SAA 2015: thinking about access

Glass globe (1925) based upon a drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci, main branch of the Cleveland Public Library, East 3rd Street and Superior Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio, 2015-08-15.

The 2015 meeting of the Society of American Archivists ended early yesterday afternoon, and I spent the remainder of the day thinking about . . . well, a lot of things, but mainly about the conference and my hometown.

By my count, there were five sessions -- four listed in the preliminary program and a fifth "pop-up" session that came together shortly before the meeting began -- that focused on making born-digital records accessible to end users. I heard a little grumbling about the weight given to this particular topic and to electronic records generally, and I also heard some griping about the timidity and complexity of the access solutions and systems that were discussed. As I walked through the Cleveland Public Library this afternoon and visited various suburban bookstores this evening, the subject of access to records kept popping into my mind.

I agree that in some instances, we allow fear -- of embarrassment, of reprisals, of vague and undefined consequences -- to play an inordinately large role in shaping our access policies and procedures. I also agree that it's quite easy to develop online access mechanisms that force users to jump through additional hoops instead of providing a seamless entree into one's digital holdings. However, it's important to remember that our hangups regarding access aren't merely the product of fear.

In some instances, access restrictions are the result of negotiated agreements with donors. In other words, we've made a promise that we need to keep -- in part because it demonstrates our trustworthiness and in part because -- generally -- it's the right thing to do. One can argue that the terms embedded in a given agreement are excessive, needlessly complex, or downright unreasonable, but I don't think that any archivist would assert that we should treat donor agreements lightly.

In other instances, restrictions are imposed by law. Is every law that might bear upon access to records well written, easy to enforce, and in alignment with archival principles. No, no, a thousand times no. However, archivists generally seek to operate within the bounds established by law and those working in government repositories may have a legal as well as an ethical obligation to uphold the law.

Moreover, upholding laws relating to records access is, in some instances, a matter of social justice, particularly when public records are involved. Over the course of my career, I have encountered records that a) concern individuals who are quite likely still alive and b) contain detailed documentation of injuries and illnesses, identify victims of sexual assault, document psychiatric histories, or plumb the family histories of minors who came into contact with the criminal justice or social welfare systems. Releasing such records might very well do these individuals substantial psychological harm. If the records document abuses that these individuals suffered while being "served" by government-operated facilities and programs, their improper disclosure may rightly be regarded as perpetuation of that abuse.

On one of the sessions (I forget which one), one of the panelists (again, I forget which one) said that she thought it would be a good idea if archivists focused less on the harms that inadvertent disclosure might cause ill-defined third parties and more on advocating for the interests of end users. Keeping in mind the perspective of end users is absolutely appropriate, but we need to remember that some of the people documented in our holdings have claims that may be even more compelling.

SAA 2014: integrating history

 One of the advantages of paying my own way to SAA is that I don't have any reservations about attending at least one session that interests me but doesn't have anything to do with my work responsibilities. Yesterday morning, I passed up two interesting-seeming electronic records sessions and sat in on session 309, "Integrating History: A Search-and-Recovery Effort in Alabama Archives." I'm glad I did: of all the sessions I attended this year, this one was my favorite. (N.B.: I was really ill on Friday, so what follows might be a bit hazy.)

Two of the archivists who participated in this session are employed by repositories that have traditionally reflected the experiences of white Alabamians, and two work at historically black universities. All of them spoke with passion and nuance about the challenges of comprehensively documenting their communities and institutions, and in the process discussed a host of things familiar to archivists working in a variety of settings:

• The ugly way in which an ever-growing processing backlog reduces institutional visibility and makes it ever harder to obtain the resources needed to tackle the backlog.
• How differences in power and perspective fuel tensions between small, resource-starved archives and large, well-funded collecting repositories.
• The importance of and hard work involved in winning the trust of donors, particularly those whose experiences have in the past been under-documented.
• How efforts to document previously under-represented groups may force one to confront the unsavory past of one's own community, one's own uneasy relationship with that past, and anger and fear in those who have a vested interest in maintaining certain archival and broader societal silences. 
• The importance of intimately knowing one's own collections and working collaboratively with repositories that hold related materials. 

