSA, headed by Administrator Emily Murphy, which will collaborate with the PBRB and OMB to help “offload” properties like this facility. As such, to speak out against the closure, you could email Emily Murphy at emily.murphy@gsa.gov, the GSA’s Deputy Administrator at Allison Brigati at allison.brigati@gsa.gov, call 1-844-GSA-4111 or contact the GSA’s Office of Real Property Utilization and Disposal at 202-501-0084 and at realestate.buildingdisposal@gsa.gov. Alternatively, you could contact the OMB’s Russell Vought at Russell.t.vought@omb.eop.gov or Archivist David Ferriero at David.Ferriero@nara.gov.

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Legis* Research Team: Updates Regarding Legislation and Legislator Actions

The Legis* Research Team monitors the intersection of archives issues and legislative resources and concerns, legislative bills, and individual legislators. This post, part of our Research Post series, was written by Katharina Hering, Mark Prindiville, Ashley Levine, and Lindsay Hiltunen.

In the past several months, I have focused on monitoring opposition against the Immigration and Custom’s Enforcement’s (ICE) “Visa Lifecycle Vetting Initiative” (VLVI), formerly called the “Extreme Vetting Initiative” (EVI) in and outside of Congress. On April 5, 2018, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS), Ranking Member of the Committee on Homeland Security, Rep. Filemon Vela (D-TX), Ranking Member of the Border and Maritime Security Subcommittee, and Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-NY), Ranking Member of the Counterterrorism and Intelligence Subcommittee, sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen urging her to halt the VLVI. “The Trump Administration’s extreme vetting initiative must be stopped.  Not only will it be ineffective and inaccurate, but will certainly be discriminatory and unjustly target certain communities. ICE’s intention to build a program with unknown limits to search social media platforms demonstrates a disregard for privacy, due process, and the rights to free speech and free association. This initiative will undoubtedly chill free speech online.” In March 2018, citing concerns raised by the Brennan Center for Justice and other civil liberties and civil rights organizations about the Extreme Vetting Initiative, the Congressional Black Caucus, via letter, requested that DHS suspends all activities related to the VLVI.

Among the groups opposing the VLVI were the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York (ART) and the Concerned Archivists Alliance.

Several civil rights, civil liberties and privacy rights organizations provide regular updates on the opposition against the VLVI, including the Center for Democracy and Technology, National Immigration Law Center, Georgetown’s Center for Privacy and Technology, and the Brennan Center for Justice, among others.

— Katharina Hering

Senator Gary Peters of Michigan voted in favor of banking deregulation on March 6, 2018, as well as his fellow Michigander, Sen. Debbie Stabenow, and 14 other Democratic Senators. Coincidentally, both Peters and Stabenow have history with banking lobbyists, as campaign and leadership PAC donations from securities and investments have been found via OpenSecrets.org. Peters has received $726,879, while Stabenow has obtained $587,939, ironically including corporate/PAC donations into the realm of the gender wage gap issue.
— Mark Prindiville

In following the activities of the TV, radio, and internet news program, Democracy Now!, the legislator, Tom Cotton (R-AR), and the legislation, H.R. 3923:  Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act of 2017 (Sponsored by Adams Smith, D-WA), failures of government accountability in documenting abuse of undocumented persons by government agencies (e.g. U.S. Immigrations Customs Enforcement, a.k.a. ICE) amid simultaneous efforts to bolster aggressive immigration enforcement policies, are increasingly apparent.

The Democracy Now! website dedicates a section entirely to reporting on immigration issues in the United States. Articles bearing headlines like, “Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Allow Jailing of Pregnant Women,” to, “Immigration Activists Fight to End ICE Arrests at Courthouses,” and, “17 States Sue Trump Administration over Census Citizenship Question,” highlight the current administration’s efforts to crackdown on immigration from non-European (i.e. non-white) nations, and terrorize undocumented people within the U.S. These reports underscore concrete steps taken by ICE to simultaneously increase surveillance of immigrant communities (through data gathering mechanisms, such as the “Visa Lifecycle Vetting” initiative), and double-down on aggressive detainment activities (raids on courthouses, communities, and sanctuary cities). ICE activities are shrouded in secrecy, while ICE leadership neglects to adequately explain its extralegal actions.

Tom Cotton’s legislative activities mirror those of the administration in which he serves. For example, last year Senator Cotton sponsored S. 354: RAISE Act, which aims to limit illegal immigration by significantly reducing several provisions of U.S. policy that encourage legal immigration. S. 354 would end the Diversity Visa Program, a State Department initiative that grants an additional 50,000 legal permanent resident visas each year from countries with low rates of U.S. immigration. This bill also aims to reduce the number of family-sponsored immigrants, as well as cap number of refugees around the world offered U.S. permanent residency to 50,000. Tom Cotton also sponsored S. 1720: RAISE Act, a bill to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to establish a skills-based immigration points system.

