SAA 2015: new approaches to documentation

Album cover, The Impressions, People Get Ready (1965), and hat (c. 1981) and jacket (c. 1981) owned by Curtis Mayfield. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, Ohio, 2015-08-20.

 The annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists is in full swing, and I put in a full day attending sessions and catching up with people. I am not going to blog about every session or meeting that I attend-- I no longer have the stamina needed for that sort of thing -- but will instead post about the most interesting, compelling, or useful session or idea that I encounter each day.

Today, I attended two very good sessions that concerned balancing privacy and access considerations as they relate to electronic records. I also found thought-provoking a session that focused on how and whether one should document communities that either do not wish to be documented and on how some of the assumptions and understandings embedded in archival practice can perpetuate the past injustices done to indigenous peoples. However, for me, a lunchtime forum entitled "The Secret Life of Records" was the high point of the day. What follows probably will not do it justice -- as is usually the case when I'm at SAA, I've been sleeping wretchedly -- but I wanted to sketch out a few thoughts before crawling into bed.

Sponsored by SAA's Diversity Committee, this forum highlighted several recent efforts to document the Black Lives Matter movement and other responses to the recent high-profile police shootings and other actions that resulted in the deaths of African-American citizens. As panelist Jarrett Drake (Princeton University) noted, the news media and substantial segments of the public tend to accept the narratives embedded in police reports and other government records. However, recent events have highlighted the fact that these records may contain inaccuracies, distortions, and deliberate untruths and that they must be supplemented by materials created by individuals and communities affected by police misconduct.

The panelists discussed numerous approaches to capturing these materials in the digital age. Bergis Jules (University of California at Riverside) detailed how he and his colleagues were capturing tweets (i.e., Twitter content) relating to African-Americans who died in police encounters and to the Black Lives Matter movement. Nadia Ghasedi (Washington University) discussed how her repository established an Omeka-based website that enables area residents to upload copies of still images, video and audio recordings, and other materials that documented the community protests that took place in the St. Louis, Missouri area following a police shooting that resulted in the death of a young African-American man in the suburb of Ferguson. Stacie Williams (University of Kentucky) and Jarrett Drake detailed how an online discussion between archivists throughout the United States gave rise to an online repository and oral history initiative documenting citizen experiences of police abuse in Cleveland, Ohio.

I find these projects intriguing for a number of reasons:

• They're a striking departure from the traditional archival approach to acquisition of records, which involves allowing time to pass before attempting to take in records documenting a given event, careful evaluation of potential acquisitions, and, in many instances, the privileging of records created by institutions or individuals that wield significant social and economic power. These projects involve proactive capture of materials soon after creation and consciously seek out materials created by individuals and organizations that are all too often marginalized.
• They involve copying materials that are born digitally and will, in all likelihood, be maintained digitally and leave the originals in the hands of their creators (or, in the case of tweets, the online service used to disseminate them). If the "custodial" approach to preserving electronic records represents one horn of a bull and the "post-custodial" approach to preservation represents the other horn, this approach sails through the space between these horns.
• They suggest that creating an "archives" as we currently understand the term may not be the only model for preserving the history of a community. The Cleveland project is propelled by a geographically dispersed group of archivists, doesn't have a formal institutional home, and may well never "belong" to a single "archives" as we currently understand the term. I suspect that we're going to see a growing number of informal, online-only "archives" (and I hope that the Internet Archive will capture them, because some of them may well perish otherwise).
• They underscore the fact that archivists will still have to grapple with questions of power and privilege -- and may find that working in an online environment heightens them. As Bergis Jules noted, a Twitter user may come to regret a given tweet -- and be shocked to discover that an archives captured and preserved said tweet without asking her permission. Stacie Williams and Jarrett Drake asserted that they were painfully aware that they were privileged strangers who were asking Cleveland residents to trust them even though they lacked detailed knowledge of the community's history and struggles. The speed with which one can find collaborators online and establish a presence on the Web means that one can get a project underway very quickly, but winning the trust of potential donors/interviewees will no doubt continue to require a substantial commitment of time and effort. I suspect that a growing number of archivists are going to find themselves grappling with such conflicts.

