1) What was your first experience working with archives?
The first time I ever worked with archives was when I was an undergraduate doing research on Coney Island and went to the local history division at the Brooklyn Public Library, which at that time was a small closet-sized space tucked behind the history section in the main branch.
2) What is an archival issue that means a lot to you?
I am passionate about seeking out and exposing labor advocacy pathways, which are all too frequently buried and hidden.
3) What do you hope to gain by being on the I&A Steering Committee?
Being a part of a group that forms community around, and gives space to, those in the archives profession to openly discuss both entrenched and emerging issues they either have witnessed and/or experienced.
4) What can we find you doing outside of the archival profession?
Outside of work, I spend time with my partner, Jesse, and our two daughters. I enjoy cooking, walking our mini-schnauzer, Whitman, through Rochester’s small parks and amazing cemetery, Mt. Hope, and curating my growing collection of body art.
Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. Today’s post comes from Burkely Hermann, Metadata Librarian for the National Security Archive and current I&A Blog Coordinator. There will be spoilers for each of the books, animated series, films, and other media he will be discussing.
High-level overview of National Declassification Center processes, as shown in a post on the NDC blog in 2019
Previously on this blog, Rachel Mattson examined whether police body camera footage is public record or is classified, arguing that it should be a public record. Other blogposts on this blog have examined whether the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture is a Federal or Congressional Record, noted selective declassification by the French government, which declassified over 200,000 records about Vichy government’s collaboration with the Nazis but none about France’s occupation of Algeria, and noted the tendency of politicians to avoid documenting their activities and stonewall FOIA requests.
In January 2022, the Director of National Intelligence April Haines argued, in a letter to U.S. Senators Ron Wyden and Jerry Moran that there are “deficiencies” in the current declassification system, and notes the burden of mandatory declassification requirements while the amount of classified material expands. My colleague from National Security Archive, Lauren Harper, noted that Haines, many months later, said that overclassification is a national security threat. Some of these classified records are in the hands of the National Archives, otherwise known as the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), organized into Top Secret, Secret, and Confidential. Other records are deemed unclassified if they do not meet the existing requirements for classification.
Classification of records in the U.S. has often been outlined in presidential executive orders, beginning with President Truman in 1951. National security generally described as the primary reason for classification. Over the years, rules changed and the role of NARA increased. This has even resulted in a part of the agency dedicated to declassification, the National Declassification Center (NDC), which was established in 2009, in accordance with Executive Order 13526. This went beyond the agency’s representation on the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP), or the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), which oversees the security classification programs in “both Government and industry“, and reports to the President annually. The ISOO, role on ISCAP, and NDC, most recently, have given NARA an important position in the entire classified information management process. [1]
Unsurprisingly, NARA has been in the public focus, especially for storing presidential records from the Obama Administration, and afterward. Some politicians have claimed the agency is an “enemy” and have wanted to dismantle it because of NARA’s push to return classified records to the public, rather than having the records stored in shoddy locations or controlled by presidents as their personal property. [2] This makes reports, in past years, like in May 2012, that boxes of classified government records disappeared from Washington National Records Center all the more concerning, as it could be representative of a larger trend.
Currently, there are measures in place for declassification of government records, either enshrined in executive orders or provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). However, the FOIA system is currently flawed, especially with existence of various exemptions which can be used to redact documents or reject records requests. [3] There are similar issues with Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) requests. As one government report put it, storage of classified materials is “widespread” across the U.S. government, with NARA storing records from all agencies at central facilities. Even so, some have argued that politicians have neglected the National Archives and failed to “control official secrecy”, belaying assumptions about government transparency, and resulting in the crisis which will make it harder for researchers to examine the “state’s inner workings”. Recent developments, such as a drop in the annual budget of NARA, attrition, and loss of institutional memory have resulted in the agency having one of the lowest levels of job satisfaction in the federal government. All the while, funding for declassification has decreased and backlogs for declassification have increased. [4]
NARA is not the only archives which handles and processes classified records. There are established procedures for classification of records held by the New South Wales Archives in Australia, British Public Record Office, Taiwanese government, Israeli Defense Force, State Archives of Poland, National Archives of Brazil, South African State Archives Service (later renamed National Archives and Records Service), National Archives of Korea, and National Archives of France. Even the archives of the United Nations has a classification level of Strictly Confidential, necessitating declassification requests, while archival materials over 20 years old are “generally open to the public for research”. [5]
As Electronic Records Archivist Amy Wickner argued, archivists have the “power to name and classify,” a power which has “material effects on theworld“. This power can be used to make records more accessible or to make them harder to access. The latter is the case if access is only “granted or refusedon anindividual basis“. At times, more restrictions are imposed because of compliance with professional standards or data within in a record rather than the document itself. This includes including personal data. On the other hand, records which should be publicly available, like agreements between carceral facilities and FamilySearch for indexing of historical records, have a possibility of redaction, despite the lack of personal or sensitive information. [6]
In the episode “The Underground Tennis Tournament: The Campbelldon”, Loid examines a file of his target, a man named Cavi Campbell, who has a painting in the basement of his mansion. As the story goes, the painting was originally owned by a general who had compiled a dossier of explosive top secret information which could tip the scales and cause possible cause military conflict if revealed, and the painting has a code revealing the dossier’s location.
