Margot Note's Blog, page 20

Refining Your Archival Skills

I've compiled some of my best post posts on archival management. I love being a consultant who can help organizations fund, set up, or expand their archives programs.

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Holiday Gift Guide: Connect Through Memories

A gift that celebrates memories is so much more than a present. An occasion for gift giving--the holidays, a birthday, an anniversary--is all about the experience. Everything's better when you enjoy it together. 

Here's a list of distinctive presents for everyone on your nice list. They are suitable for people of any age. They are affordable as well; most gifts are $10-$20, with many under $10. When you purchase items through these links, I receive a small percentage of the cost through the Amazon Associates program. You can buy curated, high-quality items at the same that you support my work. The ties that bind these gifts together is that they cherish the past or create the future.

Creating Family Archives: A Step-by-Step Guide to Saving Your Memories for Future Generations By Margot Note Buy on Amazon

For Family Archivists

I would be remiss for not mentioning my book, Creating Family Archives: A Step-by-Step Guide for Saving Your Memories for Future Generations, as a thoughtful gift. It's an easy, quick, and affordable guide to protecting your treasures. I've also selected a collection of my favorite Gaylord Archival items for beginners, including family history kits, enclosures, and folders, that I advise my clients to use and that I use myself. I've also created the ultimate archival supply shopping list that goes into more detail about what beginning archivists need to get started.  

For Memory Makers

Lea Redmond's Letters to... series provides prompts for letters to loved ones. Letters to My Friend: Write Now. Read Later. Treasure Forever. offers 12 letters to celebrate a cherished friendship. 

A gift of a recipe box with 100 recipe cards (and a potential to hold twice as much) allows family members to record their favorite recipes. I like this box because of its clean, modern design; a groove on the top of the box allows you to view your recipe easily. 

The Memories line of Homesick candles are the best. The Books scent smells like an older leatherbound book mixed with a woody desk character of cedar and sandalwood. Hints of balsamic and vanilla finish the complex scent. Doesn't that sound wonderful? This hand-poured soy wax candle burns for 60 to 80 hours. 

Drop a note to friends and family with letterpress printed cards. My favorite is a set individually printed on a 1930's letterpress with a vintage typewriter motif with "just a note" in black on the front. They're blank inside. The cards measure 3.5" x 5" and come neatly packaged with a variety color of envelopes. If these aren't your style, I suggest seeking another set of letterpress stationery; they have a luxe, handmade touch that stands out among slick and impersonal commercial cards. 

An archival-quality photo album kit includes everything you need to safely present precious family photos in an elegant black album. The kit includes a buckram cover, mounting pages, protectors, photo corners, and envelopes that are acid-free to safely store photos, negatives, newspaper clippings, and other memorabilia. I've written a post about purchasing and using the album to recreate a damaged magnetic album. 

For Kids

In Home, artist Carson Ellis makes her solo picture-book debut with a whimsical tribute to the many possibilities of home. I spotted this book at The Strand and was immediately drawn to it. The book has a beautiful tone that invites many return visits. It also introduces the important concept of how the places we live shape our lives.

These forest friends bookplates are so cute. The 80 bookplates were illustrated by Quill & Fox. They feature colorful owls, worms, squirrels, foxes, beavers, ladybugs, rabbits, and hedgehogs. It makes a fun gift for the little bookworm in your life.

Let's Make Some Great Art is such an inspiring book; it’s full of activities and lessons on artists, and is a great tool to get kids’ creative juices flowing.

Nothing beats the ease of taking photos on your cellphone, but there’s something retro about the Instagram-like wallet-sized photos produced from a Fuji Instax. All kids should experience the tangible aspects of photography, especially instant photography. Archivists and conservators are unsure about how long digital images will last. Physical images (when preserved properly) will survive hundreds of years. 

The classic My Book About Me, By ME, Myself encourages children to write and draw their own biographies. It's an ideal gift for elementary school children and one that will become a cherished keepsake. (I loved filling in my copy as a child!)