Off to bed.

More Podcast, Less Process

Well, this is cool: More Podcast, Less Process is a new podcast that features "archivists, librarians, preservationists, technologists, and information professionals [speaking] about interesting work and projects within and involving archives, special collections, and cultural heritage." The first episode, CSI Special Collections: Digital Forensics and Archives, featured Mark Matienzo of Yale University and Donald Mennerich of the New York Public Library and debuted at the start of this month. The second, How to Preserve Change: Activist Archives and & Video Preservation, was released yesterday. In it, Grace Lile and Yvonne Ng of WITNESS discuss the challenges associated with preserving video created by human rights and other activists, producing activist video in ways that support long-term preservation, and WITNESS's impressive new publication, The Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video.
Hosted by Jefferson Bailey (Metropolitan New York Library Council) and Joshua Ranger (AudioVisual Preservation Solutions), More Podcast, Less Process is part of the Metropolitan New York Library Council's Keeping Collections project. Keeping Collections provides a wide array of "free and affordable services to any not-for-profit organization in the metropolitan New York area that collects, maintains, and provides access to archival materials." This podcast greatly extends the project's reach.

Given the mission and interests of its creators, I suspect that quite a few More Podcast, Less Process episodes will focus on the challenges of preserving and providing access to born-digital or digitized resources. I'm waiting with bated breath.

More Podcast, Less Process is available via iTunes, the Internet Archive, Soundcloud, and direct download. There's also a handy RSS feed, so you'll never have to worry about missing an episode. Consult the More Podcast, Less Process webpage for details.

Full disclosure: Keeping Collections is supported in part by the New York State Documentary Heritage Program (DHP), which is overseen by the New York State Archives (i.e., my employer). However, I'm plugging More Podcast, Less Process not because of its DHP connections but because it's a great resource.

SAA 2012: archives and social justice

Of all the sessions I attended at this year's annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists, “In Pursuit of the Moral Imperative: Exploring Social Justice and Archives” was the most thought-provoking and satisfying. I had the option of attending not one but two electronic records-focused sessions during the same time slot, but this one promised to speak to the deeper convictions that I bring to my work. I enjoy working with records and messing around with digital stuff, but these things are only the means to an end: doing whatever I can, in my own very small way, to help build and safeguard an equitable and open society.

Imagine my surprise when the cartoon above popped up on my Facebook feed this morning. I've often referred to appraisal as the “archival superpower” – the ability to determine who is or is not reflected in the historical record – and in its funny way this cartoon really drives home the extent of the power we wield. (Thanks to Russian Serbian archivist Arhivistika for posting it to her Facebook feed, archivists around the world for making it go viral, and my colleague Suzanne for sharing it with me and all of her other friends.)

All three presenters are still graduate students at Simmons College, two of them were presenting at a conference for the first time, and all of them gave polished presentations that adhered scrupulously to the session's time limits. Some of my more seasoned colleagues could take a lesson from these rising archivists.

 Noting that archivists often link their work to social justice issues but don't define “social justice” with any precision, Erin Faulder asserted that archivists need to move beyond their usual focus on human rights and governmental accountability and think of social justice as an everyday archival concern. Citing the work of philosopher Iris Marion Young, whose theory of social justice moves beyond issues of equal access to and distribution of resources and asserts that the profession would benefit from examining the work of philosphers and political scientists who have attempted to define social justice. Drawing upon the work of Axel Honneth, who asserts that recognition of an individual's dignity is a prerequisite of social justice and that injustice is the withholding of this recognition, she noted that archivists are the keepers of materials documenting this recognition (or lack thereof) and that our collecting efforts in and of themselves help to legitimize individual identity Faulder also asserted that archivists should look to the work of Iris Marion Young, who moved beyond issues of equitable access to and distribution of economic resources and asserted "social justice concerns the degree to which a society contains and support the institution for the realization of these values: (1) developing and expressing one's experiences, and (2) participating in determining one's actions and the conditions of one's actions." Young stressed that oppression is always contextual and that it often takes the form of myriad small actions, and Faulder noted that the processes of oppression that Young identified – economic exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence – almost always leave records behind.