Classified records have often been depicted in popular culture. For instance, there is an episode of The Crown about classified records showing Duke Edward VIII collaborating with Nazis. Such records are also major part of the Spy x Family series. The protagonist, Twilight (voiced by Takuya Eguchi), poses as a father named Loid Forger, with a wife and child. He is tasked with a secret mission to keep two countries from beginning a war. As a result, he is often passed information through a network of informants, spies, and others, or is given mission briefings by dedicated agents. The information he receives often includes classified records. Another pertinent example is the 13-episode anime, Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet. In one episode, “Deep Sea Secret”, the protagonist, Ledo (voiced by Kaito Ishikawa), demands declassification of the record. What he learns causes an epiphany. It results in him questioning what he thought about the world and his life’s purpose, causing a mental breakdown of sorts.
There are other examples, apart from the tongue-and-cheek U.S. Navy recording studio named “Classified Records” in The Simpsons, which included subliminal messages in their songs which encouraged people to join the Navy. For instance, classified archives of the CIA are shown in an episode of the TV series, Alias. Furthermore, classified, and restricted, records are a major part of the animated adventure series, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, which has many archivy themes. In one episode, Mara, the previous She-Ra, learns that the Heart of Etheria project is classified, with Light Hope worrying about information being accidentally shared with Madame Razz. In many others, records are only accessible when specific words are spoken, or specific people are detected by computer systems. The same could be said about the records inside the data archives of the World Organization Of Human Protection which is shown in the Totally Spies! episode “The Yuck Factor”, or the “healing center” for Pearls known as The Reef, which is a structure used to create, repair, or modify Pearls, shown in the Steven Universe Future episode “Volleyball”. Both undoubtedly contain restricted or classified records.
In Star Wars Rebels and Star Wars: The Clone Wars, two animated series, there are records which can only be accessed through magic or other means. As such, they are classified, as a result. Accessing secret, and classified, records is a major plot point for live-action films such as Sneakers (1992), The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (2005), and My Fellow Americans (1996). In other cases, like in Joker (2009), the records are even stolen. In the latter film, the records clerk is implied as an impediment to protagonist Arthur Fleck, as are the bureaucratic requirements which require a signature from Fleck’s mother, before he can take the file.
Samantha “Sam” Cross, a certified archivist who was part of the SAA Issues & Advocacy News Monitoring Team in 2018, has highlighted this on her blog, Pop Archives. She notes Carol Danvers (later becoming Captain Marvel) examining likely classified information in Captain Marveland Loki trying to use his manipulation and charm in the Loki TV series to get classified files from a female character credited as an archivist. She also writes about a character in the Danganronpa game, Byakuya, who “read and study the classified information” in an archives-like room and states that many of the documents shown in Federal Bureau of Control, in the video game Control, are redacted, and classified. [7]
Other pop cultural critics in the library and information field note other examples. For instance, librarian Jennifer Snoek-Brown, known as the creator of the site Reel Librarians and real-life librarian at Tacoma Community College, noted classified records featured in Rollerball (1975), Soylent Green (1973), and likely ones in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011). [8] Elsewhere on her blog, she pointed out similar themes in Mercury Rising (1998) and WarGames (1983).