Rebekah Davis (Limestone County Archives) discussed the importance of collecting materials that not only documented the history of the county's black community (e.g., programs distributed at community members' funerals) but also what that community had to live with (e.g., color photographic prints of a Ku Klux Klan rally that took place in the 1970s). Quoting fellow presenter Susannah Leverman, she emphasized that even though she and her colleagues at times felt deeply uncomfortable about accessioning and furnishing access to some of the materials in the latter category, "to pretend things didn't happen is to take away the victory of those who overcame it." Davis also stressed the importance of making sure that older white volunteers who expressed distaste when they encountered collections documenting the county's African-Americans understood that they could privately believe whatever they wished but needed to understand that bigoted statements reflected poorly upon the archives and to keep their opinions to themselves while working there.

Susannah Leverman (Huntsville-Madison County Public Library) highlighted her institution's efforts to build relationships with her community's African-American inhabitants. Although the library has collected materials documenting African-American art and education, segregated city directories, church histories, portraits, information about black-owned businesses, and other aspects of African-American life, Leverman was convinced that the documentary record was incomplete. She began going to black churches and civic meetings, hosted a traveling exhibit relating to Lincoln, created a public history exhibit commemorating 50 years of school integration and a related sub-exhibit concerning the Ku Klux Klan, developed a phenomenally popular exhibit relating to African-American sports history, and tries to ensure that other exhibits accurately reflect the community's diversity. The library also hosts talks focusing on Huntsville's black business district and other topics and posts recordings of them to YouTube. She described her approach thusly: "we need to provoke people into thinking instead of forcing them to remember or memorize." It seems to have paid off: the library has recently acquired collections documenting civil rights activism and a substantial collection of African-American sheet music.

Veronica Henderson (Alabama A&M University), who is relatively new in her position, discussed her efforts to tackle a decades-long processing backlog, create finding aids, sharpen collecting efforts, and sort out some custodial issues. The Alabama state legislature established the State Black Archives and Research Center in 1989 and charged it with acquiring, preserving, and providing access to materials documenting the state's African-American history. Henderson determined that the collection included some materials that didn't relate specifically to the history of black Alabamians, and she has sought to refocus the collecting scope. She's also trying to smooth relations with alumni of a defunct black high school who are questioning why the university archives has some of their memorabilia; the university doesn't have a deed of gift, but it did have a longstanding and close relationship with the school's administrators. Fortunately, at least some of the alumni are satisfied with digital reproductions.

Dana R. Chandler (Tuskegee University) also discussed his university's efforts to tackle a large processing backlog and to identify and recover items that have gone missing. He also recounted his repository's efforts to right an old wrong: in 1943, the Library of Congress (LC) took possession, with the university's consent, of a body of materials that it called the Booker T. Washington Collection but which were actually the early organizational records of Tuskegee University. Chandler found that the agreement that enabled LC to take custody of these records specified that the university would receive a microfilm copy of them. However, LC filmed the records only after Chandler pushed it to do so and maintained afterward that it retained the copyright. and I've held them to this; LC had to spend approximately $69,000 to microfilm the records. LC tried to maintain that it held the copyright, but Chandler's position is that these "papers" are in fact the records of a public university.

Chandler then profiled two phenomenal collections that came to light when Tuskegee addressed its processing backlog:

• Records of the Southern Courier, 1965-1968. The Southern Courier was a civil rights newspaper run by Harvard Crimson volunteers. It was unprocessed for years, and Chandler and his colleagues discovered that it contained detailed accounts of the dangers and difficulties that staff faced, including mad dogs, beatings, and death threats. They also found evidence of young black and white people working together toward a common goal -- a story not commonly associated with Alabama. 
• George Washington Carver Notebooks. Scholarly biographies of Carver published to date conclude that he did not make any significant scientific discoveries. However, Tuskegee has six notebooks containing Carver's scientific notes, drawings, and observations, and Carver's work must be reassessed in light of these manuscripts. 

I was particularly heartened to learn that the longstanding informal collaboration between the presenters and other Alabama archivists seeking to ensure that the state's documentary record is equitable and balanced may give rise to a multi-institution Web portal centered on archival materials documenting the lives of black Alabamians. Alabama archivists have a long track record of working together and accomplishing amazing things with modest resources, and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if this proposed portal is a rousing success.

Image: anemone buds peek out from behind a bench on the grounds of Washington National Cathedral, Washington, DC, 16 August 2014. Anemones symbolize, among other things, anticipation.