For Readers

Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind by Sarah Wildman documents her journey to find the lost love her grandfather left behind when he fled pre-World War II Europe. The book begins when she finds a cache of letters in his old files, then ends in an exploration into family identity, myth, and memory.

In Sidonia's Thread: The Secrets of a Mother and Daughter Sewing a New Life in America, Hanna Perlstein Marcus writes about her journey with her mother, Sidonia, who came to Massachusetts from a displaced persons camp after World War II. Sidonia supports herself as a talented seamstress, yet hides many secrets. As an adult, Hanna searches through her mother's old letters and photographs to find clues about her heritage. 

The House in Prague: How a Stolen House Helped an Immigrant Girl Find Her Way Home follows Anna Nessy Perlberg's life from witnessing the Nazis invade Prague in 1939 to after the Velvet Revolution in 1989. The book is illustrated with pictures from the author’s family archives. 

97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement by Jane Ziegelman investigates the culinary habits of five ethnic families living at the turn of the twentieth century in one tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It includes 40 recipes.

In search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America. Lacking a written language of their own, the Hmong experience has been primarily recorded by others. Driven to tell her family’s story after her grandmother’s death, The Latehomecomer is Kao Kalia Yang’s tribute to the remarkable woman whose spirit held them all together.

For Writers

The Blackwing pencil was introduced in the 1930's by Eberhard Faber and was the pencil of choice for Oscar, Grammy, and Pulitzer Prize winners throughout the 20th century. Pencil aficionados from John Steinbeck to Thomas Wolfe to E.B. White have sung the praises of the Palomino Blackwing pencil. After it was discontinued in the 1990's, fans began paying as much as $40 per pencil to seize unused stock. These are perfect for writing in your journal, scribbling down notes as you interview family members, or crafting letters to loved ones. 

The Fisher space pen is one of the most popular pens of the twentieth century. The original Fisher Space Pen was used on the Apollo 7 space mission in 1968 after two years of testing by NASA and has been used on all manned space flights since then. The design and construction of the pen hasn't changed; it's exactly the same as the one taken to the moon. The pen writes at any angle, even in Zero Gravity, and in extreme temperatures. 

Writers can jot ideas down quickly with a set of three Moleskine Cahiers. These flexible, singer-bound journals have indigo blue covers and visible stitching on the spine. The ruled pages are acid-free, so they are easy to preserve. 

For a more substantial notebook, choose Leuchtturm. These notebooks helps you get organized with numbered pages, a blank table of contents, and a set of stickers for the cover and spine that allow for clear labeling and archiving. I've chosen a notebook with plain paper; you can also choose lined or dots (for bullet journals). 

The Miracle Time Cube is perfect for overcoming procrastination. You can set it to 5, 15, 30 and 60 minutes and research, write, or edit until it beeps. 

What gifts are you looking forward to giving and receiving? 

To learn the preservation secrets used by libraries, archives, and museums to protect their priceless materials (that you can also use for your family heritage items), read my book, Creating Family Archives: A Step-by-Step Guide for Saving Your Memories for Future Generations.

Creating Family Archives: A Step-by-Step Guide to Saving Your Memories for Future Generations By Margot Note Buy on Amazon

Digitization and Digital Preservation in Heritage Organizations

Digital preservation requires two activities: digitizing and preserving digital objects. 

Digitization is a complicated task involving the coordination of several different types of activities. As a result, projects may need to focus on these functions to varying degrees at phases of their life cycle as they move out of a start-up phase and into creation and ongoing maintenance. 

Many of these functions are tasks that can be accomplished by project personnel, so, unsurprisingly, staff is the largest category of expense for digitization projects. However, it is also worth noting that performing these activities may entail significant costs that are not staff-related, such as hardware, software, project overhead, and professional development. 

Digitizing converts analog materials into digital form. If users access the digital copies, minimizing handling of the analog originals, the digital copies perform a preservation function. They can also perform a preservation role by serving as backups. Digital reformatting is guided by best practices and technical specifications to ensure that the materials are converted at a quality level to support user needs. 