Faulder ended with a provocative question: what if we sought to document the social forms of oppression, not identities, and started pointing out to political scientists and philosophers that our records support their theories?

Amanda Strauss focused on the work of Chilean archivists who have sought to document the extrajudicial killings, torture, and other human rights violations that took place during the seventeen-year dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet and its broader implications for archival practice. As Strauss noted, the Chilean archivists engaged in this work recognize that it is inherently political -- some Chileans still are still ardent defenders of the Pinochet regime -- and many of them are actively involved in the Chilean human rights movement, which has placed great emphasis upon documenting the regime's abuses. Noting that social justice is based upon the premise that every person has inalienable rights (among them the right to be recognized as a person before the law, not to be tortured or punished unjustly, and to be free in thought and worship), Strauss offered her own definition of social justice. Drawing upon Norwegian archivist Goodman Valderhag's assertion archivists can collect the records that enable courts, tribunals, and legislatures to pursue social justice, James O'Toole's conception of a moral theology of archives, Latin American liberation theologians, she asserted that for archivists, social justice means service to the society one documents.

As a concrete example of this sort of service, she cited the Museum of Memory in Santiago, Chile, which actively seeks to collect materials that shed light upon the people who actively committed abuses, those whose quiet consent allowed the regime to keep operating, and those who suffered at the hands of the regime. In an effort to ensure that all Chileans have access to its holdings, the museum has created numerous traveling exhibits that bring documents out of the stacks and into spaces in which a wide array of people can access them. Strauss argues that this practice challenges “the archival temple” and makes it plain that these documents are owned not by the archives but by the Chilean people themselves and that the acquisition of human rights archives is, in the final analysis, not about the archives but about the men, women, and children whose rights were violated by the regime. Strauss concluded that the call of justice requires that archives be open, and although I can think of more than a few instances in which withholding specific records would better protect the rights of individuals, I generally agree with her. I'm also heartened by her closing assertion concerning the nature of archival power: if social justice requires that the archivist serve the community, allowing the community to create the archives allows for the sharing of power between the two. Archives should be places for discussion and the finding of common ground, not remote temples staffed by people oblivious to the ways in which their collecting activities may reinforce or subvert existing inequalities.

 Jasmine Jones focused on the development of community-based North American archives documenting the Ukrainian famine of 1931-1932, which are spaces for debating – on the Ukrainian emigrant community's own terms – the contours of their experiences and fostering transgenerational memory of what transpired. These archives were established because of the archival silence that surrounded the famine: the Soviet government, which pursued agricultural policies that caused the famine, actively sought to obscure its role in causing the famine and restricted access to archival records documenting its policies and their impact upon the Ukrainian people. Even after the Soviet Union collapsed and its archives were opened, the continued silence of the Russian government has prompted Ukrainian emigrants living in the United States and Canada to continue documenting the experiences of famine victims and survivors.

Jones emphasized that the Soviet conception of multiculturalism required that one identify as primarily Soviet – and that doing so required that one suppress one's past and normalize one's conception of self so that it matched that articulated by the state. However, one does not forget trauma, tragedy, or the details of one's struggle to survive, and the men and women who started gathering materials documenting the famine were trying to take back their own sense of self-direction by rejecting Soviet conceptions of culture and self and claiming their status as survivors.

