Reflection on Archives & Manuscripts

I nearly didn’t take this class. I needed one more course to finish out my degree and I was originally planning on taking something that would directly relate to my current job. At the last minute however I decided that this was also my last chance to have any kind of archival experience - it’s possible I could end up in archives some day, but it’s never been on my career path. I am very glad that I decided to go this route and learn something a little “off track” to round out my schooling.

I was surprised by how separate yet entwined archives are from libraries, and how clearly I identify myself as a librarian, not an archivist. It’s such a similar job - you are organizing typically paper-based materials into a coherent order, then teaching people how to fill out a form to retrieve data from those materials (I was at a presentation recently where the speaker - a librarian - said librarianship was fundamentally teaching people how to fill out forms. I’m still stinging at how true that is: you search catalogs and databases using forms, fill out patron accounts and request forms, etc. But I digress). Our views on privacy are the same.

We fundamentally both believe that people should have access to the materials, but our path to get to that access differs quite a lot. In my work, we account for attrition. Books are lost or misplaced, our patrons occasionally pay a fee for them (we usually waive it) and we replace the items (or not - often getting another copy is more trouble than it would be worth to our library). In contrast, the archivist needs to be much more cautious with their materials, as even putting everything back but out of order could alter the historical record.

In some ways, archives are more like a makers space than a library, a place to get the tools to build something rather than a location to get things that have already been built. Original documents are the raw material that the research needs to interpret to create their own scholarly work. In contrast, almost everything that I work with as a librarian is “pre-interpreted.” There’s still a great deal of new knowledge that can be created from books, but it’s different from the type of knowledge that can be created from archival collections.

It’s odd reflecting on a semester of schooling that has taken place during a pandemic. I wonder what different things I would have gotten from this course otherwise. A few things jump out to me. Digitization seems more pressing now. It’s not just a convenience, it’s the only way that people can safely use most collections. But having had the convenience, I doubt that people will want to go back after we return to the status quo, especially as it ties into global research. I think it’s so cool that we have ways of doing research with people internationally, whether that’s through completely digitizing a collection, or sitting on Zoom with a researcher while the archivist turns the page for them.

The past year has also heightened people’s understanding of the need for greater racial diversity in archives. I’ve really appreciated that there’s an underlying agreement that Black Lives Matter and diversity matters throughout discussions and assignments. There’s still so far to go, but the awakening is satisfying. The intractable problem keeps coming up for me however. It’s one thing to diversify our collections - this is good, ethical, and needed. But it’s a much harder thing to diversify our profession, and doing so is going to require white archivists to do some hard internal work to ensure they aren’t being a barrier.

My knowledge of archival practice has already helped my career. I’m on the committee to hire a new faculty member who will be our public services supervisor in our special collections and archives (we call them SCARC - Special Collections and Archives Research Center - here at OSU). This class has given me a better understanding of what is done day-to-day in the archives, which means I can better design questions for our interviews and hopefully make a stronger hire. I’m also very excited for when I can begin to collaborate with SCARC. My boss has long said she is interested in collaborations happening between our departments, and now that I understand their work a little better, I feel more equipped to suggest ideas and get them into reality. The pandemic “helped” us to complete some work together. I needed tasks my many student workers could do remotely, SCARC had a backlog of oral histories that needed their transcripts matched up. We even had one of our star student workers help with writing the biographical background for a collection - now that I’ve completed the finding aid assignments, I’m even more wowed by her work.

Our discussion boards had some great ideas for new directions this class could take. I think I could have taken a whole class on finding aids very happily. That was a perfect assignment, it was easily one of the most hands-on projects I’ve done over the course of my degree.

I would love to learn more about the process of digitizing a collection in its entirety. A ‘start-to-finish’ course would be helpful, beginning with learning how to determine what collection should be digitized, creating a project proposal, developing a methodology, and ensuring the materials stay findable. Between this class, a class I took on metadata, and my own work experience helping develop a procedure for digitizing our course reserves, I feel like I have many of the pieces together, but not an overarching understanding of the process. I also think this would give us the chance to talk more about the needs of different materials, as audio/visual materials and photographs have specific needs.

Overall, this class has been fascinating, and I’ve learned a lot. It’s been more closely tied to my job than I anticipated. Who knows, maybe in my career, someday I’ll be an archivist.

Ethical Questions in the Archives

In this blog post, I am examining the following ethical dilemma:

In working on the arrangement and description of a collection, you come across a piece of information that is of a highly-sensitive nature and could change the perception of a major (still living) political figure. What should you do?

 

Before I begin discussing my thought process, I want to give a structure for this hypothetical situation. The legal considerations are from a United States viewpoint and involve U.S. citizens only. Other countries have privacy and copyright laws that could lead to a different outcome (see, for example, the GDPR). I’m also assuming that we’re working within “normal” constraints - this isn’t a politician with mafia ties who will put a hit out on my family if these documents are made public.