Meanwhile, since its introduction in October 2017, H.R. 3923:  Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act of 2017, has seen no action made in the House. This bill aims to provide standards for facilities where undocumented persons in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security (ICE) are detained. Since ICE’s inception in 2003, and up to 2015, 150 individuals died in the agency’s custody. Furthermore, the immigration detainee watchdog group, Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC), highlighted 14,693 reported incidents of sexual and physical abuse in ICE detention centers from 2010 to 2016, with just about 1 percent of these reports actually resulting in investigations. ICE has even reversed its policy of not detaining pregnant women, as reports of multiple confirmed miscarriages and  inadequate medical care in ICE detention facilities have come to light. This new policy follows President Trump’s Muslim Ban, “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” from January 2017, which has led to increased interior enforcement across the country.

— Ashley Levine

The most active monitoring I have been doing lately stems from the National Coalition for History. An active advocate for many important policy issues that impact archives, libraries, and other cultural heritage institutions, the National Coalition for History has been doing a lot of work to keep the issue of Humanities funding in the forefront. Member organizations represent thousands of historians, genealogists, archivists, teachers, students, and other stakeholders, so they are keeping current on issues that impact those professions and the communities served. Active social media campaigns have been highlighting some of these efforts, as well as collaboration with other non-profit educational organizations to encourage face-to-face and other modes of history-related advocacy. Current goals and accomplishments that impact the archives profession include working to prevent the elimination of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, an important source of funding for archives across the country, and leading the effort to pass the Presidential & Federal Records Reform Act. The National History Coalition has an active social media presence, so be sure to check them out on Facebook and Twitter, or historycoalition.org, to get a sense of current advocacy work and major accomplishments.

— Lindsay Hiltunen

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Legis* Research Team: Goals and Preliminary Findings

The Legis* Research Team monitors the intersection of archives issues and legislative resources and concerns, legislative bills, and individual legislators. This post, part of our Research Post series, was written by Rachel Mandell, Mark Prindiville, Ashley Levine, Dina Mazina, and Laurel Bowen.

Who is the Legis* Research Team?

Team coordinator: Rachel Mandell, USC Digital Library and I&A Chair

Team members: Laurel Bowen, Georgia State University; Katharina Hering, Georgetown Law Library; Lindsay Hiltunen, Michigan Technological University; Ashley Levine, Artifex Press; Dina Mazina, US Senate Committee on Finance; andMark Prindiville, Walter P. Reuther Library

What does the Legis* Research Team do?

The Backstory: For those of you who are familiar with the Issues and Advocacy Legislator Research Team of the past, the current configuration is somewhat different. We are taking a different approach and consider this very much a beta structure or a work in progress, if you will. We decided that a revamp was necessary because as we began to reflect on our goals for this team,  I&A vice-chair, Courtney Dean, and I realized that the information collected by Legislator Research Teams in the past have had no direct uses or action items associated with the data. This year, we hope to change that!
Goals: In recent months, we have been in conversation with the Committee on Public Policy (CoPP) about working towards the goal of contacting legislators and potentially engaging in on the ground advocacy work at SAA 2018 in Washington, D.C.. Towards that end, and also towards the end of collecting data for a purpose, we would like the Legislator/Legislative Research Team to try something different.

What does the Legis* Research Team do?

The Task: Legis*: Choose and Monitor (yes, that is a Boolean search/truncation joke)

Everyone on the current team has chosen up to 3 items to monitor. The idea is to explore topics of interest and, in doing so, see more clear goals/uses emerge from the data. The categories are legislation, legislators, and legislative resources. We will cover topics and people qho have influence and affect archives, funding, social justice, data security and surveillance, labor, etc. No topic is too small or too big; given the rather limited time commitment for this research team, extensive research is not expected. Instead, we seek to have and share a general overview of what’s happening in legislative branches, what resources are out there, what legislation is being discussed, and who is taking the lead on such legislation.

What’s included in your research?

So far the topics chosen are as follows:

Legislation:

  • H.R. 2884: Communications Over Various Feeds Electronically for Engagement Act of 2017
  • H.R. 3923: Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act of 2017
  • H.R. 4382: Free Flow of Information Act of 2017
  • H.R. 4271: To blog the implementation of certain presidential actions that restrict individuals from certain countries from entering the United States.
  • H.R. 4081: Consumer Privacy Protection Act of 2017

Legislators:

  • Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)
  • Hank Johnson (D-GA)
  • Gary Peters (D-MI)
  • Joe Crowley (D-NY)
  • Michael Turner (R-OH)
  • Darrell Issa (R-CA)
  • Mike Quigley (D-IL)
  • Tom Cotton (R-AR)
  • Jamie Raskin (D- MD)
  • David Cicilline (D-RI)

Resources:

  • National Coalition for History, Congressional History Caucus
  • The Hill
  • National Archives Center for Legislative Archives
  • Democracy Now!
  • Congress.gov
  • Senate Committees
  • Senate Legislation and Records
  • Congressional Transparency Caucus
  • Data Transparency Coalition

This year promises to be an interesting year in our legislative branch of government and the I&A Legis* Team will be there to monitor. We look forward to reporting back with with more information as the year progresses!

