Memorandum in reply: the obligations owed to the living

MEMORANDUM TO THE STEWARDSHIP MEM/2025/07

IN REPLY TO MEM/2025/04

1. I agree with most of the archivist's paper and with none of its

presumption. That is an awkward sentence and I have left it in,

because it is the position.

2. We hold what we hold because people trusted us with parts of their

lives, in most cases without being told how long the holding would

last or who would be reading in forty years. Continuity is not the

same thing as indefinite possession.

3. The archivist's presumption treats availability as the resting

state and closure as the exception requiring argument. I would put

the burden differently. Where a living person is described, the

question of whether we publish is open every year, and not settled

once by the fact that we published before.

4. A record kept public against the wish of the person it describes

is not a neutral object sitting on a shelf. It is a thing being

done to that person, repeatedly, by us, on a schedule we control.

5. Historical interest is not sufficient. A document may be genuinely

valuable to a reader in 2080 and still be the reason a woman in

Bangor is asked about her father at the shops.

6. I accept that correction may sometimes require withdrawing or

destroying material rather than keeping every version for ever,

and I accept how badly that sits with everything else we say.

7. What I am not arguing. I am not arguing for the reputation of the

Institute, which can look after itself and has too often been

allowed to. Nothing in this paper would close a record because it

embarrasses us; embarrassment is a reason to publish and I would

support a rule saying so. Nor am I arguing for the removal of a

document because a reader finds it uncomfortable.

8. The archivist is right that deletion removes the disagreement. My

difficulty is that preservation sometimes removes the person, and

I do not know how to weigh those two losses in a circular.

N. Whitlock, Steward of Orchard House.