Monthly Archives: April 2014

The wind chill temperature was 32 degrees and cold rain fell as I left the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) on Tuesday, April 15. The day had started warm.  It was 70 degrees in the morning but then the temperatures plummeted as a front came through.  Drastic change.

Inside NARA, I found warmth and light as I always do these days in what I call my intellectual home in Washington.  At a public program, Cokie Roberts and Todd Purdum discussed his new book about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, An Idea Whose Time Has Come.  I found the discussion fascinating.  And I had fun chatting with the guards, the staff, and with the Big Dude, aka AOTUS David S. Ferriero, who gave welcoming remarks at the start of the program.

During her discussion with Purdum, Cokie Roberts mentioned her own memories of the time period.  A graduate of Wellesley, she received her B.A. in Political Science in 1964.  Both of her parents served in the U.S. Congress.   She lost her father, Hale Boggs, when his airplane crashed in Alaska in 1972.  Her mother, Lindy Boggs, won election to his vacated seat and later also served as a U.S. ambassador during the Clinton administration.   Roberts’s occasional inclusion of personal memories in her conversation with Purdum added texture to the discussion of the events of 1964.

To my relief, the rain hadn’t changed over to sleet or wet snow as I left the building after the event.  But wearing winter gear as cherry blossoms bloomed felt strange!  I bought Purdum’s book and will be writing more about the Civil Rights Act and Lyndon Johnson in future posts.   This post looks at archival records, voices, and context, in a follow-up to what I wrote last week.

In her talk, “The Value of Archival Description, Considered,” Maureen Callahan discussed the detailed mapping of a traditional finding aid.  I agree with her that automation is a tool we can explore for mapping and making available to researchers information about the collections.  And that the Scope and Content note is a part of the finding aid where we can use our knowledge of what it contains to help researchers get a sense of the collection.  As we know, it is possible to draw on our knowledge, to write a Scope and Content Note, while leaving our own opinions of the people involved out of it.  Part of being a professional archivist.

After reading the notes for Maureen’s talk, I went back and re-read Rand Jimerson’s 2005 Society of American Archivists President’s address on “Embracing the Power of Archives.”  Three years ago, I parachuted into the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference in Alexandria, Virginia just to listen to Jimerson speak.

I introduced myself to Rand after his speech.  And I thanked him for speaking up on the Archives & Archivists Listserv in 2005, when some subscribers asked about the usefulness of my many messages about NARA and the Archivist of the United States.  (Blogging suits me better given my essayist writing style!)  You can read Jimerson’s Listserv post, “Why We Should Care About NARA,” here.

Ben Bromley did a good job summarizing highlights of Jimerson’s 2011 MARAC plenary in a blog post about what he might have tweeted had he been able.   Rand talked at MARAC about the relation between objectivity and advocacy, about Open Government, about oral testimony and giving voice to “the voiceless.”  I wanted to speak up from the audience, to comment about the complications that surround an issue he mentioned, the archivist as whistleblower, but I thought better of it.

As I learned on the Archives & Archives List, some topics are so complicated and so woven through with one’s personal experiences, long form explorations of them are best left to sites such as blogs rather than listservs.   Better to put up a post for people to read, or not, or consider, or not.  That’s not to say some of the questions and news stories on the Listserv don’t deserve discussion–far from it!  Just that it is easier to do when you can link to a long-form piece you’ve written rather than posting message essays to a listserv.

At the conference, when Jimerson took questions, I didn’t see a way to provide context when asking a question or commenting about the challenges surrounding whistleblowers.   You can urge archivists to act as whistleblowers regarding records in their care.  But archival educators also need to explore with students how power imbalances and the natural difficulties for outsiders of sorting out “he said, she said” can affect resolution or airing out of the issues.  And to explain why some people support others privately but may feel unable to speak up in public, on listservs or other forums.

Putting yourself out there to have mud flung at you–to have lawyers representing the powerful seek to discredit your story–is not a choice to be made lightly.  I saw my former boss, a supervisory archivist, go through that in 1992.  Difficult choices, for him, for me, for my colleagues, for many involved in the matter at hand.   Being the subject of the type of speculation (much of it off the mark) that we faced about our motives was not something for which my graduate studies had prepared me!