Preliminary update from Mark Prindiville: 

The Hill

  • Founded in 1994, due to the success of Roll Call, a newspaper and website that reports on legislative and political maneuverings in the Capitol.
  • Can be argued that The Hill is the American equivalent to the United Kingdom’s BBC News or The Guardian.
  • The Hill also operates through its website and has six blogs dealing with politics and legislation.
  • Has a surprisingly adamant social media presence, though it does not seem to have the same positive feedback in regards to its phone/tablet application.
    • If one follows The Hill on sites like Facebook, they post stories and breaking news at an astounding rate.

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich)

  • Born December 1, 1958. Served on the Rochester Hills City Council from 1991-1993. Member of MI Senate from 1995-2002. Commissioner of Michigan Lottery from 2003-2007. Member of U.S. House of Representatives (MI-9) from 2009-2013, and again (MI-14) from 2013-2015. Elected to US Senate in 2015, succeeding Carl Levin.
  • Voted for the Recovery Act, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (not passed), the Paycheck Fairness Act (not passed), the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and the DREAM Act
  • As of 2010, has a “D” rating from the NRA; 2016’s Orlando shooting prompted Peters to participate in the Chris Murphy gun control filibuster
  • In 2017, voted “Yea” on allowing Ajit Pai to become Chairman of FCC; however, Sen. Peters has come out against the FCC’s decision to repeal net neutrality, including voting in favor to overrule the FCC repeal, along with fellow Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow
Preliminary update from Ashley Levine:

I have elected to monitor three resources to explore how the American media and government document the undocumented, respectively. These include the TV, radio, and internet news program Democracy Now!; legislator Tom Cotton (R-AR); and House bill H.R. 3923, Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act of 2017.

My preliminary findings suggest failures of government accountability in documenting abuse of undocumented persons by government agencies, e.g. U.S. Immigrations Customs Enforcement (ICE), amid simultaneous efforts to bolster aggressive immigration enforcement policies. I aim to unpack the meaning of “government transparency” related to policy affecting undocumented persons, and simultaneously assess the effectiveness of the media in presenting truthful, documentary evidence on immigration matters.

Preliminary update from Dina Mazina:

I’ll be following issues of government transparency, specifically the Congressional Transparency Caucus and their two chairmen, Mike Quigley (D-IL)  and Darrell Issa (R-CA).

In December, Rep. Quigley introduced the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act, which would establish a central repository accessible to congressional staffs and the general public of federal agency non-confidential published reports. Recently, the bill passed out of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. A companion bill is being led in the Senate by Senators Portman and Klobuchar.

Preliminary update from Laurel Bowen: 

I’m monitoring Michael Turner (R-OH), Joe Crowley (D-NY), and my own representative Hank Johnson (D-GA).  I’m familiar with Michael Turner as a successful advocate of legislation that promotes historic preservation, a field that often employs archivists.  I’ll be interested to find out if Joe Crowley and Hank Johnson, both representing urban areas, are advocates for cultural activities (libraries, archives, museums).  

In researching via Congress.gov I discovered (accidently) that Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) has introduced H.R. 1376, the Electronic Message Preservation Act of 2017, which requires the U.S. Archivist to promulgate regulations governing federal agency preservation of electronic messages.

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Research Post: The Evolving Landscape of Collecting Protest Material, Part 1

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. Each post offers a summary and coverage of an issue. This post, part one of a two-part series, comes from the General News Media Research Team, which monitors the news for issues affecting archivists and 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 Section.

Protest materials have long found their way into archival repositories, and collecting initiatives such as the gathering of signs from January’s Women’s March are not unsurprising in our currently volatile political climate. While still fraught with their own set of ethical considerations, as was evidenced by Occupy Wall Street archive custody concerns, traditional protest ephemera does not harbor the explicit privacy and legal consequences that have arisen as a result of the increasing online presence of protest movements.

The internet is a richly generative arena where movements are born and developed, either with or without a coincident physical presence. The way it is mobilized for protests can vary–from coordinating and publicizing traditional actions, to communication and information sharing, community building, fundraising, and movement organizing. Its rapid and reactive nature means that the parameters of a movement can be constantly adjusted and redefined, often across social media networks. Social media content by design yields much more information about its creators and can therefore be harvested and analyzed differently than traditional material, and due to its increasing ubiquity, it warrants new conversations where traditional legal and social notions of the public and private domain may no longer be adequate. As the volume and variety of this content grows on an unprecedented scale, so, too, do the tools and methods by which it is subjected to scrutiny.

Curt Ellis, “Woman holds up her fist ,” Preserve the Baltimore Uprising: Your Stories. Your Pictures. Your Stuff. Your History., accessed March 15, 2017. 