Preserving digital objects involves preserving digitized materials, including those resulting from the reformatting process, to ensure their longevity and usability. Threats to the preservation of digital resources include software and hardware obsolescence, digital media fragility, context preservation, and integrity and authenticity preservation. 

Digital Preservation Under Development 

The mechanism for long-term management of digitized assets is no different from that for management of born-digital assets. While refreshment and migration of digital collections are well-established, the protocols and policies for preservation are still under development. Archivists should keep updated on the latest digital preservation trends, and, in time, best practices, policies, and procedures will mature and become commonplace. 

Storage and Formats

The amount of data generated by digitization projects can be a storage challenge, especially with redundant copies and regular backups. However, the actual cost of storage remains unclear. In addition, archivists lack consistent metrics for the long-term management of storage systems, and they do not know how economies of scale might reduce unit costs. 

While the long-term preservation of digital materials is unknown, the formats generated by digitizing textual materials will be more consistent and stable than most of the born-digital materials that archivists will be responsible for in the future. Archivists use the target file formats based on preservation concerns, and their ubiquity helps ensure that migration paths will be available. The homogeneous files archivists create will be less difficult to preserve than the born-digital ones created by everyone else.

Sustainability

Any assessment of what archives can achieve must consider factors of sustainable collection development, including a strategic view of the role of collections to serve institutional missions and lifecycle planning for collections. A strategic view is revealed by looking at how closely the results serve the mission and the decision-making process, such as deciding what to convert to serve, which ends. Ensuring long-term access to digital collections is contingent on lifecycle management. For example, how does the budget reflect the creation of the digital scans and the metadata, storage capacity, preservation tools, and user support?

It Never Ends

Often, digitization is thought of as a short-term project for archives. However, while digitization activities may have an end date, the resulting digital surrogates continue to exist after the project. Therefore, any organization considering a digitization project must also create digital preservation strategies for their newly digitized materials. Digitization projects, which have had a resurgence during the coronavirus pandemic due to an increase in virtual users, are opportunities to build archival teams and skill levels and raise the profile of archival project team members. 

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

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Archival Responsibilities

The primary responsibility of an archival repository is to gain control of its holdings to enable discovery.

Collections with legal restrictions, fragile or damaged materials, materials with high theft potential, or collections with ethical or culturally sensitive considerations require interventions by archivists and may not be accessible for users.

Three Archival Duties

Archives provide a trio of services. The first is findability. Materials should have enough physical or intellectual documentation or arrangement to provide searching, browsing, and other discovery methods. Access is second. Where rights and security allow, materials should be viewable and functional in applicable hardware and software with the quality and integrity of the original and in a manner that supports the organization’s mission and needs. The last service is sustainability. Archival materials should maintain their findability and accessibility with reliability across time, locations, platforms, systems, and changes in technology and ownership.

Five Categories of Responsibility

Irrespective of the scope of the archival institution in question, archivists have a responsibility to perform certain core duties to ensure that the archival holdings in their care are preserved and managed as authentic and reliable documentary evidence. Archivists are responsible for five major categories of responsibility.

Archivists adhere to an archival management framework, including identifying and respecting relevant legislation, policies, standards, and procedures and establishing the organizational and financial infrastructure to manage archival holdings effectively and appropriately.

Secondly, they maintain a stable physical environment for the receipt, storage, and handling of the archival holdings in the institution’s custody, regardless of the form and medium of the materials, to preserve the materials themselves or the information and evidence they contain as long as possible.

Archivists also acquire appropriate archival materials in keeping with the institution’s archival vision and mission and secure those acquisitions to protect the archives for the long term.

Archivists gain intellectual control over archival holdings to understand and communicate the nature, scope, content, and context of the materials and make those materials available for the creators or donors of the records and researchers.