When I went to see Jimerson speak at the beginning of May 2011, I already had started Nixonara although I hadn’t yet had the joy of reconnecting with the National Archives.  (That would come shortly after MARAC due to outreach to me by David Ferriero).  Much has changed in the last three years and I feel great joy when I visit my former employing agency these days.   Last week, I visited my “home away from home” twice.   Shampoo, rinse, repeat!

On Thursday evening, I returned to the McGowan Theater and listened to a panel on DC Emancipation and Home Rule.  I was especially interested in the colloquy between Eleanor Holmes Norton and former Rep. Tom Davis (R – VA).     Many of the public programs I hear at NARA break through reductive narratives, offer interesting insights, and aid civic literacy.  Great care and effort goes into many of the programs at NARA–and it shows in the results.

I support diversity and giving voice to the voiceless, as Jimerson argued in his presidential address in 2005, in his book, Archival Power, and in his plenary remarks at MARAC.  But I would argue that we need to expand the concept of the voiceless and to take a broader look at what limits and constrains archival materials.   To look at it from the beginning of the records life cycle, in areas, such as records management, where concepts such as those Jimerson described rarely are discussed in public forums.   And to recognize that even with government records–including the records of the powerful–there may be information asymmetry.

Jimerson used images of temples, prisons, and menus when he spoke at SAA in 2005.  He concluded his presidential address by saying,

“As we consider the symbolism and the substance of archives and the archival mission, let us embrace the power of archives. Let us accept the solemn obligation to use the Force for good and not for evil. Let us ensure that archives protect the public interest rather than the privileges of the powerful elites in society.

May our archival temples truly reflect values worthy of veneration and remembrance. May our archival prisons minimize locks and security and emphasize accountability, preservation and access. May our menus be clear and understandable, and our table service efficient, thorough, and helpful.

This is what it means to be a profession. We must serve all sectors of society. Our goal should be to ensure archives of the people, by the people, and for the people. By embracing the power of archives we can fulfill our proper role in society.”

In January 2012, Cokie Roberts and Max Byrd spoke at NARA about Clover Adams.  Roberts explained during the book lecture that in the 19th century, women such as Clover Adams did not expect their letters to survive them while many prominent men believed that theirs would be saved.  She said that if you read letters from past centuries, those of prominent men in Washington often seemed to be written for the record.  They show self-consciousness and reflect awareness of self image.  Some such letters are stiff, even pompous.

How government works is much richer and nuanced than many of the records set aside for transfer to archives convey.   When I briefly posted on the records management listserv around 2005, I understood from my experiences in doing disclosure review for NARA of the Nixon tapes that such rich records never again would be part of presidential records.  I knew how complicated records issues are for the powerful.  And I understood the types of integrity issues that can come up for records professionals.  I drew on that in asking questions on the Listserv about Henry Kissinger’s records and related issues.

I didn’t gain traction on Recmgmt-L and soon unsubscribed rather than disrupt a community focused on other aspects of record keeping.    But I understood already in 2005 that if the records management profession tried to treat email and electronic records in the manner in which paper records had been handled–transferring from secretaries to creators of records the obligation to declare status and file accordingly–there were key areas where record keeping would collapse.   While archivists debated accountability and archives power in 2005, the culture of record keeping was changing greatly in some areas, at the beginning of the life cycle.

I understood early that the paper records acquired by repositories such as NARA in the past resulted from an approach to record keeping that could not be replicated with electronic records.   This is due to a complicated mix of time available, the press of mission duties, priorities, and, yes, awareness of what might happen to one’s written words.   Michael Beschloss observed in 2002,

“Increasingly worried about such political dangers as subpoenas from special prosecutors, newspaper leaks, and memoirs by disgruntled ex-officials published while their ex–bosses are still in office, presidents and their chief officials shy away from putting things on paper. Public figures no longer write the kind of thoughtful, discursive letters and revealing memos that we used to see. People in Washington are more public relations savvy than in earlier times and, thus, more adept at drafting memos and other records that conceal their motives and can fool the historian.

