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Fwd: NARA and record keeping



To my fellow historians and archivists:  FYI, posted to H-Diplo list this morning.
  Subj:  NARA and record keeping (Krusten)
  Date:  Wed, 25 Apr 2001 7:43:55 AM EDT
  From:  "H-DIPLO [Johnstone]" <hdiplo@yorku.ca>
  To:    H-DIPLO@H-NET.MSU.EDU
  From: Maarja Krusten <Maarja@aol.com>

  I recently posted several messages about the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), in which I explained the many challenges it faces in providing public access to government records.  I noted, "To be  useful, any criticism of NARA must take into account all the sources of pressure on the agency and look for ways to protect it, not tear down the agency."  Yet the two scholars who responded appeared mostly to vent about
 their personal experiences.  They showed little inclination to look at the environment in which federal employees operate.

Warren Kimball noted, "There are always lists of excuses, but the fact is that NARA does not have the institutional 'will' to fight the good fight and get the job done." Hayden Peake wrote:  "There is no need to gain insight into NARA's problems, it is the solution to the scholars' problems that require attention."

Having spent most of my professional career working in the areas of archives and history, I've always thought that gaining insights into how government operates was one of the goals of research.  So, for me, the postings by Warren Kimball and Hayden Peake, and the silence from other scholars, raise some interesting questions.

How widespread is the effect of insularity and individual frustration on scholars' perspectives?  Do academics view public employees (federal archivists and historians) as their allies or as their adversaries?  If you view us as allies, but fling mud at the institutions we work for, what incentive is there for us to fight difficult public policy battles on your behalf?

Rarely do I hear [see] scholars write in-depth analyses about current public policy issues in archiving and record keeping.  Yet NARA and federal employees face enormous challenges right now.  "Is U.S. History Becoming History?," Jeffrey Benner asked in Wired.com on April 9, 2001.  Benner noted, "The workings of government in the first decades of the information era have been poorly recorded, archiving experts say. Years
  of valuable public records may have already been lost, creating a gap in the country's historical record."

According to Benner, Scott Armstrong of the National Security Archive estimates that government is saving "less than 1 percent of the electronic documents, and somewhere between 50 and 75 percent of the kind of records previously (in the paper era) archived are being lost."

There are many reasons why the once mundane area of record keeping has become a high risk area in government.  For one thing, government offices largely
 have lost the buffer once represented by the secretary/file clerk, the neutral third party with no vested interest in the contents of records.  Patrice McDermott of OMB Watch notes that widespread use of the
  personal computer means that individual officials now choose what to save or not save on their computers.  But there are increasing disincentives for officials to create and preserve complete records of their activities.

In the late 1990s, writers such as former White House counsel Lloyd Cutler and Washington Post staff writer Linton Weeks commented on the fact that notetaking in Washington was drying up. Cutler wrote, "If government
 note-taking and memo-writing dry up, or if the notes and memos are routinely destroyed the next day, journalists, biographers and historians will have a
 much thinner supply of written materials on which to base their work."

The revelations of the Microsoft litigation may have had a chilling effect as well.  The New York Times noted in March 2001 that President George Bush has chosen not to use a personal e-mail account in the White House because the contents would be subject to open records requests.
  This, despite the fact that the Presidential Records Act protects purely personal communications from improper disclosure.

Clearly, the current situation with record keeping creates enormous headaches for anyone who cares about history.  But if scholars take the view that government employees are footdragging adversaries, what incentive is there for us to fight on your behalf, either to  ensure proper public access to older records, or to act as missionaries for history in the new electronic age?
Maarja Krusten
(Maarja@aol.com)
 (Maarja@aol.com)

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