Memorial Day. I’m thinking of those we have lost in the service of the nation. And how they live on. In the memories of those who knew them. And also in preserved records, textual and audiovisual. Some are personal, held within families. Others are official, created and maintained within an official record keeping system.
One reason I am so deeply grateful for how and why I have reconnected with my former employer, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), is because my late sister once worked there as a supervisor and team leader. But the focus of this post is the loss of records, not people. People are central players, nevertheless!
In 2003, a subscriber to the Archives & Archivists Listserv posted a link to Fred Kaplan’s article in Slate about Air Force historian Eduard Mark and his concerns about the poor state of federal record keeping in the computer age. Another subscriber posted a comment saying he looked online and saw that the Department of the Air Force had a records control schedule which covered email. He said of Dr. Mark, “so I don’t know what the ‘inside source’ is talking about.”
I replied that I had had contact with Dr. Mark in other settings and found him credible and well informed. But the exchange on the Archives & Archivists Listerv with the list subscriber taught me something. I was astonished that anyone would think that the mere issuance of guidance and creation of a records schedule implied everything was working as it should. And that it meant more than an insider’s cry for help.
True, it is hard for outside observers, inside and outside NARA, to know what is going on in a department or agency. But there are clues, including the placement of the records management function. When the records staff is linked with library services, chances are the organization embraces records as a source of knowledge. If organizational placement suggests records staff are seen merely as people charged with moving paper or electronic boxes, corporate memory may be at risk.
Historians such as the late Dr. Mark are in the position of “first responders.” Federal records have lengthy hold times (20 or 30 years). Long before NARA sees how well records management was or was not working, a person such as Dr. Mark (or Shelly Davis) is seeing the reality on the ground. He or she relies on records to carry out his day to day federal mission, after all.
I had a further moment of clarity this week after I read Kate Theimer’s post at Archivesnext, “Debate: The majority of users don’t care about provenance. They just want access to information.” Kate, who worked at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) from 2000 to 2006, wrote of researchers, “The majority of them do not care in what record group, collection or series those materials are located. If the archivist brought out a box labeled ‘all the materials on X,’ assembled from all over the archives with no indication of where it came from, the user would be thrilled, not disappointed.”
I posted a comment. (Archivesnext is a site that welcomes discussion and various perspectives.) In a post at my own blog about the multiple ways that gaps occur, I mentioned unique elements in the culture of different federal agencies. I said you need context in order to understand incentives and disincentives for action, including constraints and limitations. It is critically important to understand internal departmental and agency cultures, working relationships, information flow, message discipline, subordination, collegiality.
Sometimes, an annotated news clipping in an official’s file can tell you much as much about him as anything he writes to superiors or subordinates “on the record.” The clipping may come up in an undifferentiated search of items related to a topic. But without a direct link to the official, and when in decision making he saw it and marked it up, it loses value as historical evidence.
So much has happened in Washington since the Vietnam war ended with the signing of peace accords in 1973. That was the year I entered federal service as a full time civil servant. My aha moment occurred during my lunch time walk the day after I read Kate’s blog post, when I walked past the National Archives building at 7th and Pennsylvania Avenue. I stared up at the sculptures of the eagles on the corners of the roof. They remind me of guardians. As I looked up at the guardian eagles atop AOTUS David S. Ferriero’s “house” this week, I thought:
“Has the National Archives lost history?” Yes.
When did this start? In the early 1990s.
How long did it go on? Answer: It is ongoing.
Was there a moment when it might have been prevented? Yes, in 1997.
Is it possible to reverse course? Yes, but with great difficulty and behaviors that Washington will not reward.
Why have the losses occurred? NARA lost touch with how historical research is done by the most sophisticated researchers, those towards the stronger end of the spectrum of civic literacy.
There was a moment when smart, skilled intervention might have staunched the losses. A watershed moment occurred in 1997, when presidential historian Joan Hoff rang an alarm bell. NARA did not respond as needed.
