Internship, week of 2/20

More or less finished the processing plan. Just a few more boxes to get through. I'm not sure what will be done with certain things in this collection, like overhead transparencies, slides, and so on. I suspect that the Auxiliary Library Facility allows for a bit of slack when processing them--they won't deteriorate in the strict climate control, so there's no real need to make the usual backups and/or replacements.

There's also a few computer discs and cassette tapes that unfortunately I don't think anyone is in a hurry to transfer to another format. I always find it sad that more time, effort, and money can't be spent on updating media in archives and libraries. I feel like there's a lot of history we're forgetting and never going to recover.

Internship, week of 2/13

Wow, there's a solid four boxes of correspondence alone, dating all the way back to the 40s when Gest was a grad student and working with the brightest minds of the time on the Manhatten Project. Amazing stuff.

Also amusing was some correspondence with the Oxford English Dictionary. One of Gest's major areas of work is photosynthesis, and he took issue with their definition. He sent them a packet to prove his credentials and a suggested new definition. They wrote back that they were revising the whole OED, and being so large it takes a few years. They definitely wanted his input, but at the moment were somewhere around J and would get back to him.

Roughly a year later Gest wrote them a follow-up that amounted to "...well? What's taking you so long?"

Internship, week of 2/6

Worked a little bit on the processing plan, but also accompanied Phil to the IU Press. He's accessioning essentially their entire archive--hundreds if not thousands of manuscripts and publications over multiple decades, with all the corresponding contracts and paperwork, on top of any/all of the usual office paperwork.

For a place that kept such records, they didn't really do a great job of it. There's a giant room in the basement with file cabinets sort of willy-nilly, brimming with papers. Boxes are stacked on top of the cabinets, and several pallets on the floor have more stacks of boxes. There's no great order involved here--they emptied desk drawers into boxes (or filing cabinet drawers) and stuffed them where they had room.

It was overwhelming to see, but very interesting to work with. I suspect I'll see a good deal of this in my career.

Internship, week of 1/30

Began sifting through the Gest boxes. The first few accessions are rather large, cover huge swaths of his career, and are divided by subject and in some cases a vague sense of order. The latter few are much more mixed as he began to add from the papers he hadn't given previously. A few boxes seem to be little more than random papers. When possible, Gest outlined what he was providing to the archive at that time, but there's still a lot to sort through.

Article Abstracts, pt.1

Virtually all of my articles relate to privacy issues in archives, as that is a major research interest of mine. A concern in archives for some time has been "third-party" donations--correspondence and other documents that were in the possession of the donating party, but not originated by them. As technology advances, archives go online, and collections are frequently made available while the subjects are still living, the debate has become even more heated and pressing.

Hodson, Sara S. "Private Lives: Confidentiality in Manuscripts Collections." Rare Books and

Manuscript Librarianship. 6. (1991): 108-118. Print.

Hodson examines the issue of “third-party donors” in a direct manner, asserting that the “primary” donor is still the best resource for gathering information about a collection. She raises certain concerns, such as collections acquired and accessioned with “inappropriate restrictions” attached (a given example is “no Jews”) which are later quietly lifted, and whether instituting restrictive rules of use would allow for those to ever change. Hodson advocates for a case-by-case treatment of archival collections simply because each one is in fact a special case, but also champions caution and restraint. The fear that archivists should have, Hodson argues, is far more ethical than legal, yet those in favor of more restrictive archival policies concentrate almost entirely on the legal aspects.

Kirby, M.D. "Access to Information and Privacy: The Ten Information Commandments."

Archivaria. 23 (Winter 1986-87): 4-15. Print.

Kirby looks at privacy in the face of growing information technology and the need to regulate. He lays down a set of “commandments”. One of the chief problems he sees is that of “old laws, new world”, which lies at the heart of every internet piracy debate and proposed legislation. He puts forward the need for “informed observers” who have no stake in the outcome, yet understand the concepts involved and can act and react accordingly--again, the lack of informed policymakers is at the root of many (non-)resolutions. While the article is a bit dated, having been written in 1986, many of the concerns that Kirby addresses are still valid now, some even more in light of SOPA and similar proposals. Kirby’s language is also frank and direct--an updated set of commandments in this style would be easily accessible to the layman and useful in explaining the issues facing information technologies, both public and private.

MacNeil, Heather. "Defining the Limits of Freedom of Inquiry: The Ethics of Disclosing

Personal Information held in Government Archives." Archivaria. 32 (Summer 1991): 138-144. Print.

MacNeil sets out to define a utilitarian approach to the moral use of personal information. The common guidelines in archives is to be cautious while still providing as much material as possible, supplemented with a liberal take-down policy. MacNeil argues that this approach is a cost-benefit model with no tangible benefit or cost. She argues instead for a “rights-based analysis” that is rooted in Kantian philosophy. Under this proposal, personal consent or confirmed public domain is the only tenable course of action--because of the Kantian input, anything that is not personal consent contributes to an overall loss of privacy that is not to be tolerated by an ethical people. MacNeil acknowledges that this would actively hamstring efforts to make archives available to patrons, or even archive a great deal of material in the first place, but she asserts that this is merely the price of a more ethical society.