As Jones pointed out, the Soviet regime was able to keep the true causes of the famine under wraps until the 1970s. As a result, the community-based archives established by Ukrainians living in North America were for decades the only repositories that contained substantial bodies of material documenting the famine and its impact. Moreover, these archives also collected records and other materials that documented life in Ukraine before the famine; some mainstream repositories collected a few Ukrainian materials, but only the community-based archives reflected the multiplicity of Ukrainian voices and experiences. The Soviet Union's collapse led to the opening of some Soviet archives, but large quantities of records are still off-limits to researchers. As a result, the community-based North American archives remain an essential source of information about one of the greatest human rights abuses of the 20th century; the predominance of oral histories and eyewitness testimonies within their collections may pose some methodological problems, but the fact remains that these materials played a key role in shaping discourses that countered the official Soviet explanation of the famine's causes.

Jones concluded by citing David Wallace, who has stressed the need for archivists to be aware of the conditions under which knowledge is produced and to reach out to community-based archives.

I'm of two minds about community-based archives. In some respects, I see the emergence of community-based repositories as a sign that the archival profession has failed to serve a segment of the community to which it is answerable. Community-based archives documenting the lives of LGBTQ people dot the landscape because until very recently, mainstream repositories either didn't want to collect materials documenting the lives of “those people” or were afraid that donors or other stakeholders would object. The emergence of community-based archives documenting the Ukrainian emigre community is a sign that mainstream archives weren't paying attention to the emerging emigre communities in their midst – in no small part because their staff lacked the language skills needed to do so.

At the same time, I'm always awed by the passion and commitment that community-based archives display. The LGBTQ people who established community-based archives were convinced that LGBTQ people had worth and a history that was worth documenting, and the Ukrainian emigres in Canada and the United States established their own archives in part because they were not willing to allow the Soviet Union to define their sense of self or paper over their experiences. For community-based archives, gathering the historical record isn't a workaday activity but a political, psychological, and moral imperative. Moreover, community-based archives help to broaden the reach of archival knowledge. Most of the volunteers who start community-based archives aren't professional archivists, but, at least in my experience, most of them want to care for their holdings properly and actively seek out advice and those that don't may have good reasons for not doing so. I also know several top-notch archivists who were pursuing other careers when they began volunteering in community-based repositories, realized that they had a real passion for archival work, and ended up getting graduate degrees in history or library/information science.

During the question-and answer segment, a couple of interesting issues came to the fore. The first centered upon how to avoid coming from a place of privilege, and all of the participants emphasized the need to be aware of how one's own background shapes one's experiences and the need to respect differing experiences and perspectives. Moderator Terry Cook made what I thought was a particularly important point: some communities may experience our ways of acquiring, preserving, describing, and providing access to records as small actions that contribute to their oppression, and we ignore this possibility at our peril. Another hot issue: how do archivists help people come to grips with their mixed histories of both being oppressed and actively oppressing others? Faulder suggested that Young's focus on the processes of oppression may help us stay focused on the records documenting these processes and remind us that we cannot pick a “side” and that we should document people's experiences as broadly as possible. Jones emphasized that we need to promote the idea that our repositories are home to a multiplicity of voices.

Terry Cook followed up this question by asking the panelists whether we should document the lives of neo-Nazis, homophobes, murderers, and the like. Jones concluded that we should focus on documenting all voices, refraining from telling people what to think, and give people the tools to make their own choices. I'm not perfectly happy with this answer. I have no problem, in select circumstances, with archivists asserting that they document some governments, organizations, or individuals precisely because these governments, organizations, or individuals were, in an explicit and sustained manner, actively committed to engaging in the processes of oppression. However, this is an argument that should be deployed with great care and restraint; for example, it's an appropriate approach for documenting Pinochet-era Chile but not for, whatever its failings, the present-day Chilean government. I think that, in most cases, Jones's position is the prudent one.