Legal consequences and privacy issues

In response to this ever-growing body of online material, archivists and archival institutions have been initiating and developing best practices for web archiving projects. Web archiving and data harvesting provide opportunities to study metadata as well as content, in order to better understand the context of creation. For example, researchers may be interested in studying tweets across time, by geographic origin, or as part of a larger network of contacts.

This information is also of interest to law enforcement agencies, some of which have partnered with companies that sell tools for tracking and monitoring social media content culled from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media companies that offer programs which allow app makers to create third-party tools. One such company, Geofeedia, counts more than 500 such clients and has advertised services that were used by officials in Baltimore to monitor and respond to the protests that followed Freddie Gray’s death in police custody in April 2015. Using such tools, Baltimore County Police Department’s Criminal Intelligence Unit was able to discover and arrest protesters with outstanding warrants by collecting and filtering social media photos through facial recognition software, a practice that has been shown to have serious technical flaws and to disproportionately affect people of color. Such tools are also used to assemble dossiers on targeted individuals as part of a strategy of long-term surveillance, as evidenced in the Cook County Sheriff’s Office records.

Use of social networks by third parties and law enforcement agencies has been met with opposition by many, including activists and the American Civil Liberties Union. Companies including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram cut ties with Geofeedia last year, according to the Washington Post, and on March 13, Facebook announced that police departments cannot use data to “provide tools that are used for surveillance,” a move that some consider a first step in curbing the online surveillance and targeting of activists and people of color.

Given this context, it is important for archivists to be aware of the potential ramifications of collecting contemporary protest material. For example, lawmakers in several states have recently introduced legislation that would target and criminalize protests, in some cases creating or greatly stiffening existing penalties and in others going so far as to give drivers legal license to hit protesters blocking traffic. Regardless of whether or not such pieces of legislation are passed, their existence is a testament to a political atmosphere that is fraught with serious issues for people who exercise their right to protest. As protest and movement organizing moves to an online and increasingly public sphere, the potential reach of such legislation, in conjunction with increased surveillance and data collection, could expand significantly.

Archivists should also be cognizant that many communities have complicated histories with the legal apparatus of this country. Different movements stem from different contexts, and as such the needs and aims of communities may differ with regards to visibility and their own safety. For the indigenous communities at Standing Rock, for example, the violent response of law enforcement towards protesters is the latest in a long history of dispossession.

Communities of color also often find themselves at the convergence of government surveillance and the rhetoric of legality. Some police departments, which respond to and monitor protests, have formed partnerships with the FBI, DEA, and federal immigration agencies such as ICE. These task forces facilitate information exchange between local officers and federal agencies through data-sharing agreements that provide reciprocal access to local and federal databases. Such partnerships have serious consequences for the activity of targeted communities, whether they are Muslim communities that are subject to surveillance by Joint Terrorism Task Forces, or undocumented and immigrant communities that are fearful of local officers deputized as ICE agents.

Archivists can navigate these concerns through the appraisal and reappraisal of their roles and documentation strategies, and by opening dialogues about consent. One model for ethical collecting could be the solicitation of community materials via online digital platforms. In A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland, for example, professional archivists worked in conjunction with community members to develop “a safe and secure space to share any testimony, documents, or accounts that narrate or reflect on encounters or effects of police violence in their lives and communities.” In other words, members of the community self-select what to contribute, while professional archivists serve to make that material accessible.

Harvesting does not need to be inherently problematic, however. In fact, ethical concerns can inform the development of technologies themselves. DocNow, a collaborative project between the University of Maryland, University of California at Riverside, and Washington University in St. Louis, has created a suite of tools for working with Twitter data related to Black Lives Matter and other social justice actions. As part of their mission they explicitly affirm, “a strong commitment to prioritizing ethical practices when working with social media content, especially in terms of collection and long-term preservation. This commitment extends to Twitter’s notion of honoring user intent and the rights of content creators.”

A recent American History Association article by Kritika Agarwal further acknowledges technology’s potential to dismantle problematic archival constraints and to “rectify injustices associated with historic collection and archiving practices.” The article cites collaborative content management system Murkutu, which allows indigenous communities to limit access in accordance with community practice, as another example of a digital tool that places ethics at the forefront.

Issues of narrative and interpretation

In any collecting effort, archivists must consider whose stories are being preserved and why. As has been pointed out previously here, historically repositories tended to focus on rehashing, and thus elevating, hegemonic narratives. While now there is a greater acknowledgement of the power in appraisal, description, and access decisions made by archivists, and the position of privilege these often come from, issues of representation still persist.