A wire service reporter wrote in 1997,
“Joan Hoff is a historian who specializes in the times and tragedy of Richard Nixon. When she wants to know more about the former president, she goes to the National Archives and in a moment she is riffling through a box of papers bearing the scrawls and aura of her man Nixon.
“Muzzle these jerks,” he scribbled in the margin of one document. “What’s wrong with these clowns?” he jotted on another.
. . . . Ms. Hoff fears she’ll never again be privy to such spontaneous insights. She worries that the raw material that helps historians make sense of the past will simply die inside a word processor.”
She wasn’t the only one.
“Archives director John Carlin, former governor of Kansas, thought he had the solution in 1995. He issued a directive authorizing federal agencies to dispose of computerized records once copies had been made, either on paper or electronically.
Historians, journalists – and muckrakers in general – were aghast. They sensed that Carlin’s directive would allow agencies to keep the final product but wipe out the fingerprints.”
At the time, the impact was not yet clear within Fedland. To understand why history has been at risk, you need to look at NARA as well as individual agencies and departments.
When I worked on records appraisal assignments at the National Archives during the 1970s, the agency had some ability to keep its staff physically connected with the federal agencies and departments. Over time, resource limitations led to a reduction in NARA’s presence. At some agencies, there was a stark contrast between the way records control schedules were approved in the 1990s and in the next decade. In some cases, the strong, on site presence by knowledgeable NARA archivists who immersed themselves in how the agencies actually worked diminished to a point where it was reduced to occasional contact on the phone or by email. This pull back by NARA occurred just as agencies increasingly moved from paper to electronic record keeping. Yes, a perfect storm.
The agencies and departments largely were on their own during the end of Carlin’s term and that of AOTUS Allen Weinstein. NARA, the agency which understood that a lack of resources limited its Federal presence, tried to keep record keeping at the fore. Its issued guidance still talked about leaving an enduring record of federal service. But it largely focused its efforts on records managers, not the creators of records, as if nothing had changed from the days when secretaries filed paper records for senior officials.
NARA’s head down approach overlooked how some records staff were increasingly removed from how senior officials (whose records NARA regards as the most valuable) actually thought and operated. In some cases, records control schedules approved during Weinstein’s tenure suggested that the GS-15 and GS-14 officials who write many of the products for senior executives in executive agencies in Fedland seemed to be entirely off of NARA’s radar screen.
There were some players who understood what was happening. They had little impact. The wire service report revealed in 1997 that
U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman sided with the protesters. He said Carlin’s order was “irrational on its face.” He said Carlin made no distinction between a mundane document on the purchase of new desks and an electronic message from a secretary of state dealing with a declaration of war.
The archivist, he said, had “abdicated to the various departments and agencies of the federal government his statutory responsibility … to insure that records with administrative, legal, research or other value are preserved.”
Joan Hoff asked for help NARA could not give.
“Ms. Hoff suspects that the only thing left for future historians will be the end-product document – tidy, spell-checked, evenly margined, sterile and bearing the unmistakable blandness of a deed done by committee. But what researchers want are the marginalia that reflect the internal struggle that preceded policy.”
NARA held out big buckets. Throw into them what you will! Finely tuned, carefully calibrated actions reflecting an understanding of cause and effect in the approval of records control schedules receded.
Abdication had the predictable result.
I’m not sure what led NARA largely to ignore the red flags by Joan Hoff as a representative of external researchers and Eduard Mark and Shelly Davis of internal researchers. Dr. Mark once observed, records have no constituency. Outside NARA, I can see why questions about records attracted little attention. Civic literacy eroded during the 1990s, as segments of the population increasingly turned to feel good, niche news sources.
Some historians have weakened how they are perceived as users of records, as well. David Kaiser, who teaches at the Naval War College, recently wrote in “How an Era Came to an End” about the impact of the Vietnam War on the rationalist tradition. He observed at his blog that
“The attack on the rationalist tradition has been most effective in the most critical theater of war, American universities. Nowhere is this more apparent than in my own historical profession. History is no longer a matter of uncovering the truth, it’s a question of examining (and creating) different ways of “framing” past events. That amounts to seeing the past through the eyes of the present, which makes it impossible to learn anything from the past. In addition, the humanities are now based largely on hostility to authority and institutions–which makes it almost impossible to contribute positively to what society needs.”
