Archives Found

 Some thoughts on this sunny Sunday morning:

-Reading this article (”Does Facebook Replace Face Time?”) and thinking about the changing nature of friendships and relationships with regard to digital interaction, I wanted to think a bit more about the impact that digital availability can have from the perspective of archives and users. Certainly in some ways it’s now more convenient for researchers to access some information than it ever was before– not just collections, but in some cases, contextual information about related collections and accession dates, digital surrogates of some materials, and community contributions around the documents (like the Polar Bear Expedition or the Library of Congress Flickr photostream).

How does this affect the relationship between the researcher and the archivist? What about the relationship between the researcher and the archives? Are they the same? From the user perspective, does all of the information gathered from various sources hold the same weight? How is the veracity of the information verified by the user, and should that matter to the archivist? Further, is all online exposure (web presence, blog, Tweets, newsletters, etc) good exposure?

-What is the impact of these new information streams from a records management view? For institutions out there with some of these types of exposure (website, blog, Twitter), what kind of yardstick are you using with regards to “enduring value” or retention time? Are you keeping digital copies of your website and blog posts in your institutional repository? What are you doing with these same digital materials from other departments of your company, university, agency, or other divisions within your purview? These are all questions that I’m struggling with as we work on updating not only our records retention plan, but also in the sense of disaster planning and determining records vital to operations.

-“Librarians want to dance. Archivists want to choose the music. Archivists don’t dance.” For some reason, this really cracked me up. Is this true, folks? Go over to Beaver Archivist’s blog and vote.

One of the more exasperating things about travel (and particularly holiday travel) is the dearth of time that I seem to have for sitting down and thinking (and then posting) about things that I want to discuss– and I’ve been doing a lot of traveling over the past few months.  Something that I’ve been thinking about in both a general, and more specific sense is the access and use of electronic records. I don’t have time to get into my own project and thoughts now, but I wanted to share a general article about the transfer of the Bush documents to NARA. The AP article really doesn’t get into the ingest process and anticipated entry into the ERA, but a I wanted to share a quick quote that I found to be really interesting:

 ”The electronic-records archives system may be able to take in a tremendous amount of e-mail and other records,” Brachfeld said. “But just because you ingest the data does not mean that people can locate, identify, recover and use the records they need.”

Full article from The Columbus Dispatch:  Bush’s electronic data a major archiving task

Hope everyone had a safe and lovely holiday break– and I’m hoping to be back on the blog more often once I make it home!

I’m in Chicago this week, attending NEDCC’s Persistence of Memory conference, and I hope to share some thoughts about that soon, once I’ve digested things a bit.

Until then, a quick article about public records and a recent ruling by the Ohio Supreme Court from the Columbus Dispatch. A brief snippet:

Even deleted e-mail messages are public records if they deal with official business, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled yesterday.

In a unanimous ruling, justices ordered commissioners in Seneca County to scour their computer hard drives for e-mail messages requested by a Toledo newspaper last year that had been deleted.

The decision was a rare legal victory for public-records advocates in Ohio.

Full article- Deleted emails are still public records.

Why do people keep everything? There are lots of reasons, but the one that I hear most often is: “I might need it again someday.”

On days when I’m frantically switching between two hats (archivist and records manager), that answer both makes sense and makes me tired. Archivists love to keep things. Well, some things, anyway– hopefully those that fit the scope of the collection and contribute to a more complete historical record. Records managers, on the other hand, love to throw things away– in general, records that no longer have informational or historical value in accordance with retention schedules and institutional needs. These are definite oversimplifications to be sure, but when explaining my job function to a harried departmental secretary (as I was recently), I’ve found that it helps to be concise. In fact, when I’m meeting with departments to discuss their records, I almost always get a question along the lings of “why would you want to go into this field anyway?”

Picture the attic, or perhaps the hallway or storage room in your workplace. Over time it has transformed from being a file room to holding other discarded things– banners, an old typewriter, old cube walls, coffee cups from two presidential terms ago, an adding machine, and other junk. Piled high with the detrius of daily life, the room is a place where old office stuff goes to die, and that includes old files. Old files that may document the progression and daily life of your office– and which may be of high interest to your neighborhood archivist. Or, possibly, old files that have confidential information and should have been destroyed long ago, according to your institutional record schedule. In either situation, the files are taking up space– lots of it– and people say we “should” keep it, but cannot name the reason why.

In almost all cases, people hold onto things way longer than they should. Sometimes this is a benefit to the archives, because there are hidden gems squirreled away by overzealous secretaries within departmental files, and we discover them years or even decades after the boxes have been accessioned. From a records management and legal standpoint, this is a problem because records slated by destruction according to records schedules and state laws are sitting around in virtually every department on probably every campus in the US. It becomes an even more interesting dance when student records are added to the mix (as they almost inevitably are) because FERPA guidelines restrict the access and use of almost anything academically related to specific students.

More on this later.