A recent thread on the Women Archivists Section listserv spoke to issues of counter-narrative in the Women’s March on Washington Archives Project, specifically concerns over actively trying to document voices of women who chose not to participate, and the tension between respecting “intentional archival silence” and including a variety of voices in oral histories and other event documentation (Danielle Russell, e-mail message, February 15, 2017). However, narratives and collections no longer need to be limited by traditional single repository/project models. As WArS co-chair Stacie Williams pointed out, “Let’s not assume that they don’t want to be a part of the larger narrative happening here, however well-meaning our intent as archivists; they may have their own ideas for how they want to be represented.” (e-mail message, February 15, 2017)

While digital collecting brings with it a host of new challenges such as security and privacy, it also carries the potential to create tools and projects that possess community-centric values. These are not mutually exclusive imperatives. As Jarrett Drake stated in his #ArchivesForBlackLives talk, “We have an opportunity before us to transform archive-making, history-making, and memory-making into processes that are radically inclusive and accountable to the people most directly impacted by state violence.” Now more than ever, archivists need to consider the ethical ramifications of our work.

A list of tools and related bibliography will be in the next post.

This post is courtesy of the General News Media Research Team, and in particular Courtney Dean and Lori Dedeyan. The General News Media Team is: Courtney Dean, Lori Dedeyan, Audrey Lengel, Sean McConnell, and Daria Labinsky, team leader.

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

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Mid-Year Steering Share: Activating Coordinated, Compelling Advocacy

Steering Shares are an opportunity to find out more about the I&A Steering Committee. This mid-year post is from I&A Steering Committee member Laurel Bowen, University Archivist at Georgia State University.

In the last few months, the Issues & Advocacy Section has been adding new content from the history and historic preservation professions to our Toolkit.  In a separate venture, many members worked on research teams to find information about legislators that could help SAA advocate on our behalf.  

Thinking about both projects, I wonder if we, as archivists, should (1) look to a broader range of professions for joint or coordinated advocacy; and (2) craft a value statement for archives that is as relevant and compelling as those done by the history and historic preservation professions.

We hear that “all politics are local”—that to get and remain elected, politicians must first focus on their home community and constituents.  A legislator whose constituents are passionate about their region’s wide open spaces may more readily support funds for parks, while a lawmaker representing an urban area that has fallen on hard times may lean toward funding historic preservation as a means of revitalizing that city.  

But these initiatives are not mutually exclusive.  The National Park Service manages not only natural areas but historic sites, monuments, buildings, and collections related to them.  The National Trust for Historic Preservation advocates for “saving places,” but how can either built structures or natural areas be restored to their former glory without documents, photographs, and objects that describe and illustrate what that past glory was?  Archives, libraries, museums, parks, historic sites—all provide ways to understand communities, places, and their interrelationships over time.  As a profession, we already work cooperatively with the library and history professions—why not with the historic preservation and park people as well?

Dennis Meissner tells us that compelling advocacy needs to be grounded on “data that speak to the archival value proposition:  economic impact, audiences served, outcomes achieved.”  The Preservation Leadership Forum (National Trust for Historic Preservation) has stepped firmly in that direction, linking their work to

  • engaging diverse communities;
  • “promoting building reuse in cities as essential to economic growth and vibrant communities”;
  • being environmentally responsible and creating “economically vital, socially equitable, and strong resilient neighborhoods.”

In addition, they articulate their value to those who redevelop property, and speak about their “new relationships” with historic sites (that often include collections) and with federal agencies that manage our vast historic and cultural resources.

The history profession, through the History Relevance Campaign, is also identifying “the value of history in contemporary life.”  History is essential because it:

  • nurtures personal identity in an intercultural world;
  • teaches critical 21st century skills and independent thinking;
  • lays the groundwork for strong, resilient communities;
  • is a catalyst for economic growth, drawing people to communities with a strong sense of historical identity and character;
  • helps people craft better solutions;
  • inspires local and global leaders.

And finally: “Through the preservation of authentic, meaningful places, documents, artifacts, images, and stories, we leave a foundation upon which future [generations] can build.”  At the bottom of all this…lies archives!  Surely we, as archivists, can craft as compelling, clear, and relevant a value statement as colleagues in allied professions.

As archivists, we know the inherent power of archives and how archives can be used in meaningful ways to change lives.  In my university archives are documents that: 

  • provided proof of employment and its length so an employee could claim retirement benefits;
  • enabled an alumnus to reconnect with a former classmate, pleasing both the older gentleman and his state legislator who made the request on his behalf;
  • estimated the cost of a former student’s education so he could claim his fair share of the estate of his deceased relative (and former benefactor).

Similarly, records are important in local governance. In my community, I’ve used:

  • court and county records to support our neighborhood’s position that a proposed commercial development abutting our homes wouldn’t enhance the livability of our community or the value of our homes (it was defeated);
  • planning documents to reveal that drawings of a proposed development didn’t include generous greenspace (the lawyer colored the parking areas green);
  • government engineering records to dissuade an eager decision-maker from quickly approving an expanding business that wanted to avoid connecting to a sewer line.