 I'll end this post with Terry Cook's provocative closing statement. When Chilean human rights activist Ariel Dorfman gave the 2010 Nelson Mandela Lecture, he asserted that communities give themselves the chronicles they need and that nations whose stories depend upon the suppression of some voices are building their foundations upon sand. We need to start thinking about archival documentation in the same way.

MARAC Spring 2011: Archival Ethics and the Call of Justice

1315 Duke Street, Alexandria, Virginia, 5 May 2011. Between 1828-1861, this unassuming brick building was used as a holding pen for slaves awaiting sale in Natchez, New Orleans, or elsewhere; neighboring structures were also part of the city's slave trade district. It now home to the Northern Virginia Urban League and its Freedom House Museum, which documents the lives of the men, women, and children who were imprisoned here.

The Spring 2011 meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives conference got off to a roaring start with Rand Jimerson’s thought-provoking plenary address, "Archival Ethics and the Call of Justice." Jimerson’s words have been bouncing around my head since this morning, and this post is an effort to nail some of them down. First, however, a disclaimer is in order. I’m a little sleep-deprived at the moment, and as a result some of the first half of Jimerson’s address bounced right off my benumbed skull. In other words, this post may not be fully faithful to his remarks. However, what I heard (or think I heard) got at least a few of my mental wheels spinning.

Jimerson began by summarizing several propositions put forth at a 2005 colloquium sponsored by the Nelson Mandela Foundation:

• Archivists must avoid allowing normative conceptions of society to color the ways in which they select, acquire, and furnish access to materials.
• Archivists must fight against destruction or neglect of records that document oppression.
• (Oppressive regimes tend to be really good at documenting their crimes but attempt to destroy their records when their demise is imminent.)
• Archivists must proactively create archives that reflect the full diversity of their societies.
• Archivists should not be passive documenters of society but active participants in efforts to achieve social justice.

All of these propositions are new (or relatively new) to the archival profession, which has traditionally seen itself as objective and neutral. However, archives have traditionally served and reinforced he interests of entrenched power: their holdings reflect the words and deeds of the powerful, the successful, and the educated, and people and groups lacking one or more of these characteristics have either remained undocumented or documented only by records creators opposed to or indifferent to their experiences and perspectives. In recent years, Archivists have consciously started making an effort to make the documentary record more inclusive, but our emphasis upon provenance and upon the written word ensures that we are subtly biased toward the powerful and the influential.

Jimerson noted that many archivists might have trouble accepting that their work and their holdings reflect and perpetuate existing relations of power and might be deeply wary of the "call to justice" articulated in Johannesburg in 2005. However, he noted that it is possible to maintain professional standards of objectivity while at the same time accepting the impossibility of being personally neutral: as historian Thomas Haskell has asserted, a commitment to telling the truth does not prevent one from engaging in advocacy, but it does place certain intellectual limits on one’s advocacy. Moreover, answering the "call to justice" does not mandate that one adopt a particular partisan affiliation. However, it does mandate that one embrace and defend democratic values (e.g., government openness and transparency, the right of all citizens to participate fully in the life of their society and to have their histories and perspectives documented).

Jimerson then offered a variety of ways in which archivists can answer this "call of justice":

• Ensure diversity in the archival record. The Society of American Archivists has recently identified the need for diversity in the record and in the profession as one of three key priorities, and this is a step in the right direction.
• Welcome the stranger into the archives. We seek to include previously marginalized groups in archival documentation and ensure that they are full partners in the recordkeeping process. In the end, the entire community must be the provenance.
• Base selection and appraisal decisions should be based upon clearly articulated and widely accessible criteria. We need to document our decisions.
• Listen for oral testimony. Many peoples throughout the world -- including some residing in Canada and the U.S. -- do not write down their histories. If we do not seek out oral testimony and conduct oral histories, we will not know large parts of the world from the inside.
• Make archival description sensitive to power relationships and conscious of the coded language that describes the social dynamics that led to their creation.
• Make records accessible freely and openly, within the bounds established by privacy concerns and cultural concerns (e.g., access to tribal records).
• Embrace new technologies. Social media and electronic records make it easier to make information widely available. Moreover, we need to embrace Kate Theimer’s conception of Archives 2.0: promote openness, flexible, user-centered, efficient, assessment-oriented.
• Support open government, transparency, and democratic values.
• Engage in public advocacy, which may include becoming whistleblowers when powerful people and groups try to destroy or alter records.