The over twenty popular culture examples described in this post only scratch the surface. There are as undoubtedly many more films, comics, and series which featured classified or restricted records. The examples noted in this article do not always feature archives, however, as some creators confuse archives with libraries. To add insult to injury, archivists are often not present, resulting in the characters, who have no archival training, to go through the records themselves. Very few depictions in popular culture reflect the current reality of classified records within archives. Hopefully, this changes in the future.
[4] “Appendix V: Central Storage, Declassification and Destruction” in Classified Information: Costs of Protection are Integrated with Other Security Costs: Report to the Chairman, Information, Justice, Transportation, and Agriculture Subcommittee, Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives (United States General Accounting Office, 1993), 26; Connelly, Matthew. “State Secrecy, Archival Negligence, and the End of History as We Know It.” Knight First Amendment Institute, Sept. 21, 2018. The latter article also says that state secrecy and state archiving began at the same time, around the establishment of NARA and into World War II.
Steering Shares are an opportunity to find out more about the I&A Steering Committee. This post comes courtesy of Steering Committee member, Burkely Hermann, National Security Archive.
Hello everyone! In today’s post I’d like to share a project that I’ve been working off-and-on since 2019, in my spare time, which relates to digitization, archival ethics, and access. Since then, I have been using MuckRock to request documents from county jails and state prisons about FamilySearch’s program to have inmates index public records, like censuses and military records, which are then used by genealogists and the general public. In order to put this project into context, I’d like to give some background to highlight why this project matters.
In February 2020, in my first article on the closure of the National Archives facility in the Seattle area, I noted that some U.S. legislators criticized the partnership between the National Archives and FamilySearch, who stated that this partnership, meant to digitize records, has not “resulted in actual access to records that have been prioritized by stakeholders.”
Currently, NARA’s webpage on digitized microfilm publications and original records states that digitization partners like Ancestry, Fold3 (owned by Ancestry), and FamilySearch “have digitized microfilm publications and original records from NARA’s holdings and made them available on their websites.” NARA has had a partnership with FamilySearch since 2005, with NARA describing them as having a “clear focus on records of interest to genealogists.” The current partnership agreement with FamilySearch will remain in effect until NARA or FamilySearch terminates it, which is unlikely.
All of this matters because FamilySearch, a division of the Mormon Church (LDS), is using inmates to index many of these public records. This means that the records you might be using on Ancestry, which FamilySearch shares records with, or on the latter site, have likely been indexed by inmates.
It is important to keep in mind that jails and prisons are not the same. Jails are run by counties or cities, housing those with short-term convictions or awaiting trial. Prisons are operated on the federal or state level, with inmates who have longer-term convictions.
I became interested in this topic after reading Shaun Bauer’s short article in Mother Jones in August 2015 entitled “Your Family’s Genealogical Records May Have Been Digitized by a Prisoner”. Unfortunately, Bauer never wrote a follow-up piece, and some genealogists, like assorted people on social media and Megan Smolenyak, more prominently, defended the indexing, claiming that a “few key aspects” were left out.
In contrast, Jarrett M. Drake, a Harvard University PhD candidate who focuses on “archival, educational, and organizing projects that pertain to prison abolition,” argued, in a 2020 book, Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality, that the national and state governments that partner with FamilySearch certain “untold millions of dollars” by sharing their records for indexing and digitization, and argued that “millions of archival records have been made available by incarcerated labor.”
Although my research on this subject is still ongoing, there is clear evidence that sometime in the 1980s, LDS opened a Family History Center at Utah State Prison, followed by one at California’s Tehachapi State Prison in 1989. In February 2001, the Chicago Tribune acknowledged that the Freedman’s Bureau records, which are popular especially with Black genealogists, were collected and culled by 550 inmates at the South Point Correctional Facility at Utah State Prison.
Smolenyak’s interview with one of the indexers, Blaine Nelson, said that the indexing of the Freedman’s Bureau records took eleven years, 600 inmates, and “over 700,000 volunteer hours.” He declared proudly that, by February 2001, “some 480,000 Freedman’s Bank records had been extracted and indexed.” This means that one of the “richest databases for African-American research” as Ed Lunt, who helped establish the indexing program at the Utah State Prison in 1990 with his wife Penney, described it, was only possible due to the large amount of unpaid inmate labor.
The indexing did not end there. It has continued since then, with millions of names indexed by inmates, not only in Utah, but in other states, like Idaho and Arizona. Some even declared that this indexing means that prisoners are “working to strengthen everyone’s family tree.”
