Exchange with a critic, printed entire

[FIRST LETTER, 14 MARCH 2022]

To the Archivist —

I have spent four months with your published material and I want to put a criticism to you directly rather than in print without warning.

Your openness is doing work that openness is not supposed to do. You publish your deficits, your unresolved discrepancies, your unacted access findings, your failures of capacity. The effect on a reader is not scepticism; it is trust. You have discovered that an institution which lists its own faults is believed about everything else, and I do not think you can be unaware of it.

I am not accusing you of dishonesty. I am saying that a confession published annually and in a house style becomes a genre, and a genre is a technique, and a technique is not the same thing as candour. What would it look like if you were doing this badly? I cannot construct it from your documents, and that worries me.

— [name withheld at the writer's request]

[REPLY, 2 MAY 2022]

Dear —,

The first half of your letter is correct and we have no answer to it. Publishing our faults does produce trust, we do know it, and there is no way to publish them that does not. We considered stopping and decided that a private failure list is worse than a public one that flatters us. That is the whole of our reasoning and it may be insufficient.

The second half I can answer with a document. You ask what it would look like if we were doing this badly. It looks like MEM/1992/05, which is in the archive, in which a steward is found to have used a safeguarding procedure to remove somebody he disliked. We publish it because we have to. We do not publish it well: it is catalogued flatly, the finding is four lines, and the two people concerned are not named at their own request, so you cannot check it. That is what our openness looks like when it is genuinely costly, and you are right that it is thinner than the annual accounts.

You may print this letter. You may print it without the first paragraph if you think the concession is a technique too.

— the archivist