As noted above, Jimerson’s address was provocative. First, it made me painfully aware of the manner in which I still privilege the written word and literary aptitude. I came to archives as an aspiring labor historian seeking to recover the experiences of men and women who created few written records. My earliest work in archives focused on increasing the inclusivity of the documentary record, and I will argue to death the importance of ensuring the comprehensiveness of the historical record. I am nonetheless unduly impressed by people who “write well” and can be quite uncharitable toward people who are not proficient writers (especially if they’re hard-partying or unfocused undergraduates -- hence my decision not to finish my Ph.D. and go into academe).

I don’t think I will ever overcome this bias -- and in some respects I don’t really want to -- but Jimerson’s words were a stinging reminder that I need to be aware of it and to ensure that I go out of my way to treat with respect records creators, researchers, and other people who don’t embrace the written word as I do, to understand how they understand the world and document their histories, and to do what I can to ensure that they are equitably represented in the documentary record.

I also started thinking about the ways in which Jimerson’s ideas seem to be rooted in relatively recent developments in historical scholarship. The historians who pioneered the "new social history" -- "history from the bottom up" -- in the 1970s and 1980s began scouring records created by elites for information about the lives and perspectives of non-elite people: slaves, laborers, women of all classes, and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. Barbara Hanawalt’s superb The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England, which mines records of royal inquiries into unnatural deaths for evidence of everyday peasant life, is a superb example of this sort of reading against the grain: Hanawalt was able to reconstruct how these largely illiterate men and women bathed and washed their clothes (yes, they did these things!), cared for children and the elderly, attempted to regulate sexual relationships and negotiate internal social hierarchies, distributed food and other essential resources, and grew crops, tended animals, and produced various necessities of life. Charles Joyner’s Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community, which draws upon plantation owners’ diaries and records in addition to oral histories of and narratives written by former slaves, is another stellar example.

I can easily envision a scenario in which this sort of historical inquiry might be viewed as oppressive in and of itself. For example, one person whose life is partially documented in the records of government social service agencies might welcome the sort of inquiry undertaken by a social historian intent upon treating his or her subjects respectfully, but another might view it as yet another unwelcome and painful intrusion perpetuated by yet another educationally, socially, and economically privileged person. However, it strikes me that the philosophical commitments of the new social historians (e.g., belief in the inherent dignity and value of all persons, desire for a comprehensive and equitable historical record) are closely related to those of Jimerson’s justice-focused archivists. The new social history is still reshaping the archival worldview -- and, in my view, that’s a very good thing.

Iraq National Library and Archive

In 2006-07, Saad Eskander, the Director of the Iraq National Library and Archive (INLA), kept a diary that the British Library posted online. The entries matter-of-factly chronicle Dr. Eskander's efforts to create an institution that comprehensively documents all aspects of Iraqi history, politics, and culture, bolsters democracy by ensuring free access to information, and contributes to the development of an open and egalitarian society. They also illuminate the appalling realities of life for Dr. Eskander and his staff: bombings (at home, on the streets, and at INLA itself), sniper fire, death threats, the kidnapping and murder of relatives, and death at the hands of sectarian death squads and other terrorists.

It's a non-stop chronicle of horror, but the most stunning thing about the diary is the persistence of Dr. Eskander and his staff: despite the omnipresent danger, INLA's librarians, archivists, and other staff kept coming to work day after day. They kept collecting archival materials for the Baghdad Memory Project, developing the INLA Web site, digitizing publications, theses, and dissertations, and preparing exhibits. They also kept recovering materials lost or damaged as a result of the looting that took place in late 2003.