SAA 2014: agency, ethics, and information

The joint annual meeting of the Council of State Archivists, the National Association of Government Archivists and Records Administrators, and the Society of American Archivists got underway this morning. Approximately 2,300 archivists, records managers, and allied professionals have swarmed the sprawling behemoth that is Washington, DC's Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, and the weather is unseasonably, gloriously cool.

Unfortunately, I'm a little under the weather at the moment. I spent part of the day in bed and wasn't particularly present at those events that I did attend. As a result, I'm a little hesitant about offering up the following sprawling recap of session 201, A Trickle Becomes a Flood: Agency, Ethics, and Information, which examined issues relating to secrecy, power, ethics, and regulation of communications systems in light of the recent disclosures of classified information by WikiLeaks, Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, and Edward Snowden, and the prosecution and suicide of activist Aaron Swartz. However, it was a thought-provoking session.

Hillel Arnold (Rockefeller Archive Center) opened by noting that we are surrounded by communications systems that are largely invisible and that the regulations surrounding those systems are even harder to discern. Archivists are generally pretty good at understanding the invisible: we know that organizational structures profoundly influence the creation and content of records, we realize that the historical record reflects the privileging of some people and the silencing or dismissal of others, and we're sensitive to the evidential as well as the informational value of records. In the digital era, however, regulation determines what's left for us to work with, and not understanding it means not being able to account for silences or furnish essential contextual information.

Regulation is premised upon the idea that the common good justifies some limits on liberty; however, some powerful actors may be able to use regulation to stifle competition, discipline labor, or otherwise act in ways that do not benefit society. It can take a variety of forms. External regulation may be engendered in legislation, policy, or technology (e.g., bandwidth throttling), and self-regulation may manifest itself in social norms or in user expectations. Arnold explored how characteristics of communication systems serve as markers of power. Archivists examining the role of these systems in shaping the archival record must be attuned to the following:

• Flow. Analysis of flow involves assessment of direction (one-way, two-way, multi-direction), volume, and speed with which information travels through a system. Broadcast radio is an illustrative example of the role of regulation in shaping flow. Radio was from the outset seen as a powerful medium, and the Radio Act of 1927 controlled flow via licensing, wattage limitations, and establishment of the entity that subsequently became the Federal Communications Commission. 
•  Structure. Analysis of structure involves examination of distribution mechanisms (hierarchical or geographically and/or technologically distributed) and standards (structure, content, and protocol). The United States Postal Service highlights the role of structure in shaping a communications system. Lower rate schedules for publications have long facilitated the wide distribution of newspapers and longstanding standards of privacy for personal correspondence have governed user expectations. At the same time, Postal Service regulations prohibit mailing firearms, explosives, and certain other materials, and the Comstock laws for decades barred mailing of materials deemed pornographic. 
• Commodity. Analysis of commodity centers upon identifying the thing(s) of value. Archivists are used to focusing on information, but we need to understand that the network itself or the relationships between users of a communications system (e.g., Facebook friends) may also have value. The landline telephone system exemplifies the role of commodity in shaping a system: “Ma Bell” levied service fees and sought, with remarkable success, to create and maintain a natural monopoly. 

Elena Danielson (formerly with the Hoover Archives) focused on issues surrounding secrecy and transparency and opened with a stunning piece of information: according to the 2013 annual report of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration's Information Security Oversight Office, in fiscal year 2013 it cost the nation $11.6 billion to safeguard its classified information and to declassify information that no longer needed to be kept secret.

Danielson then articulated a point of view that, for what it's worth, I find eminently sensible: information wants to be free, but some secrets really need to be kept and the manner in which information is disclosed can lead to violence or even war. For example, in 1870 Otto von Bismarck successfully goaded the French into going to war by selectively editing and releasing an account of a conversation between King Wilhelm of Prussia and the French ambassador to Prussia. In 1917, the British released the Zimmerman telegram, in which the German government invited Mexico to enter into an alliance in the event that the American government entered the First World War on Britain's side, in an effort to draw the United States into the conflict.

In light of the the recent leaks of classified information by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, Danielson articulated a set of questions that may help archivists and others seeking to assess the origins and impact of such disclosures:

• Was the information scrutinized before release? 
• Was the information released with the public good in mind, or was it done for some sort of gain – money, ego gratification, fame, political advantage? 
• Is the person who released the information willing to face the consequences? 