In 2021, Steve Collings, a product manager for the FamilySearch Correctional Services program, stated that LDS had “35 different facilities” with where inmates do indexing across the Mountain West, including Utah, Wyoming, and Arizona, with plans to expand nationwide, then worldwide. Whether the indexing provides “personal growth” to inmates as LDS claims, or not, LDS has been mostly tight-lipped in providing many details about the indexing and noting the exact locations where LDS has contracted prison indexing.
In my research, I’ve found that five jurisdictions in Utah currently have contracts with LDS to have inmates index records: Box Elder County, Cache County, Duchesne County, Kane County, and Summit County, as I note on the “Documents received” sheet within my “FamilySearch and prisons” spreadsheet. Sevier County presumably also has a contract, but I have not received documents from them. The most recent one I received, for Box Elder, shows that FamilySearch is all in on the inmate indexing as it was signed earlier this year by Stephen Valentine, who is the Senior Vice President of FamilySearch International!
From my requests I also learned that there are genealogy programs in Idaho prisons, but they reportedly have no policy related to the program. The same is the case for the Utah Department of Corrections. I also received redacted emails from the Washington Department of Corrections showing communications about Mormon volunteers coming to the state’s prison facilities. Otherwise, I learned that Beaver and Washington counties have volunteer programs but reportedly do not have records of that program.
In order to do these requests, I’ve been using MuckRock, which allows you to submit freedom of information requests to any governmental agency within their databases and keep all of the interactions public, or even private. Unfortunately, it has been somewhat costly to do this work, costing $5.00 per record request, making it hard for those without adequate financial resources to make these record requests and hopefully receive documents which can become public, even if they are heavily redacted. Where I work, the National Security Archive, has the same goal, but on a much larger scale, with various projects and experts on certain subject areas.
As I continue my research, with the impending end of requests to county jails in Utah, I’ll be trying to find out more about this program beyond Utah, to other states. I’ve done this a little with requests to counties in Wyoming, Arizona, Nevada, and other states such as Colorado and Arkansas. Although I’m not sure what I will learn about this indexing program going forward, and how widespread it is, I am confident that it will remain a learning experience which will inform people, particularly archivists and librarians, about those who index the public records which are used on a daily basis. Hopefully, it will also encourage a push for a larger NARA budget, so that more digitization of their records can be done in-house rather than contracted out to FamilySearch or for conditions be put on the next agreement to prohibit indexing by inmates.
Steering Shares are an opportunity to find out more about the I&A Steering Committee. This post comes courtesy of Steering Committee member, Burkely Hermann, National Security Archive, and current I&A Blog Coordinator. Other members currently on the I&A Steering Committee include Danielle Simpkins, Caitlin Rizzo, Sheridan Sayles, Liz Call, Holly Rose McGee, and Claire Gordon.
1) What was your first experience working with archives?
I first worked in an archives after graduating from college with my B.A. in Political Science and History, as a researcher at the Maryland State Archives for a project trying to track down the stories of Maryland Revolutionary War soldiers, called the “Finding the Maryland 400” project, having a flexible start and end time, often either working with a historian on staff or independently. While that job only lasted six months as the grant money from a non-profit ran out, it began my interest in archives, which was rekindled in later years when I started my MLIS degree and worked at NARA’s College Park location as a work study in my last semester.
While I was drawn toward genealogy when working at the Maryland State Archives, I remember digitizing documents, using a push cart to move heavy books from the stacks to my desk, the in-house system I used to input information, or the many databases I used day in and day out. On the other hand, there were mold remediation efforts during the end of my time there. Worst of all, however, was the public transit nightmare I endured to get to the archives. Every day, I went on a light rail train to the end of the line, then a caught bus down to the archives itself. One wrong transfer or traffic would cause delays either by minutes or by hours. One major lesson I learned from the whole experience was to work somewhere that is accessible through public transportation!
2) What is an archival issue that means a lot to you?
That is a hard question. I would say precarity in the archives profession is very important, as many of my jobs since graduating have been precarious, whether working at a grant-funded position at the Maryland State Archives, an unpaid internship for NARA, or a graduate assistantship at University of Maryland, where I earned my MLIS degree, focusing on Archives and Digital Curation. Connected to this are those trying to unionize archivists, have fair pay, and safe working conditions, among other efforts to help archival issues.