Although life in Baghdad remains dangerous, INLA continues to recover and grow. Staff have started a new electronic journal and are publishing bibliographic reference works, accessioning archival government records, microfilming publications, conserving water-damaged Ottoman records, and taking advantage of new computers and other technology investments. The building housing INLA has a new generator and HVAC system, and approximately 900 people now visit INLA every month. On top of all this, Dr. Eskander is doggedly fighting to get the United States to turn over Iraqi government records that U.S. forces seized in late 2003 and early 2004.

People think that archivists are quiet, retiring souls, and it's true that our professions attract a disproportionate number of quiet, introspective souls. However, they also attract people whose dedication and vision can lead to greatness. I stand in awe of Dr. Eskander and his colleagues.

Records of Guatemala's disappeared

Every now and then, I come across a story that really makes me think about the importance of archives -- and the dangers that sometimes confront archivists and other people committed to preserving the historical record and demanding accountability from their government.

Earlier today, the Washington Post published an article highlighting the Guatemalan government's efforts to provide access to records documenting the actions of the army and national police during the country's long and extremely bloody civil war. Over 200,000 people were killed during the conflict, and approximately 40,000 disappeared without a trace. The fates of many people who disappeared are documented in records that were created by the Guatemalan national police, who subsequently tossed the documents into a disused munitions depot and left them to rot there. Civilian authorities inadvertently discovered the records in 2005, and archivists then began cataloging and scanning them; to date, roughly 7.5 million of an estimated 80 million documents have been digitized.

Approximately two weeks ago, the government began making the scanned images publicly accessible. Some of the digitized records consist of photographs of arrested students and labor leaders, and others provide detailed directions about how to spy on people who were subsequently kidnapped and murdered.

Although relatives of people who disappeared or were killed are glad that these records are being made accessible, other people fear being named as informants or perpetrators -- and at least a few of the latter are intent on keeping old crimes buried. On 24 March, Sergio Morales, the Guatemalan government's human rights ombudsman, released a public report concerning the records. The next day, his wife was kidnapped, drugged, tortured for several hours, and then released; her release may have been an attempt to lure Morales to a secluded place where he could be killed, but he and his wife were reunited without incident.

Morales and the archivists are nonetheless pressing on: records the archivists have processed have led to the issuance of arrest warrants for several people, and given that they have processed less than 10 percent of the records in the archives, it's highly likely that their work will result in many more criminal cases.

Given the horrific experience of Morales's wife, I think it's fair to say that the archivists responsible for processing the Guatemalan police records are working in a fairly risky environment. Those of us who are fortunate enough to work in stable democracies speak quite frequently about the importance of archives in holding government accountable, but we tend to focus on corruption and general stupidity, not mass torture and murder. We would do well to keep in mind that the accountability concerns of colleagues in many countries do center upon torture and murder -- and they might well pay a very high price for upholding our profession's ideals.

It is possible that the archivists working on the Guatemalan police records will be able to finish their work without incident. As the article points out, the very survival of the archives is a sign that Guatemala is moving toward the rule of law. At the time of its discovery by civil authorities, the archives was guarded by Ana Corado, a police officer who had been given the task because she had spurned her superior's advances. She began trying to care for the files, and when her supervisor ordered her to burn the documents, she refused on the grounds that unauthorized destruction of records was against the law. Despite her defiance, Corado is still a police officer, which would not have been the case a short time ago:

"If this had happened 20 years ago, I wouldn't be alive," Corado said. "I would be disappeared."

Moreover, the Guatemalan government is also seeking to declassify military records documenting the army's campaigns against leftist guerillas, which often resulted in the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians. Although the army is resisting this effort, the government has established an archives to house these records and continues to press for their release.