Lastly, archivists support and foster access to (and use of) the holdings and services of the institution, in keeping with its mandate and vision and with respect for the rights of both the donors and creators of archives, sharing archival resources as widely as possible.

Essential Skills

Archivists can perform these duties because they depend on their skills and qualifications. Archivists are analytical. They decide which material should be preserved. Thus, they need to determine the importance, origin, and history of the material they work with. They are tech-savvy because they need to use databases and software programs and perform digital preservation tasks. Another vital skill is communication; they interact with internal and external users, helping them find and retrieve information. They also need to communicate with decision-makers, who might not understand all the work and resources needed to maintain a historical legacy. Archivists succeed when they are inquisitive. They need to conduct independent research for their work and suggest to others how to best research using their collections. While well-versed in history, archivists also need to be forward-thinking, with an ability to anticipate and prepare for changing uses of archived information. Lastly, archivists must be organized. They need to store records in a way that preserves them and makes them retrievable, developing logical systems for both themselves and researchers to use.

Putting It All Together

Archivists use many techniques and strategies to manage, control, and use their information assets. They work to gather, process, store, access, use, share, and preserve records of enduring value. Archivists focus on their duties, responsibilities, and skills and bring the past to the present and the future.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

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Privacy Concerns in Archival Records

Archival records contain important historical information. As primary sources, they allow users to get as close to the past as possible. Often they contain information that legally or ethically should remain private. 

Subjects are often unaware of their representation in archival collections, which leaves archivists in the difficult position of allowing access while protecting individuals’ rights. Archivists attempt to resolve this conflict so that the interests of the repository, records creators, and researchers are supported. The balancing act is further complicated with the digital world as archivists determine the subjects’ expectations regarding online access. 

The Limits of the Law

Sometimes the decision to withhold information from digital archives is clear under federal law, such as personal health information or educational records protected under the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), respectively. In addition, laws also protect against the disclosure of personally identifiable information (PII). PII includes any information maintained by an organization, including but not limited to education, financial transactions, medical history, and criminal or employment history. It also includes information that can be used to determine an individual’s identity, such as their name, social security number, date and place of birth, and other personal information linked to an individual.

The 24/7/365 Reading Room 

There are legal and ethical obligations associated with the digitization of archival records. For example, the Society of American Archivists (SAA) code of ethics requires that archivists protect the privacy rights of both donors and the individuals and groups who are the subjects of archival records and deal with the ethical obligation to provide access to historical sources for research purposes. 

Digital records present different legal concerns because with digitization, the materials become more available, and with broad access, any private information disclosed can reach a much wider audience and, therefore, cause more harm. In addition, the obscurity of confidential information in physical collections is troubled by digital archives, which enable precise searching across documents by a global audience; before digitization, researchers would have to travel to reading rooms and search physically within collections to find the same information. 

Forget Me Not

The right to be forgotten is the right to have private information about an individual be eliminated from Internet searches and other directories under some circumstances. The specifications of this right are still being developed and argued internationally. However, as more materials become digitized and available online, materials that we thought were limited in availability—like a negative news story about an individual in a local paper published decades ago—now live online seemingly forever. 

Archives become publishers of the material in digital collections, making it more likely to be held legally liable for publishing private information. Protecting private information is a challenging issue in archives since many archivists see their responsibilities of maintaining privacy and promoting access as values in conflict. 

Strategies for Privacy in Archives 

Consequently, archivists have employed strategies to assess sensitive information and reduce the risks of causing privacy-related harms. Archivists have replicated many processes to help ameliorate privacy risks in digitization work, including selection policies and procedures, contacting donors and subjects for permissions, and redacting sensitive information. Strategies include careful selection of materials for digital publication, the possibility of getting input from third parties mentioned in archival collections, creating policies for handling potential complaints, and tailoring access to sensitive collections. In addition, archives often include take-down policies that allow archival subjects to request the removal of online material. 