Currently, I work at a non-profit which relies on grant funding, so in that way, it is a bit of a precarious position, I suppose, as a loss of funding could lead, possibly, to cuts in wages and benefits. I am glad that archival precarity has received a lot of attention in recent years and I hope that it continues to be seen as important by those in the profession, including in the SAA. This seems by the case from what I can gather when filling out the A*Census II.
3) What do you hope to gain by being on the I&A Steering Committee?
I hope to connect with like-minded archivists who are concerned with various archival issues, such as reparative processing, redescription, institutional sustainability, institutional racism, and preserving social media posts. I’ll be using my perspective to positively contribute to the Issues & Advocacy Section (I&A) to continue existing advocacy and outreach efforts, including continuing to promote the value and importance of the archival profession.
4) What can we find you doing outside of the archival profession?
Well, read a lot of webcomics and watch a bunch of animated series. And I write reviews of shows and comics I read, some of which have archivists and librarians! Also, for fun, I write fiction and incorporate some archivists into some of my stories. I occasionally do family history research for both sides of my family and have some blogs about that as well. When I’m not doing all of that, and it’s good weather, I go on hikes and read books.
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.
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.
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 opinedagainst 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.
[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.
Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. The following post is from Bradley J. Wiles, a PhD student in Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, School of Information Studies.
In recent years, the fate of rural American communities has been prominently featured in national press coverage and soul-searching public discourse about the United States’ changing social, economic, and demographic realities. Rural communities, we have often heard, have failed to adapt to the new global economy and suffer from irreversible brain drain; they are close-minded, cultural wastelands characterized by aging populations and despair-induced morbidity; the biggest incentive they offer to would-be transplants is cheap property and good but under sourced school systems. Urban and suburban communities, by contrast, are growing steadily and have been for decades. They possess in abundance the desirable quality-of-life amenities and economic opportunities that rural communities lack, and examples abound of renewal and persistence in large cities previously written off by critics of contemporary urban policy. The biggest losers in this comprehensive demographic and economic reshuffling appear to be remote agricultural communities. Although this narrative is generally supported by the available evidence, the factors driving rural decline are complicated and often the narrative fails to capture this complexity.
So much of the recent decline narrative about rural America is related to demographic and economic trends extending from the Farm Crisis of the 1980s. Numerous writings have detailed the collusion between government, food conglomerates, and the financial sector to push maximum production and corporate models of efficiency throughout the entire American agricultural system. Unfortunately, these efforts brought about a perfect storm of conditions that resulted in massive bankruptcies and property foreclosures, rural suicide levels higher than in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the decimation of the family farm system that had been a cornerstone of rural life for over a century. Although the rural-to-urban population shift was well underway by the 1980s, this trend accelerated in all subsequent economic downturns and became virtually irreversible in the wake of the Great Recession. Similarly, rural poverty has equaled or exceeded that of urban areas for decades, and the recovery from the Great Recession has mostly bypassed rural communities, especially those in remote and sparsely populated areas. Recent reference statistics from the United States Department of Agriculture on rural recovery show that the urban-rural poverty gap has widened since the end of the recession, with employment in rural areas still not up to pre-recession levels and overall income growing at a much slower rate than non-rural locations. Additionally, the majority of remote agricultural and micropolitan areas have lost significant population since 2010, a reality that is increasingly both the cause and result of widespread economic woes.
Some recent analyses suggest that the rural population decline is a relative measure that is more reflective of the changing designations of areas and communities from rural to suburban or urban. Indeed, in some areas with remarkable geographical features or that are accessible to urban amenities, rural areas have experienced a net population growth. However, remote rural areas have experienced a near fatal combination of declining in-migration, increasing out-migration, and lower natural replacement levels related to resident fertility and aging. Lower fertility rates and higher average ages exacerbate resource-depleted remote rural areas that already have trouble attracting adequate health care services, funding public works, and providing other basic needs for its residents. Because of larger economic trends that afford more opportunities in cities and suburbs, young people who grow up in rural communities are less likely to move back once they have left. Those who never leave or who do return often find themselves in settings that are ill-prepared to nurture families, develop human capital, and take advantage of the experience and skills that these people bring to the community.
