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Records/Archives in the News Part 03 01/20/00
Records/Archives in the News r991223a
There are 3 stories in this posting.
Dallas Morning News 12/23/99
DART to pay Morning News $35,000 in attorneys? fees
Austin American Statesman 12/23/99
UT, Bexar officials feud over Spanish Archives
Pittsburgh Post Gazette 12/22/99
Editorial: The Frick archive
_______________________________________________________________
Dallas Morning News 12/23/99
DART to pay Morning News $35,000 in attorneys? fees
by Brooks Edgerton
<snip>
DART has agreed to pay The Dallas Morning News $35,000 in attorneys? fees
incurred during a nearly three-year fight over bus-safety records.
A judge in Dallas County ordered the payment in 1997 after transit agency
lawyers argued both that they had the right to withhold documents sought by
the newspaper - and that they did not exist.
DART lost again at the appeals-court level this fall and recently decided not
to seek relief from the Texas Supreme Court, officials confirmed Wednesday.
?We probably should have handled the whole thing differently,? DART board
Chairman Jesse Oliver said. ?We don?t need to get into a situation where it
looks like we?re intentionally withholding information.?
The case dated to early 1997, when a source gave The News a secret DART
report identifying several rear-door hazards on a bus that had crushed an
exiting schoolgirl to death. Under the Texas Open Records Act, the paper then
obtained documents about dozens of previous injuries caused when other buses?
faulty exit doors trapped exiting passengers.
Afterward, Dallas Area Rapid Transit cut off access to more records, saying
that they?d become confidential because of a lawsuit filed by the dead girl?s
family.
DART settled that suit this year for $161,000 without admitting liability. It
released all documents sought by The News during the family?s litigation,
agency spokesman Morgan Lyons said.
DART decided not to keep fighting the newspaper, he said, because ?we had
achieved our primary objective, which was to release the documents properly.?
Appeals court judges ruled unanimously, however, that DART had no right to
delay release. They ordered their opinion published, giving it the weight of
precedent.
Newspaper executives applauded DART?s decision, while noting that they have
no way to know whether the agency fully complied with court orders to
surrender all documents the paper sought.
?We were entitled to these documents from the very beginning,? said Michael
McCarthy, executive vice president/general counsel of Belo Corp., parent
company of The News . ?We believe the court correctly awarded us costs.?
<snip>
_________________________________________________________________
Austin American Statesman 12/23/99
UT, Bexar officials feud over Spanish Archives
by Mary Ann Roser
<SNIP>
A feud between a Bexar County official and the University of Texas isn?t
exactly the battle of the Alamo, but it?s darn close.
Bexar County Clerk Gerry Rickhoff wants UT to hand over a priceless
collection of Spanish and Mexican documents that detail life in Texas between
1717 and 1836 -- the year Texas lost the famous mission fort but won its
independence.
Rickhoff and his supporters say Bexar County has a right to the 250,000 to
300,000 pages. They contend that UT has not been a good steward since Bexar
County turned the documents over for preservation and translation 100 years
ago.
UT, which says it has taken good care of the records, told Rickhoff and
several other Bexar County officials at a San Antonio meeting Wednesday: The
collection isn?t going south.
?These are documents that are critical to the state of Texas, and we feel
that what?s best for the state of Texas is that they remain here,? UT Vice
President Patricia Ohlendorf said.
She said the meeting went well and that further talks would be held. UT also
will provide Rickhoff with microfilm copies of the Spanish Archives, as the
collection is called.
The Mexican government abandoned the archives in Bexar County in 1836.
Written by Spanish-speaking priests, diplomats, military officials and
others, the papers detail the cultural and political history of Texas? vast
Bexar district, which encompassed more than 100 present-day counties. Some
papers refer to such famous Texans as Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett.
In 1899, Bexar County commissioners asked UT to take custody of the
documents. UT has since built its Texas history collection around those
records.