Dr. Kaiser, with whom I’ve had some pleasant contacts on Nixon records issues, seems to be painting with a pretty broad brush there. I’m not of the academy–all of my work as a historian has been in the federal sphere. But I read enough academic history to know that framing is more prominent in some teaching and writing than in the period prior to the Vietnam War.
The larger problem is what Dr. Kaiser describes as the movement away from a rationalist approach in many areas of our culture. That rationalist behavior is less rewarded at the ballot box and in the market place makes it much harder to sell the value of good records management. Except for on NARA’s site, rarely do I see records management sold as a means of ensuring a reliable narrative of actions.
If you look at the records management listserv, links to articles such as this one seem much more common than ones pointing to the work of federal historians. How do you balance the current day primacy of law firms as leaders in records management with what a Harvard business professor observed in the 1980s, “lawyers are the enemies of history?”
The Big Dude, aka AOTUS David S. Ferriero, has a longtime interest in understanding user behavior. I’ve come to see that he brings unique skills to the job as well, some of which Elizabeth Bramm Dunn pointed out in 2009. (And Harriet was way off the mark, fortunately for NARA!) David combines an understanding of people and human behavior, comfort with technology, strategic vision, and an ability to look at structural issues in ways I haven’t seen in his predecessors as AOTUS. The photo from last summer shows him with one of the guardian eagles I stared up at from the street last week at lunch time.
One of the research topics David studied while working on his Master’s in Library and Information Science at Simmons College was information seeking behavior. What if the leadership at NARA had shown his curiosity about human behavior in 1997? What if the agency had been outward looking and forward thinking enough at the beginning of the age of electronic record keeping to recognize it needed to adjust in order to protect history and enhance civic literacy?
David is unafraid of engaging with critics. I am convinced that he would have listened to and thought about what Joan Hoff had to say, had he been in charge back in 1997. Ferriero has said that NARA’s practice in the past was to keep critics and those who asked questions about its activities at arms length. He believes in a different stance, that you need to engage with such people. That is a sign of someone serious about moving NARA away from a head down, closed posture to an open, learning posture. He would not have dismissed Joan Hoff’s and Eduard Mark’s concerns in 1997 and 2003.
What would have been the result, if David S. Ferriero had been Archivist of the United States in 1997? What if the eagles really would have looked outwards (instead of being symbolic of a lost age, as they increasingly appeared to me during Carlin’s and Weinstein’s tenures)? What if they had been able to act as the guardians of that for which Joan Hoff pleaded? Fewer losses, fewer cut lifelines, fewer blows to record keeping, less damage. Greater foundations for civic literacy in the future.
Yesterday, I had a wonderful lunch in Washington with a friend, Jay Bosanko. Great conversation and a very enjoyable chance for me to catch up with an old friend. In March 2011, when AOTUS David S. Ferriero named Jay to be Executive for Agency Services, I didn’t realize how much change lay ahead for me in the future. Things were about to start turning around for me regarding the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in ways I hadn’t imagined. 
I’ve known Jay since late in 1994. The photo at left was taken at Archives 2 at Christmas time that year. He once worked with my late sister, Eva. She used to be his boss in the records declassification division at the National Archives. I had an arms length relationship with official NARA back then, but I enjoyed attending some of the parties and luncheons in my sister’s division, which most people simply called Declass.
David chose well in appointing Jay to his current Senior Executive Service position, where he oversees records management policy and the records centers, national security records declassification, and information security oversight. He’s a good man–smart, savvy, classy, gutsy, hard working. I admire his sense of duty and integrity. Jay’s official biography is here. I like the way it says he started out as an Archives Technician. That’s how I started my NARA career, as well!