For example, if archivists find records with PII, they must judge their potential value for research and decide the next steps. If the record has high potential research value, archivists will want to keep it in the collection. They can physically remove it from the collection and place it in a restricted box, or keep it with the collection and redact only the sensitive information. Redaction can be done for digital documents by software and physical documents by obscuring the information and making a copy. If the document has no research value, archivists can deaccession it and officially remove it from the collection.

Supporting Everyone’s Interest

No matter what strategies they use, archivists must balance legal mandates and ethical concerns with accessibility. They should provide as much access as is responsible, given the information the records of enduring value contain. 

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

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Legal Records in Archives

Legal history depends on primary sources related to litigation. Rich with research value, case files typically fall into three categories: open public documents; working files—which fall under work product privilege—and client correspondence, which cannot be shared. 

Attorney-Client Privilege

In addition, many documents within case files are protected by attorney-client privilege. The attorney-client privilege protects documents, oral advice, and items created by the client or lawyer and supplied to the lawyer as part of the legal consultation. 

Attorneys are always concerned about confidentiality and the disclosure of records and information. However, ethical obligations bound attorneys to preserve the relationship between attorney and client and maintain their communication in confidence. This principle encourages full, frank discussions between attorney and client in the interest of the administration of justice. 

Work Product Privilege 

A similar challenge is the work product doctrine, which protects materials developed by an attorney for litigation from discovery, prevents unwarranted inquiries into the lawyer’s files and mental impressions, and recognizes the need for privacy in planning legal strategy. This doctrine protects the lawyer’s research, analysis, legal theories, notes, and memoranda, prepared in anticipation of litigation or for trial.

In the interest of history, attorneys should not be compelled to divulge the confidences developed during their work. Certainly, the records of civil and criminal cases provide insights into historically important decisions and the handling and preparation of certain types of actions. Moreover, they allow a greater appreciation of the skills of lawyers; this is true particularly for lawyers who have fought—and won—significant legal battles. 

The protections of these privileges extend into the archives. Depositing legal records in an archives does not remove the attorney-client privilege nor make the records available for general perusal without a significant amount of preparation. Only clients may give up their privilege and open their records. Archival repositories must take precautions to prevent the release of confidential records.

Terms for Access

Some archival repositories close sensitive records for a period, such as thirty years from the acquisition date or fifty years after the donor’s death, and then open them once the period has passed. An organization might use access restriction categories: open records, work product privileged, attorney-client privileged, and permanently closed records. Open records are made available immediately upon receipt at the archival repository that holds them. Work product privileged records may be opened twenty, thirty, or forty years after the close of the case. Attorney-client privileged records may be closed for 75 years from the close of the case and 100 years for cases involving minors. 

Permanently closed records include classified documents, documents filed or placed under seal by the court, terms of confidential settlement or agreement, certain medical records (at the attorney’s discretion), and documents that reveal clients’ identities using pseudonyms. They are only opened when the records are declassified, unsealed, the protective order is modified, or the client or the client’s legal representative waives the privilege in writing.

Reviewing Materials

However, for some legal records, and in an organizational culture highly risk-averse, closure periods may be considered unsatisfactory by the organization. One option (which may work for select organizations) may be to hire a lawyer to review the files for confidential, private, or sensitive materials. After reviewing the case files, the attorney will report to the archives team about any materials that should be kept private. An organization may also wish to contact original lawyers to remember any sensitivities to the cases before privilege review. In the future, if warranted, an advisory panel may evaluate issues raised after reviewing the materials. 

Organizations may also wish to reach out to clients and their descendants regarding records made available to the public. Reaching out to clients and their family members can also be coordinated with an oral history project, allowing the people within the files to talk back to the archival record and fill in the gaps in their stories that are partially documented within archival materials. 

Preserving Legal History

Legal history and the valuable information legal archives hold are critical for research and pedagogy. However, making these materials available requires a significant investment of forethought and labor. Archivists, collaborating with their legal colleagues, can help support this endeavor to preserve legal history.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

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Disaster Recovery for Vital Records

Disaster recovery means the readiness to recover records after the disaster has struck. The planning for such an eventuality is part of disaster mitigation, but carrying it out is part of disaster recovery. 

