Memorandum on publication and correction

MEMORANDUM TO THE STEWARDSHIP MEM/2025/04

PUBLICATION AND CORRECTION

1. The archive is asked, four or five times a year, to close a record

that someone would rather were not read. The requests are seldom

frivolous. This memorandum concerns what we should do in the

ordinary case, not in the hard one.

2. My position is a presumption and not a rule. Where the law and our

obligations to living people allow it, a record which has been

corrected, superseded or disputed should remain available with its

status plainly stated.

3. The reason is auditability. A record cannot be corrected in public

if its earlier form has been made impossible to examine. What we

are then doing is not correction. It is replacement, carried out by

the same body whose earlier judgement is in question.

4. Our own history is the argument. Between 1982 and 1986 a

stewardship decided privately what members would be permitted to

read about a decision the stewardship had taken. Nobody involved

was acting badly. The outcome is that we now cannot answer an

ordinary question about our own past.

5. Closure should be exceptional and should be recorded as having

happened. A closed record with a visible catalogue entry is a

different thing from a record which has quietly stopped existing.

6. I want to be clear about what I am not arguing. Curiosity is not a

reason to publish anything. A reader's interest in a document

creates no entitlement to it. Where a record can only be read as

an exhibition of a person's difficulty, the archive should decline

to exhibit it, and I have declined twice this year.

7. Where a former member disputes what the Record says of them, the

first remedy should ordinarily be annotation, dissent, correction

or a counter-record entered in their own words, rather than

deletion. Deletion removes the disagreement as well as the entry.

8. I accept that this cannot be the whole answer, and that there will

be cases in which the annotation is itself the injury. I do not

know how to write the rule for those cases. I would rather we said

so than pretended otherwise.

G. Sørhaug, Archivist.