The archives we know, and that we use in powerful ways to change lives, are the underpinnings that support, strengthen, and insure the validity of the work of other professions.  Some of the same themes that flow through both the history and historic preservation value statements could be adapted to an archives value statement.

Ultimately, it’s about how communities can live and grow together through the years in harmony with each other and with the places they occupy.  We live in challenging times. Working with a wider variety of allies could help us compete more effectively for those dwindling resources. As one of our Founding Fathers remarked upon signing the Declaration of Independence, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

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Mid-Year Steering Share: Breaking the Silence

Steering Shares are an opportunity to find out more about the I&A Steering Committee. This post is from Daria Labinsky, an archivist at the National Archives in St. Louis, who works primarily with 20thcentury military personal data records. The Mid-Year Steering Share was developed to discuss projects currently active or recently completed, either personal or professional.

In my first Steering Share, I mentioned that one of my greatest concerns is the deliberate or accidental creation of archival silences by record creators and keepers. When I wrote that post, I did not foresee how relevant this concern would become. Tweets that may be federal records are being deleted, and White House staff may be using private email accounts and encryption/deletion software to conduct government business.

And it’s possible (probable?) that efforts to hide or destroy information concerning the operations and motives of the administration will only increase. As the group Concerned Archivists has pointed out in A Statement to the Archival Community, the president’s corporations destroyed emails in defiance of court orders before he was elected.

The Federal Records Act states, “Electronic messages created or received in a personal account meeting the definition of a Federal record must be forwarded to an official electronic messaging account within 20 days.”  Likewise, the Presidential Records Act, states that the president, vice president, or member of their immediate staff may not create or send a presidential or vice presidential record using a non-official electronic message account unless they copy it to an official account or resend it via an official account within 20 days.

Some of the president’s tweets on his personal account, but not all, have been retweeted on @POTUS, the official account.

tweets

As for the deleted tweets, under 44 U.S. Code § 2209 the president could argue that they are personal records of “purely private or nonpublic character which do not relate to or have an effect upon the carrying out of the constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President.”

Shontavia Johnson, professor of intellectual property law at Drake University, offers a well written and thorough dissection of the relevant issues in “Donald Trump’s tweets are now presidential records.” She closes with, “To create a full digital picture of Trump’s presidency, we may have to rely on the screenshots from private citizens or others.” Entities such as Pro Publica, whose Politwoops is capturing deleted tweets to the best of its ability, and the Internet Archive, which launched the Trump Archive to collect televised material, are among those answering her call. While these wouldn’t be federal records covered under the laws pertaining to them, they are admirable attempts to keep history from vanishing.

There are also efforts under way by public officials to fight potential historical silences. Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) introduced a bill to strengthen federal records laws. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who co-chairs the Congressional Transparency Caucus, has emphasized the need to demand transparency from the presidential administration as well as from Congress.  Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Tom Carper (D-Del.) are investigating whether any laws were broken by administration staffers who were using the private email accounts.

It’s sad that any of this has to be dealt with in the first place, but it is refreshing that vigilance is not defined by party lines. The efforts of these and other people and organizations give me hope that we can turn the silence into noise.

The contents of this message are Daria’s personally and do not necessarily reflect any position of the Federal government or the National Archives and Records Administration.

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What Can Archivists Do about Concerns Regarding Federal Climate and Environmental Data?

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. 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.

This post is by Eira Tansey, University of Cincinnati and a leader in the Project Archivists Responding to Climate Change (Project ARCC).

Shortly after the US election results, many who rely on federal climate and environmental data became very concerned about the continuing public availability of this data in the new administration. I am among this group myself, as my research partners from Penn State and I use data sets from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to map climate change risks to American archival repositories. In the past few weeks, institutions such as the University of Toronto and the Penn Environmental Humanities Lab began to organize hackathons in order to seed the End of Term Web Archive project with climate and environmental webpages, and determine ways to effectively copy large data sets. The issue gained steam over the weekend when climate journalist and meteorologist Eric Holthaus began tweeting about it, and has gained major news coverage with stories in the Washington Post and Vice.

As a leader within Project ARCC (Archivists Responding to Climate Change), I had reached out to individuals at Toronto and Penn to get more information about their projects as soon as I heard about them, including the role of librarians and archivists in their efforts. Representatives from the University of Toronto and Penn joined last night’s monthly Project ARCC conference call to update us on their efforts.

Things are moving very swiftly on all fronts, so additional posts will be forthcoming as information and efforts are updated.

What is already in place?

Fellows from the Penn Environmental Humanities Lab began raising the issue of vulnerable environmental data with a hackathon earlier this month. The Lab is now quickly organizing on many of the issues associated with downloading and distributing the work of copying the many data sets scientists rely on. You can read their initial vision here, their preliminary take on how not all data sets may be equally vulnerable, and yesterday’s update regarding their taking over the initial crowdsourced spreadsheet that Eric Holthaus started, as well as their collaborative work with the University of Toronto.