Often connected to treatments for wet or contaminated paper records, similar issues arise with digital records. For example, if digital records are only maintained on local computers or removable media, and the computers and media have been in water for several days, an organization may not be able to recover records from the damaged media. Therefore, having procedures for handling damaged media and then training on those procedures is part of the disaster recovery preparedness. 

Continuity of Operations (COOP)

COOP is an initiative from the last 30 years and is rooted in the need to restore systems in some rational order following a disaster. Many organizations have a COOP plan to address how the organization will respond to emergencies, from a hacker attack to an extended power outage to the destruction of a building. The idea of the COOP plan is to sort out how the organization will go about restoring services to its employees and the public. COOP plans triage information resources into those needed immediately, those that can wait for at least a brief period before being restored, and those that can be brought back later. COOP focuses on getting essential data and applications up and running as soon as possible. While programs and IT lead the COOP planning, archivists and records managers should be involved too.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations also had to pivot quickly to react to remote work environments and changing circumstances. While catastrophic data loss was not a problem, long-term restrictions to access affected the continuity of standard operations. Although no one could have predicted the pandemic and its consequences, organizations that had updated COOP plans may have been able to react quicker and maintain their day-to-day operations easier. 

Records and Data Backup

Backup is simply the most common form of disaster mitigation. It is necessary to have a retention policy for backups and to follow that policy. Backups are subject to search for discovery responses, and keeping old ones around can be a significant liability. IT staff want to keep backups long-term to allow the regeneration of older applications and data, but that can increase risk to the organization. 

IT staff frequently think of backups for recovery purposes as the same as a recordkeeping copy to cover the long-term maintenance of records. Unfortunately, that is not the case. System or security backups are system-dependent. For example, one backup system will not read another backup system’s data. 

Even with organizations with low legal risks, having backups for extended periods can result in costs to search in litigation. Cost figures vary, but costs in the tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars range are not uncommon depending on the number of backups that need to be reconstituted and searched. Even if nothing incriminating is found, the organization is still out the cost of searching the data. 

Incredibly, some organizations have found it cheaper to settle with the opposing party than to conduct the searches of backups for email and other documentation, even though they knew they could eventually win the suit. Word spread about their practices, and eventually instituted a records management program, but that was after millions in settlement costs.

Prepare and Respond

Sudden or unexpected incidents, natural or manufactured, can damage records and their storage facilities. A well-planned response is vital to reduce the level of damage and loss. Archivists, records managers, and their colleagues need to prepare for and manage records emergencies. By preparing with records emergency planning, risk management, and training, they can respond with damage assessment and utilizing records recovery services to protect their vital records.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

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Protecting Vital Records from Disaster

Traditionally, vital records were the least interesting or desirable collection to steward in archives and records management. Vital records predated the digital era and their preservation began when information professionals microformed vital materials and stored them at a safe remote location.

Lessons Learned

Archivists may have organized and preserved vital records once, but the problem is that vital records are an ongoing issue, not a one-time situation. The events of 9/11, unfortunately, changed that perception for American archivists because the threat of sudden catastrophic loss became real. A newfound urgency was reinforced by Hurricane Katrina when the records of many organizations were destroyed due to flooding. More recently, new stories covered data loss either through natural disasters, accidental mishaps, theft, or malicious destruction. As a result, the protection of records has come to the attention of organizations large and small. 

Timing is Everything

Vital records include continuity of operations records and rights records. Continuity of operations records should be covered as part of the process to return to daily operations as soon as possible. Rights records refer to those necessary to document and support the organization’s rights, its employees, and clients universally understood. There may be no need to access rights records immediately after a disaster. However, the organization will need them longer-term, and planning for their protection is an essential part of the vital records program. For example, records relating to employee benefits may not be needed immediately, but they are necessary to guarantee the rights of the employees. Today, most rights records are digital and should be handled as part of a disaster recovery plan. However, there may be records where the legal—that is, the official, signed copy—is still maintained in hard copy, such as property deeds or loan agreements. In that case, care must be taken to ensure the safety of such documents.