The result of all of this is that a historian of the years of Bill Clinton, George W Bush, or their successors may not have the kind of sources needed to understand who did what to whom and why as well as a scholar might for, say, the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. The result of this could be that historical scholarship on future presidents may become, of necessity, more speculative.”

Time will tell the extent to which some of the powerful and the “privileged” have stilled their own voices in portions of presidential and federal records.   If so, we historians will need from the “privileged” the same type of oral testimony to fill in some gaps that Jimerson refers to among those whose voices traditionally haven’t been represented.

Also important is preservation of the livestreamed public programs institutions such as NARA make available, so we can refer to them as we look at history from different angles.  And use them, along with records in archives and oral history interviews that we conduct ourselves or study, to understand, at as many levels as possible, the rich, fascinating narrative of United States history.

Since reading Maureen Callahan’s notes for her talk, “The Value of Archival Description, Considered,” I’ve been thinking about context.  Maureen states,

“At my institution, we’re just starting to work through the process of accessioning electronic records, and I can already see how tools like Forensic Toolkit help us to get electronic records to describe themselves.

After all, electronic records are records. Digital archives are archives. This is our present, future, and poorly-served past.”

She notes of evaluation of records in creating paths to access,

“When I teach description, I urge workers to evaluate rather than represent records. For instance, does a correspondence series include long, juicy, hand-written letters wherein the writer pours his heart out? Or are they dictated carbon copies based on forms? A title of “Letter from John Doe to Jane Smith” doesn’t tell us this, but an archivist’s scope and content note can.”

As I’ve been thinking about finding aids, I’ve wondered, what can we tell future researchers about electronic records?  And what can we not?  I’m going to focus in this post on what Maureen says about describing electronic records.  About letters in cursive where writers pour out their hearts.

An exhibit on correspondence at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) that opened March 21 points to the past, the present, the future.   Some of the featured items reflect correspondence from celebrities, some from regular members of the public.

What will that future look like, for records professionals, researchers, curators? And are we doing enough outreach to connect with each other, across professions, so researchers will have sufficient context to use born digital records with maximum impact?

On Thursday, I attended the exhibit reception at the National Archives for “Making Their Mark:  Stories Through Signatures.”  I very much enjoyed chatting with Deputy Archivist Debra Wall, who represented AOTUS David S. Ferriero at the reception.  Deb and I worked in the same stack area in Archives 1 (2W2) but several years apart.

I appreciated having a chance Thursday evening to tell curator Jennifer N. Johnson how much I liked the exhibit, which I first had seen at a tweet up at NARA on March 20 prior to the official opening the next day.  Some of the letters in the exhibit are handwritten.  Cursive is taught less in schools in the United States than it once was which means not everyone can read it easily.  Many cultural heritage organizations are relying on citizen transcription projects to make digitized handwritten records accessible.  I described recent presentations on crowdsourcing in a post earlier this month on effecting change in cultural heritage organizations.

There are other factors that will affect our future researchers, as well.   As I listened to Deb Wall’s remarks, I thought about people who sign official documents or share their thoughts in correspondence.  And about Maureen’s comments about evaluation, interpretation.

I turned to my long time friend and reception guest, Tim Mulligan, and said, “What most fascinates me about history is that the players don’t know how things are going to play out as events are unfolding.  No one does in life.”

Tim knows that.  He was a historian-archivist when he worked at NARA for 34 years.  Now a volunteer, he continues to contribute specialized knowledge on projects that otherwise might not be done due to scarce resources.   I had the great pleasure of introducing Tim to the Big Dude, as I call AOTUS David Ferriero, in 2012.  As a longtime friend, Tim knows why I cherish the reconnection with my former employer, NARA, that David made possible in 2011.

When we work with records as archivists, as researchers, we learn about internal operations of an enterprise.  And how policy was made.  You make your decisions based on any number of elements.  Things may shift and you may have to make other decisions in the same area under very different circumstances. How comfortable we are in having that play out “on the record” (albeit not immediately accessible in an archives) affects what the public learns from archival records.