According to the Society of American Archivists (2020), “Archivists should promote and provide the widest possible accessibility of materials, while respecting legal and ethical access restrictions including public statutes, cultural protections, donor contracts, and privacy requirements” (“Access and Use”). Although the SAA expands on privacy concerns in archives,it does not give a cut-and-dry answer to this scenario. Rather, it discusses different aspects of privacy that should be kept in mind when coming to a decision, such as the fact that both “legal and cultural dimensions” exist to the question (“Privacy”). There is specific guidance as to what an archive should do with a privacy decision - decisions should be made transparently and documented.

Although there are no definitive guides for how to handle a scenario such as this, there are many case studies available in the literature. The SAA includes in their list one that regards the decision to publicly archive letters which revealed an affair between President Warren G. Harding and Carrie Fulton Phillips. Although this scenario is different in that Harding was deceased when the letters were made public, it highlights the extreme financial, professional and legal risks one can take when publicizing sensitive documents (Pyatt, 2015). LeClere (2019) discusses how archives must make different decisions based on whether or not materials are digitized, “craft[ing] boundaries and policies around online access [...] which ranged from mildly cautious to fiercely open” (p. 122).

There are legal ramifications to making private documents public. However, because the documents are related to a public official, privacy considerations are different than they would be for a private citizen. In the United States, public figures are considered to have relinquished their right to privacy - many court cases, including Supreme Court rulings, have weighed the right to free speech and free media as more important than public officials’ privacy (Yanisky-Ravid and Lahav, 2017, p. 993). From a risk management perspective, having a documented privacy policy which is applied to all archival materials can help an archives’ legal case in the situation where they are sued. In fact, treating similar collections differently on the basis of one’s political (or other) status could potentially open up the archives to more risk.
 

In the absence of a donor agreement or privacy policy that contradicts this, my action would be to continue to arrange and describe the collection. Underlying all my decisions is the idea that archivists should “err on the side of access” (Lawrimore, 2021, para. 9). The archivist should not be in a position of judging the content of materials - truly anything could be embarrassing in some circumstances. In addition, when you consider that archivists tend to work on the collection, not item, level, it’s only by chance this information was discovered.

This decision is specific to this scenario. There are other, very similar circumstances where suppressing the information would be the ethical response, particularly if the documents in question were about a private citizen. For example, Chenier (2015) gives the example of archiving oral histories that out living people: “For example, while it might be okay to be gay today, tomorrow might bring new problems and challenges, as demonstrated by Russian historians of sexuality who are currently having to transition into new areas of research” (p. 138). In addition, consent may have been freely given at the time of the document’s creation or archiving, but may change as technology develops, such as in when digitizing pre-internet archives (Chenier, 2015; LeClere, 2019).

There are other factors that could come into play, and I have several questions I would want answered before I would make a decision. These questions include the following:

• Is there a donor agreement with guidance for how these documents should be treated? For example, are these materials donated with the expectation they will be available for in-person research only and not online? Does it require an embargo, where the documents are made available to researchers only for a specified time before being made available to the general public?
• Do these documents have specific legal protections? For example, are they protected by FERPA or HIPAA? Conversely, does the archives in question have a legal requirement to make documents public and discoverable?
• What is the nature of the document? Did the donor have legal ownership of the material? Although the decision may end up being the same in each situation, the archivist may want to consider treating private, explicit letters differently than a copy of a forgotten speech.
• Does the archives have a written privacy policy? This policy would ideally contain instructions on how to manage these situations, including how to document ones’ decision-making process. It would also include a take-down policy, stating who can request that information is restricted and why, as well as identifying who responds to those requests.
• What discoverability will these items have? Are they freely searchable and findable online, or do readers need to ask permission for access?
• What is the archives’ acceptable level of risk? Historically has this archives been more or less conservative in their interpretation of privacy regulations?

In conclusion, although my decision in this scenario is that the materials should still be described, in the end, “it depends.” Although ease of access is prioritized, there are other ramifications in terms of legal risk and ethical needs. Scenarios such as this are why the SAA does not have an overarching privacy policy, but rather a set of guidelines which archivists should consider as they make ethical decisions for their collections.

References

1. Chenier, E. (2015, May). “Privacy anxieties: Ethics versus activism in archiving lesbian oral history online.” Radical History Review, (122), 129-141. doi:10.1215/01636545-2849576
2. Lawrimore, E. (2021). “Unit 6-C: Privacy Issues.”
3. LeClere, E. (2019). The ethics of building digital archives of the recent past: A thematic analysis of archivists’ decision-making in digitization work. (Publication No. 27671752). [Doctoral Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison]. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.
4. Pyatt, T. D. (2015). The Harding Affair letters: How one archivist took every measure possible to ensure their preservation. Retrieved from https://www2.archivists.org/sites/all/files/HardingAffairLetters_CEPC-CaseStudy5.pdf.
   
5. Society of American Archivists. (2020). “SAA Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics.” Retrieved from https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics.
6. Yanisky-Ravid, S., & Lahav, B. Z. (2017). Public interest vs. private lives - affording public figures privacy in the digital era: the three principle filtering model. University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, 19(4), 975-1014. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1633&context=jcl