The University of Toronto is hosting a “guerrilla archiving” event on December 17. This event will focus on Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) page URLs that will be seeded for the End of Term project.

What is next?

The folks at Penn and Toronto have received a massive outpouring of interest. Which is great! It also means that they need time to organize their efforts and evaluate offers of help, storage space, etc., most effectively. You can visit Penn’s #DataRefuge website, which went live December 13, to learn more about efforts as they evolve.

Beyond the work that is coming out of the Toronto event on December 17, Toronto and Penn are planning to develop a toolkit so other institutions can host hackathons.

The Penn folks are currently setting up contacts with many organizations’ representatives, including the Society of American Archivists.

How can you help?

The Penn #DataRefuge project now has a “I’d like to help” form. You can submit your response here. To nominate .gov pages for the End of Term Web Archive, you can use the End of Term Nomination Tool.

Why are people so worried about this to begin with?

Several departments and agencies within the federal government, including EPA, NOAA, Department of Interior, Department of Energy, and National Aeronautic and Space Administration (to name but a few), create myriad and massive data sets related to monitoring pollution of air and water, weather patterns, energy usage, and tracking indicators associated with climate change (ocean temperature and acidification, sea level modeling, and global temperature records).  

The incoming Trump administration is signalling that it will likely be hostile to the established consensus science on climate change, as well as existing pollution regulations. The President Elect has denied global warming’s reality and has selected a series of people that have a legislative or business record of undermining environmental regulation and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Many proposed appointees have extensive ties to the fossil fuel industry, including the EPA nominee (Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma Attorney General) and the Secretary of State nominee (Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil CEO). Multiple meta-surveys of climate science papers have established that climate change is real and primarily driven by human activities. Recent publication on this extensively documented issue includes one published in April 2016, showing that between 90-100% of climate scientists themselves are in consensus on the causes of global warming. 18 of America’s prominent scientific organizations are in agreement on the science showing that climate change is primarily driven by human activities.

Researchers are worried that funding will be cut from existing federal environmental and climate monitoring and research efforts, but also about continued access to currently public data sets. It remains to be seen whether recent Open Government initiatives that increased public access to federal data will receive the same level of support in the next administration. If data sets are removed from public access, this could mean that researchers would be required to file FOIA requests for access. During the Bush administration, with similarly extensive ties to the fossil fuel industry, scientists documented dozens of instances of scientific advice manipulation, restrictions on federal scientists’ work, and cutbacks on public access to environmental information (the most famous case is probably the proposed closure of EPA libraries). Some Canadians are alarmed by what could happen in the United States, given how the Harper administration reduced public access to federal environmental data there.

For now, researchers are in wait-and-see mode, but most are erring on the side of being overly cautious—hence why so many have mobilized to copy currently available data as fast as possible.

For questions about this work’s current status, please feel free to contact eira.tansey@uc.edu.

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Police-Worn Body Camera Footage: A Public Record? Part 2

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. 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.

This post, written by Rachel Mattson, is part two in a two-part series regarding the debate regarding police body-camera footage’s classification as a public record. Part 1 is available here.

BWCs: The Wild West of Records Requests
Requestors seeking access to police-worn body camera footage nationwide have encountered a diversity of other obstacles. Indeed, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) recently called police body cam footage “the Wild West of open records requests,” noting that obtaining access to these records “is proving to be an uncertain and challenging endeavor.”[1] One justification that agencies often use for the withholding of footage is its sensitive nature. BWC footage raises serious concerns about privacy, security, and confidentiality. But as RCFP’s Adam Marshall notes—and as video archivists who work with human rights documentation have long known—there exists a wide range of tech and policy strategies that can make video available to the public while protecting individual privacy and security.[2]

Possibly the greatest threat to the public’s ability to access BWC going forward may be the efforts currently underway in many states to pass legislation that would exempt BWC footage from public records laws. In July 2016, North Carolina made national news when governor Pat McCrory signed a bill declaring that “body camera and dash camera footage are not public record[s].” Similar bills are currently being considered in Michigan, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Louisiana, and California, among other states. In Utah, one lawmaker has even proposed a bill that would officially classify all footage as “a private government record” if it depicts any “images of nudity, death, or gruesome events.” Who determines if an image is gruesome? “Something’s gruesome if police say it is.”[3]

In the view of many observers, access to police BWC footage, especially of fatal police shootings, is “crucial” to both “the public’s ability to hold police responsible for their conduct” and officers’ ability to exonerate themselves when wrongly accused of misconduct.[4] And the potential privacy and security concerns that these records raise remain separate from the question of whether these videos should be officially classified as public records. Indeed, many confidential and sensitive records, including federal intelligence records, are classified as public records under law. Body camera footage is not more sensitive than these kinds of records, and should not treated as such.[5]