Think of it as reading a blog, where the posted items have relatively stable content.  That is to say, that the author does not delete without notice or substantively edit earlier essays and comments.  But lets the blog play out as a journal of how his or her thinking evolved.   Some bloggers–I’m one–fix typos and syntax errors that I didn’t catch before publishing.  And occasionally insert clarifying sentences.

When I make a major revision, which is rare, I try to add an explanatory note with the date of change.  I’m comfortable with the fact that some of my views have changed over the course of my blogging, as I’ve learned new information or gotten to know people.  Perspective is dynamic, not stable.

To some extent, archival records form a type of journal in the same way our use of social media does.  The big difference?  In archives, both the public output (our @ tweets) and the private output (our DMs) are in the mix in an organization’s internal and external correspondence.

What we don’t always know is why some entries were preserved and others not.   Do we have obligations as archivists to share what we know about that?   And where do we get that knowledge?  As with so many archival issues, there are no easy answers or clear path ahead.

The new exhibit at NARA includes not just signed letters but signature style (clothing, gestures).  It ends with a section on automated signatures–you can get a computer generated facsimile of John Hancock’s signature.   An article in today’s Washington Post discusses the continued use of the autopen in the digital age.   As a volunteer in Sen. Howard H. Baker’s office during the Watergate hearings, I was authorized in 1973 to use the autopen to sign some of the letters I typed in replying to mail.

I occasionally typed responses to regular constituent mail.  But I mostly spent my time drafting and typing replies for the high volume of mail Sen. Baker received due to serving as Vice Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities.  (An assessment of my work by Baker’s Executive Assistant, Gary Sisco, was saved in presidential records when I applied for work at the White House.  I ended up telling the WH interviewer I preferred to stay at a job I had just taken at a federal agency.)  Needless to say, I’ve never looked at signed correspondence from VIPs the same way!

I’m pictured in the Russell Senate Office Building using a typewriter in 1973; the Baker staffer behind me is using an IBM MT/ST “word processor.” I learned to use one later in 1973 when I entered Federal civil service as a permanent full-time employee.   Many of the questions I’m asking in this blog post stem from my first Federal job, not as an archivist or as a historian, but as a secretary. How we create records, file them, declare their status, and interact with the creators of records has changed a great deal.  In some cases, that greatly affects what future researchers will see.

One of the letters in the new NARA exhibit–you see it in Bruce Guthrie’s photos from the exhibit preview–is from a 14 year old named Dave Ferriero. The letter was flagged “child” by the member of the White House staff who handled it.   As the exhibit label notes, Ferriero became Archivist of the United States.

As Archivist, David is in charge of presidential records (some statutorily controlled, others processed according to terms in deeds of gift), federal records, and some donated records.

Included in “Making Their Mark” are examples of how Lyndon B. Johnson used his physical presence in face to face conversations with people.  Curator Jen Johnson notes in the exhibit guide that

“Standing at 6 feet 4 inches tall, President Lyndon Baines Johnson
used his imposing stature as one tool in his own brand of political
persuasion, known as the Johnson ‘treatment.’  LBJ used his
‘treatment,’ shown in these photographs, to intimidate, badger,
flatter, or plead in order to achieve his political goals.”

Jen Johnson and colleague Amanda Perez recreated one of Johnson’s signature moves during the tweet up I attended on March 20.  My account of the tweet up looked at the different circumstances under which archivists process and make records available.  My post explored “Identity.  What happens when the aspirational identity of a profession–the archivist as custodian of the truth in records–runs up against that of a person whose collected materials an archives holds in its care?”

As I watched people I follow on Twitter tweet about personal digital archiving yesterday, I thought about what affects preservation, deletion, and future access.  And what affects “Archival Power.”  And whether people whose records we will be making available in electronic form “poured out their hearts” or wrote in what lawyers call “discoverable language.”  Where will we see spontaneity and some degree of authenticity?  And where a guarded or a public relations version of what happened?  Technology is affecting the nature of records in ways few historians have discussed publicly.