Noting that the digital era has placed us on an earthquake fault regarding secrecy, Danielson also detailed several other questions that we need to address:

• If governments want to regulate the flow of information, what happens when the government leaks its own information? 
• If information libertarians are committed to openness, why are they encrypting their own information? Why is secrecy okay for journalists and activists but not corporations or governments? 
• Does the Nuremberg Principle – the belief that the public good trumps the law – still hold? 

Ed Summers (Library of Congress), whose presentation is available online, explored a recent controversy – the much-maligned 2012 mood manipulation study conducted by Facebook and Cornell University – and the manner in which it illuminates how power shapes the archival record.

Summers highlighted something that I didn't know: one of the Cornell scholars involved in the Facebook study was previously involved in a research project funded by U.S. Department of Defense's Minerva Initiative, which funds social science research “areas of strategic importance to U.S. national security policy.” One of his colleagues is currently receiving Minerva Initiative funding to examine social media posts and conversations around the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey and to identify individuals who were moved to act in response to these crises and when they took action.

Noting that the outrage that greeted disclosure of the Facebook mood manipulation study was propelled in part by broader concerns about the way that corporations and government entities such as the National Security Agency collect and use personal and behavioral data, Summers asserted that we need more regulations that limit the types of data that are collected and the length of its retention. In addition, corporations need to establish ethics boards that will openly discuss with users and scholars their data use and management practices. The negotiations that archivists have long had with donors are a good model for this sort of discussion. If, for example, a donor downloads a copy of his or her Facebook data and proposes giving it to an archives, the archivist and donor will work together to identify who can access it and when it can be accessed. The donor should be able to have a similar conversation with Facebook itself, and archivists are particularly well-suited to help facilitate these discussions.

Lots to think about here. However, I can't help but wonder whether we're fighting a losing battle. National security agencies and corporations have rarely paid attention to what archivists have to say about anything, and I suspect that things are going to get worse, not better. I could be wrong, and I hope I am; after all, events that took place forty years ago prompted dramatic changes in the laws governing the records of U.S. presidents. Even if I'm not, I don't think we should simply allow ourselves to be pushed aside quietly. It's better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.

Image: Hibiscus blossom, Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, Washington, DC, 14 August 2014.

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.

Archives matter

Yesterday, the New York Times posted an article concerning a Dept. of Justice report documenting the work of the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations (OSI). OSI, which was recently folded into the department's new Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section, was responsible for initiating denaturalization and deportation proceedings against American citizens found to have participated in the persecution of civilians in Nazi-occupied Europe, and ensuring that foreign nationals who took part in persecuting civilians are denied entry to the United States.

The Department of Justice has refused to release the report, which was written in 2006, in its entirety, but the Times somehow obtained an unredacted copy and has made it publicly accessible; it also created a supplement contrasting the redacted and unredacted versions. For reasons that are completely understandable, the Times article emphasizes the report documents instances in which the United States government gave "safe haven" to people who had been actively involved in wartime persecution or enslavement of civilians; the Central Intelligence Agency, in particular, comes off quite badly.

However, one of the most striking things about the report itself is the manner in which it highlights the centrality of archival records to the work of the OSI, which had a professional archivist on staff almost from the moment of its creation. Unlike other Department of Justice officies, OSI relies not upon interviews and surveillance conducted by law enforcement personnel but upon archival research conducted by academic historians. The report, which discusses not only the OSI's investigative techniques but also the state of and access challenges associated with archival documentation of Nazi atrocities, emphasizes: "Given the advanced age of survivors and questionable value of eyewitness testimony, a[n OSI] case is generally only as good as the archival evidence."

To date, OSI's work has resulted in the denaturalization of 83 people, the permanent departure from the United States of 62 people, and denial of entry to more than 170 people.

One could argue that, in the grand scheme of things, the denaturalization and deportation of these people doesn't mean much: nothing bring back the men, women, and children who perished at the hands of the Nazis or make whole those who survived, and even the youngest perpetrators likely aren't long for this world. However, in spite of the Cold War-era actions of the CIA and other U.S. government bodies, war criminals and human rights violators have no place within a society that values individual freedom and dignity, equality before the law, and democratic governance. We cannot undo old crimes, but we can bring them to light and ensure that those who perpetrated them -- whether in Central and Eastern Europe 60 years ago, in Guatemala 30 years ago, in the former Yugoslavia 15 years ago, or in any place at any time -- do not find sanctuary in this country.

Without archives, justice would be an even rarer thing.