Despite the overarching demographic and socioeconomic trends, rural residents are generally optimistic about their lives and futures in their communities. According to recent surveys conducted by the Harvard Opinion Research Program, the majority of rural Americans hold negative views about their local economy and a large portion experience financial insecurity, but they also feel engaged in their communities and are hopeful that most issues can be corrected in the near future. The surveys identify a host of problems related to employment, housing, substance abuse, health care, and social isolation but respondents generally expressed appreciation for the safety and quality of life in their communities. Of course, the relative level of satisfaction likely has as much to do with the racial, cultural, and economic background of the survey’s respondents. The study reported more difficulties from members of racial or ethnic minority groups and people with disabilities living in these communities, including a significant discrepancy between how minorities and non-minorities view discrimination and general treatment of non-majority residents.
This blinkered view of rural America–both from its residents and from those observing at a distance–is likely what makes the real problems of decline seem so intractable. Certainly it contributes to the variance of the narrative based on where it is coming from. What emerges from countless books, reports, policy papers, articles, opinion pieces, and blog entries is subject to interpretation through a variety of political, social, and cultural filters. On the one hand, it is easy to believe that rural America is doomed, especially the really hard-hit areas that cannot seem to catch a break. On the other hand, there are many indications of resilience and a willingness of these communities to adjust, adapt, and fight on despite the odds. For many people, both urban and rural, geography is destiny and the ability to stay, leave, or return is largely a matter of relative means and privilege. The affective impact of the narrative often becomes one of cautionary wistfulness: what do we lose as a country when such a significant part of it is clearly threatened by trends we understand but appear to have no power to control? How bad does it have to get before we muster the political will for substantive collective action to fix things? With few exceptions, the consensus around the narrative seems to be that rural America is worth saving, but there is little agreement about how this might be accomplished without further enabling the urbanization trends that harm remote rural areas in the first place.
Robert Wuthnow described how the rural experience manifests in a patchwork of moral communities throughout the country centered around education, faith, and work, and embodied in the disappearing rural institutions of the schoolhouse, church, and farmstead.[1] These moral communities are bound by common experience and values developed across generations, which helps them weather disruptions and adapt to change. However, the ability of communities to exist in the relative autonomy and independence of previous eras is rapidly disintegrating and many of the resulting changes are unwelcome. A recurring theme throughout rural American history–in areas entirely settled by outsiders–is the resistance to newcomers. Although the demographic composition of rural communities varies throughout the United States, with the exception of Native American reservations and other anomalous communities, rural residents tend to be white and of European descent, with increasing numbers of people from Latin America settling into these areas on a temporary or permanent basis. This growing diversity in rural America represents one of the clearest links between the urban and rural cultural dichotomy, which, in combination with language and other cultural differences, engenders a potent strain of identity-based resentment among the majority population. Ugly and violent distortions of traditional white masculinity have been present for decades in rural America, but its recent outward activity is mostly relegated to the political fringes.
However, American history is full of examples of community identity being tied to and expressed through political activity, and as the real or perceived impact of decline advances, a more rigid political landscape across rural America appears to be developing. According to Jon Lauck, the 2016 election offered evidence of a growing rural identity or consciousness that seeks less to highlight issues important to its communities, than to cast themselves in opposition to the interests in Washington D.C., New York City, Hollywood, and other urban areas that have appeared to ignore their plight and assist their demise.[2] This seems to be driven by a last-stand mentality, a final striking out against the enemies of a way of life that was at one time the defining model of the American experiment. Thus, the decline narrative finds rural communities looking backward and preoccupied with capturing the essence, if not the substance, of lifeways that have passed. The prospect of actual annihilation increasingly overshadows the symbolic annihilation or misrepresentation that these communities have always experienced to some degree, if not to the exaggerated extent that some political opportunists claim. To many communities and their inhabitants, the current moment represents a historical tipping point, made more real by the ongoing upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic, the overdue reckoning on racial justice, the possibility of a long recession, and the certainty of a contentious national election.