Writers such as Larry Cebula point to an age of digital abundance.   Last year Slate reproduced a blog post by Cebula (“An Open Letter to Historians of the 22nd Century”), using the phrase “Sorry for All the Stuff.”  But as with so many things, it depends.  The abundance Cebula points to in an essay that focuses on non-governmental materials is in sharp contrast to the concerns expressed by federal officials I quoted in my Sunshine Week post.  (I pointed to a seeming chilling effect–of fear, even–in some areas.)  Ten years before it published the Cebula piece, Slate featured one of them, the late Eduard Mark, Air Force historian, in an article, “The End of History.”

The initial solution to the issue of email in some federal agencies was to treat it as a record to be declared permanent or temporary and filed in hard copy or electronically in a Records Management Application.  But declaration by the creator essentially placed people who in some situations have the image sensibilities some individuals use in personal digital archiving into a framework that ostensibly relies on compliance with law.  It did not take in to account the Nixonian reaction (“no one needs to see this stuff”) that makes sensitive historically valuable e-records once saved as permanent vulnerable to being consigned to the digital fireplace by The Man.

In the past, the declarations of records status often were made by secretaries. In my first couple of years of federal employment, before I got my job in the archival field with the National Archives, I made the first-cut decisions on what the public eventually would see in archives.

I went to grad school (history) while working full time in a clerical position in the federal government.   If you work with permanent federal records created in the mid-1970s, what you serve to researchers came to you through people like me.

I used to type correspondence (some drafted by me, some by others, some a collaborative effort), put it in my boss’s in-box for signature, take what he put in the out-box and distribute, mail, or file it.  I was the decision maker–a person one step removed from the writer, with less vested interest in his image than the boss had.  I followed in a relatively objective manner a Subject Alpha Numeric File Plan prepared by records management staff.  I also maintained a complete “chron” file of outgoing correspondence.  Such objectivity disappeared when records staff started asking senior federal officials to declare on a case by case basis the status of their own email.

Needless to say, given my background, I like the Capstone approach that NARA has developed for handling the electronic records of senior Federal officials. Maureen makes an effective case for using technology wisely at the end of the life cycle of records.  Increasingly, NARA is exploring how to use it at the beginning of the life cycle, as well.

My bosses rarely gave a thought to filing.  Some day–decades after they signed memos or letters–some of what crossed their desk might be accessioned by the National Archives.  That this was so was not something they thought about often.  In the age of electronic record keeping, email and documents are more vulnerable to destruction by creators than when I was a secretary.   That is why I support greater use of technology, algorithms.  However, there still is a human element to consider.  Wisely chosen records hold times can be used to try to reduce writers’ fear of retaining records, especially those vulnerable to being used for “gotcha.”

As an archivist, a historian, I believe there is value in explaining to researchers how electronic records came in to an archival repository.  Did the process involve declaration of historical value by creators of records or other people with possible vested interests in how history would regard their legacies and actions?

Was the process through which the organization developed and applied retention schedules relatively free of undue influence?  Or not?  The extent to which there may have been the Johnson Treatment in how records were handled is a significant element but one which will be hard to trace in the future.  However, there may be clues as to the environment in which an agency or department handled its records.

Were the records subject to blanket subpoena requests that might have had a chilling effect on what people chose to write down or save?  Did the creating organization value institutional memory and strive to preserve records not just based on how business units used them, but for how designated officials used them as part of a corporate knowledge base?  Were there myth making issues with corporate image that affected record keeping decisions?  Were there particular known or deducible situational elements that may have made record keeping and decisions on historical value particularly high risk or low risk?

Are these beginning of electronic records life cycle questions being explored in library and information science classes with a focus on archival studies?  I don’t know.  My Twitter feed shows little or no discussion of them.  Nor did the Archives & Archivists Listserv or Recmgmt-L when I still subscribed to them.  Yet processing archivists would benefit from a general understanding, to the extent it can be shared among professionals, of elements that affected collections that end up in their care.

Judging by the relative silence (lack of writing or discussion on Social Media) on the issues I am raising here, the connections seem harder to discuss out in the open than I would like.  But they are part of the context in which we will be making electronic records available to historians and other researchers in the future.