But 100 years later, just 14 percent of the documents have been translated,
Rickhoff said. With one person translating them part time, the job will take
about 200 years, Rickhoff said. He called that a serious breach of trust.
?These records don?t have a voice,? he said. ?I am the voice for these
records. . . . I want them back, and I?ll go to whatever measures it takes.?
Don Carleton, director of the Center for American History, said translating
the documents isn?t as simple as it sounds.
When the documents came to UT, they were a mess, he said. It took years to
get the pages in order and create an index. The translating has been going on
steadily since the 1930s, Carleton said.
<SNIP>
<SNIP>
In November, Rickhoff seemed to be taking a line from what the Texans said to
the Mexicans in 1835 about the famous Gonzales cannon?that he would ?come and
take it.? Carleton said he had no idea Rickhoff was upset until Rickhoff said
he was coming to Austin to retrieve the archives.
?They could spend the next 500 years saving the records of their history on
urban San Antonio,? he said. ?When there is so much in San Antonio that needs
to be acquired and preserved, why is so much energy being put on something
that has been carefully taken care of, is on microfilm and is accessible??
<SNIP>
________________________________________________________________
Pittsburgh Post Gazette 12/22/99
Editorial: The Frick archive
<SNIP>
Pittsburgh is the right home for records on industrial life
First the steel jobs left Pittsburgh. Now, the steel papers?
The Frick Art & Historical Center in Point Breeze, the former home of
industrialist Henry Clay Frick, houses a vast archive on early 20th century
life and industry in Western Pennsylvania. It contains an array of records -
notebooks, letters, photographs, newspaper clippings, household receipts,
business ledgers. The artifacts display or describe some element of Frick
family life, the operation of Carnegie Steel Co., the lay of local coal mines
and other subjects touched by Mr. Frick and his descendants.
Scholars and historians dealing with Pittsburgh history have relied heavily
on the archives. But now the trustees of the Helen Clay Frick Foundation,
which owns the records, have voted 10-1 to ship them to New York. It would be
a body blow to Western Pennsylvania?s heritage.
The majority of the board, which consists of Frick family members, wants to
unite the Pittsburgh records with other holdings at the Frick Art Reference
Library in Manhattan, adjacent to the massive former family home there. But
one family member and a family archivist say little in the Pittsburgh records
has anything to do with New York or the Frick art collection there.
That?s why Martha Frick Symington Sanger, the great-great-granddaughter of
Mr. Frick, is fighting the move. She herself wrote a biography in 1998 of the
family patriarch and knows firsthand the value of the archive.
She argues that Helen Clay Frick, the industrialist?s daughter who died in
1984, bequeathed the family records to her foundation and endowed Clayton,
the family?s Victorian residence in Point Breeze, as a house museum. Although
she didn?t stipulate where the archives should be stored, her will left no
historical material or funding to the library because she had parted ways
with the library?s board.
Given all that, the Frick great-great-granddaughter believes the archive
should stay in Pittsburgh. But there?s another reason.
Although the Frick Art & Historical Center doesn?t feel competent to preserve
the records in Point Breeze, other local institutions, like the University of
Pittsburgh and the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center,
have offered to house the archives. That?s a deal that the Frick descendants
should take. It would make these histories available to the public and
maintain them in the place that was forged by Henry Clay Frick and his
associates.
Students of history do not go to Kansas City to research the whaling
industry. They do not go to Minneapolis for information on Hispanic
migration. Likewise, the records that chart the toil, the cost and the profit
of industrial-age Pittsburgh don?t belong in Manhattan. They must be near the
rivers where the molten steel flowed.
New York may be the center of the human universe, but it was never the Steel
City. The Frick archives recount the rise of an entire industry - one that
may have faded here, to be sure, but one that still calls Pittsburgh its
spiritual home.
<SNIP>
PETER A. KURILECZ CRM, CA
PAKURILECZ@AOL.COM
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