So what does this mean for archives and archivists? In researching her memoir of growing up poor in rural Kansas, Sarah Smarsh refers to the difficulty of locating adequate resources “to piece together a family history from the ill-documented chaos that poverty begets.”[3] Smarsh’s account spans the Farm Crisis years to present day and surfaces important issues around the lack of understanding of marginal communities that seem, on the surface, to be adequately represented in the public consciousness. However, the representation of the rural poor–regardless of what other intersectional identity categories they embody–in archives and other collecting institutions is equally problematic. Memory and cultural institutions have long documented agriculture, agribusiness, small towns, and rural life to some degree, but this tends to focus on official records and notable or powerful residents who are almost always men. As such, the stories of working poor, women, minority groups, immigrants, non-mainstream subcultures, and others lacking political, social, and economic capital are typically lost through neglect, hostility, or indifference. Anne Effland attributes this lack of historical understanding to the limited scope given to the domain of what we consider to be rural, which is undoubtedly reflected in the documentation of rural communities.[4] Certainly nowadays “rural” no longer equates strictly to “farming,” and it has not for some time now. Understanding the complex identities and issues associated with the decline of rural communities requires archival efforts that acknowledge the political, demographic, and socioeconomic variation in and among those communities.
But even with the archives profession turning more toward community focused approaches to research and practice, rural communities have been largely absent from the disciplinary literature. Searches for articles in all major archival studies publication databases turned up scant reportage on documenting rural communities, subjects, issues, or historical trends, even in the region-specific journals. This sentiment was captured in a panel session called “Documenting Flyover Land” for the Midwest Archives Conference annual meeting in 2018, which sought to highlight specific archival projects related to the rural Midwest. In the introduction to the session, panel chair Christina Hansen spoke about the urban bubble that even most Midwesterners live in suddenly bursting after the 2016 election results.[5] What was described by many pundits and politicos (and certainly many liberal-learning archivists) as the horrific outcome of resentment-based politics only partially reflected the reality; it also signalled something deeper about rural America and its desire to make its voice heard. It should also have signaled to archivists that the call for a truly representative record and profession is disingenuous if the rural perspective continues to be pushed aside in our work and discussions. The response from archivists is yet to be determined.
Fostering a sense of place, representation, and belonging may not be enough to reverse decades of unfavorable trends, but memory institutions have a distinct role to play in how rural communities conceive of themselves in various regional, national, and global contexts. As such, these institutions have an opportunity to exert an affective and intellectual influence on their communities, grounded in shared history and experience, as its members look toward their uncertain individual and collective futures. By helping communities understand, document, and celebrate their past, archives and other memory institutions can serve as change agents that provide reassurance of a community’s role in its own destiny. By providing an outlet to and for information, education, and culture they can help these communities articulate their stories and values, and help ease the transition to different modes of living. And another big transition is already underway, whether or not anyone involved is ready.
[1] Wuthnow, R. (2018). The left behind: Decline and rage in rural America. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
[2] Lauck, J. K. (2017). Trump and the Midwest: The 2016 presidential election and the avenues of Midwestern historiography. Studies In Midwestern History, 3(1), 1-24.
[3] Smarsh, S. (2018). Heartland: A memoir of working hard and being broke in the richest country on earth. New York: Scribner.
[4] Effland, A. B. W. (2000). When rural does not equal agricultural. Agricultural History, 74(2), 489-501.
[5] Hansen, C., Anderson, M., Beckey, J., Chumachenko, V., & Dunn, R. (2018, March). Documenting flyover land. In C. Hansen (Chair), Blurring boundaries, crossing lines: The 2018 Midwest Archives Conference annual meeting. Panel session conducted at the meeting of the Midwest Archives Conference, Chicago, Illinois.
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.
The I&A News Monitoring Research Team has compiled this list of recent news stories relating to archives, archivists, archival issues, and archival representations. This list was curated by SAA Issues & Advocacy News Monitoring Team, which includes Dana Bronson, Rachel Cohen, Samantha Cross, Shaun Hayes, and Beth Nevarez; it is managed by Steve Duckworth. More links and information are available in this month’s Google doc.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which honors over 4,000 victims of lynching in America, opened on April 26, 2018 in Montgomery, Alabama (multiple reports, see full news list for more)
The I&A News Monitoring Research Team has compiled this list of recent news stories relating to archives, archivists, archival issues, and archival representations. This list was curated by SAA Issues & Advocacy News Monitoring Team, which includes Dana Bronson, Rachel Cohen, Samantha Cross, Shaun Hayes, and Beth Nevarez; it is managed by Steve Duckworth.
Issues & Advocacy 