Records Protection Roles

Records managers and archivists have several roles to play in records protection, including:

Disaster mitigation

Records and data backup

Continuity of operations (COOP)

Records recovery

Vital Records Defined

Vital records must be identified as to owner, operator, type of information, and level of protection. Information professionals should conduct periodic audits of the protection process for physical and digital records to ensure that all components work. Audits are painful but necessary, as archivists learn from the mistakes and omissions made in the training exercises. Archivists also must correctly maintain the environments in which vital records are stored and ensure that the equipment for transporting, storing, and housing vital records are appropriate.

The first step for any of these activities is understanding what information assets there are and what level of protection they deserve based on their risks and their consequences of loss. Threats include natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and manufactured disasters such as fire, system crashes, hackers, and human error.

Disaster Mitigation

Disaster mitigation is the program undertaken to minimize damage in the event of a cataclysmic event. Having identified significant threats (such as hurricanes or floods), archivists plan for mitigating the effects of the disaster, if one may hit. The plan includes changes to current business practices (such as backups stored in a location not susceptible to hurricanes) and capabilities (contract for a hot or cold site outside of the hurricane zone). It also includes contracting with a firm specializing in data recovery or treating records damaged by water. Information professionals could set up a program to have people work on essential functions from a remote location or move critical functions to another company location. The key to disaster mitigation is not only making the plan but also training to find the hidden flaws in the plan and addressing them so that the most important records to an organization are not lost forever. 

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

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Sampling Case Records

In my last blog post, I discussed case files—often voluminous records that contain sensitive, personal information about individuals. Archivists have several appraisal options to consider when reviewing case files:

Retain all records permanently.

Retain only key documents from the files.

Take a sample or selection of the records.

Take an example of the records.

Refuse to accept the records.

Destroy all records.

Sample vs. Selection

There is a difference between a sample and a selection. Sampling records allows archivists to choose items or files from a series in such a way that the items or files chosen are a reliable representation of the whole. Selecting records helps archivists choose individual items from a series to obtain a qualitative reflection of some predetermined significant characteristic of the whole.

Case files, because they are bulky and voluminous, are often seen as candidates for sampling. Yet, they are also a reflection of individual voices and society’s interactions with the individual. Thus, they are interesting for legal rights protection, genealogical research, longitudinal data, and documenting public policy. 

Types of Sampling

Statistical sampling allows archivists to save a portion that represents the whole, based on the idea that every file has an equal chance of being chosen. Sampling can be systematic, such as every nth file, assuming that the record population is already randomized. Archivists may use random number tables, with every file assigned a unique number.

Random tables are awkward to use. Systematic sampling is easier to conduct, so it is chosen more frequently. Many think that systematic sampling is statistically equally valid in most cases. Statistical sampling requires that the files be homogenous. Since archivists need to calculate the amount to select, relative to the size of the series, open-ended series are problematic.

Most archivists are not statisticians, so may not be comfortable with criteria to use in assessing sampling issues. These include variance (determining homogeneity), specified degree of accuracy (determining the required degree of accuracy), and level of confidence (degree of certainty that the specified degree of accuracy will be achieved). 

Congressional constituent correspondence has often been sampled in this fashion. These tend to be huge files with repetitive types of letters. In general, constituent mail consists of service cases in which a Congressional representative has intervened with a federal agency for a constituent, requests for information and publications, and correspondence regarding pending legislation or current issues. 

Many archives decide that retaining a portion of those files retains the records’ characteristics with minor loss, especially since constituent correspondence files are often quite similar from state to state.

Purposive sampling is a technique of selecting a limited number of typical items to represent the larger group. For example, the records of one regional office may represent them all. The selection of the portion to retain is made on a non-mathematical basis. This approach is appropriate for use in cases where statistical reliability is not an issue, and there are various ways to define what to retain. 