It may be the case, as several activist groups have claimed, that equipping the police with cameras is the wrong strategy for addressing the larger problems of police accountability and racial justice. A broad base of community and activist groups have critiqued the practice of equipping police with BWCs. For instance, We Charge Genocide, a Chicago-based group working toward restorative justice solutions for police misconduct, suggests that “when police control the cameras, those cameras are at the service of police violence.” In fact, they observe that one body camera manufacturer “actually uses the slogan ‘Made by Cops for Cops. Prove Your Truth.’” The recent “Vision for Black Lives” Statement put forth by the Movement for Black Lives likewise includes a demand to “End the Use of Technologies that Criminalize and Target Our Communities (Including IMSI Catchers, Drones, Body Cameras, and Predictive Policing Software).”[6]

Nonetheless, the calls for and deployment of police-worn body cameras increase every day. As more local policing agencies equip officers with BWCs, we have a responsibility to engage with challenges that these government-generated records present. Indeed, as professional archivists and records managers, some of us may soon manage BWC footage as part of our official responsibilities. As we have learned recently, making this video a public record will not in-and-of-itself put an end to police murder of black and brown people. In order for that to occur, access to documentation will have to be coupled with mechanisms that make it possible to hold public servants accountable for their actions. But for BWC footage to be used in the pursuit of accountability and justice, it has to be a public record first. [7]

SAA and BWCs
This fall, I will work to start a conversation about BWCs among SAA members and hope to put forth proposal to the Society of American Archivists’ Committee on Public Policy (COPP) that SAA take a public stand supporting policies that, at a minimum, ensure that police BWC footage be officially classified as a public record.[8] I hope you’ll support—or join!—this conversation and effort. On its main webpage, COPP heralds the power of archival records to “ensure the protection of citizens’ rights, the accountability of organizations and governments, and the accessibility of historical information,” noting that the SAA “believes that archivists must take an active role in advocating for the public policies and resources necessary to ensure that these records are preserved and made accessible.” As BWCs gain widespread usage by U.S. police departments, the footage they generate will become an ever-more pervasive part of the criminal justice system. Ensuring that videos remain public records is something that, as an archival organization committed to “the public’s right to equal and equitable access to government information found in archives,” we should support wholeheartedly.[9]

Rachel Mattson is a Brooklyn-based historian and archivist. She currently works as the Manager of Special Projects in the Archives of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club and is a core member of the XFR Collective. She previously volunteered for I-Witness Video, a group that used citizen video and archival strategies to oppose police misconduct. Mattson holds a PhD in U.S. History from NYU and an MLIS from UIUC. Her writing has appeared in publications including Radical History Review, the Scholar and the Feminist, Movement Research Performance Journal, and in books published by Routledge, Washington Square, and Thread Makes Blanket Press.

Citations
[1] Adam Marshall, “Police Bodycam Videos: The Wild West of Open Records Requests,” rcfp.org/bodycam-video-access.
[2] Marshall, “Police Bodycam Videos: The Wild West of Open Records Requests.”
[3] “North Carolina Keeps Public From Seeing Police Camera Video,” Winston Salem Journal, July 11, 2016; Sophia Murguia, “More States Set Privacy Restrictions on Bodycam Video,” rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/news/more-states-set-privacy-restrictions-bodycam-video; “Police Bodycam Footage is a Vital Public Record; Don’t Restrict It,” the Utah Standard-Examiner, February 12, 2016.
[4]“Police Bodycam Footage is a Vital Public Record; Don’t Restrict It,” Standard-Examiner.
[5] I thank Eileen Clancy for reminding me of this fact. For more on the parameters of the federal records laws, see e.g. Douglas Cox, “Burn After Viewing: The CIA’s Destruction of the Abu Zubaydah Tapes and the Law of Federal Records,” Journal of National Security Law and Policy, Vol. 5, 2011, pp. 131-177.
[6] We Charge Genocide, “Statement on Cops and Cameras,” http://wechargegenocide.org/statement-on-cops-and-cameras; The Movement for Black Lives, “A Vision for Black Lives, Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom and Justice,” policy.m4bl.org/end-war-on-black-people/. See also Caruso, Burns, and Converse, “Slow Motion Increases Perceived Intent,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (33) May 2016, pnas.org/content/113/33/9250.full; and Williams et al., “Police Body Cameras: What Do You See?” New York Times, April 1, 2016.
[7] For a critical analysis of the complexity of the issues at hand and the kind of work that needs to be done to address them, see Kimberle Crenshaw and Andrea Ritchie’s indispensible report, “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women,” African American Policy Forum, 2015.
[8] The proposal is currently in development. If you wish to contribute or add your name to the list of supporters, please email keepbwcfpublic [at] gmail [dot] com.
[9] SAA Public Policy Agenda, archivists.org/advocacy/publicpolicy/saapublicpolicyagenda#.V6UTso7OlqA; Committee on Public Policy webpage, archivists.org/groups/committee-on-public-policy#.V6Y3N47OlqB

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