Systematic sampling is a technique for selecting items from a group based on some formal characteristic without regard to the content of the items. Examples of systematic sampling include pulling all files of a given size (assuming that larger files contain the most interesting, complex information) and pulling all files in which the surname begins with a given letter. Although easy to implement, this method is not statistically valid.

Exceptional sampling is a technique of selecting a subset based on unusual or essential qualities. Examples of criteria used for exceptional sampling include controversial subjects, notorious or famous individuals, and “firsts.” Although not statistically valid, exceptional sampling can frequently capture materials commonly requested by patrons.

Illustrative sampling is a method that selects a portion from a series based on the archivist’s judgment, which specific criteria may inform. This methodology might occur when an archivist knows she needed examples that made certain points such as for exhibit purposes, for example.

Appraisal First

It is also important to remember that sampling should come after appraisal. Archivists do not want to appraise the sample; they want to sample based on the appraisal decision. Archives also need to document what they did and the choices they made in order for researchers to know what they can do with the data.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

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Handling Case Files in the Archives

A case file is a collection of documents relating to a particular investigation or supporting some administrative action.

Case files are sometimes referred to as project files or dossiers, although that term has a more general meaning as a file. Case files are often found in the context of social services agencies, and Congressional papers. Examples include criminal investigations, patient records, and tenure files. The types of documents in each file in a series of case files tends to capture the same categories of information about each case. Therefore, archivists can have case files in many records: legal and court records, social welfare records, public records and private papers.  

Case files have fundamental characteristics: 

They tend to focus on families and individuals, through the agency that establishes the case.

They occur in both public and private agencies.

Records creators can be individuals, but more often institutions.

Case files often contain personal information that impacts access, and thus appraisal.

A Short History

The literature suggests that case files first began to predominate in the 1930s when the organization and provision of health and welfare services became a major societal function, resulting in different records and a considerable increase in volume. Around that time, records were considered confidential, whereas previously there was more of a presumption of openness. Over time, case files tended to become more client-centered, resulting in more personal information. Thus, social welfare agencies began to develop policies to control access. 

Access Concerns

Unfortunately, due to the way institutions and organizations tend to do their work, the types of documents that one finds in case files also tend to wander into other administrative series. Archivists must understand the organization to anticipate where these kinds of files and documents might exist in a collection or record group.

Specific laws apply to access, such as the Privacy Act, Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA); while these are examples of American laws, other countries may have similar regulations. The ability to provide access to the records is a serious appraisal concern, and one which comes up frequently with case file types of material. Beyond the legal issues are ethical ones. Files contain potentially valuable, sensitive information on individuals who have no idea their records are in a public institution.

How do these appraisal issues factor into selection decisions? There are various options:

Do not accept the records.

Close the files for a period (often 50 or 75 years).

Obliterate identifying information.

Require researchers to sign a “hold harmless” statement.

Provide access only to aggregate data or prohibit use of individual names.

Review researchers’ notes.

These decisions will also be based on whether research value and use is social science or genealogical. If social science, then aggregate information often suffices. If genealogical, the identifying information is crucial.

Sampling

Another option is sampling, the process of selecting items from a collection for preservation to stand for the collection as a whole. With sampling there is a tension between theory and practice. In theory, sampling is a method. In practice, how does an archivist carry this out?

Sampling preserves significant values of the whole in the portion selected for retention. Sometimes that is defined as culling the most significant, or most representative items. It is sometimes based on the idea that if a portion of the whole is chosen, one can generalize about characteristics. Sampling is often used to reduce bulk, to which avoids the more challenging appraisal decisions.

Sampling is usually applied to certain records, such as civil and criminal court case files, other public records files, Congressional constituent correspondence, and social welfare case files.

Making Decisions

Determining what to do with case files—to balance legal and ethical obligations against research values—depends on the nature of the records and the repositories that will preserve them. Navigating access involves thoughtful consideration by archivists and their colleagues.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

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