Against the Clean Record

Every archive I have worked in was tidier than the institution it belonged to. This is not because archivists are deceitful. It is because tidying is continuous and nobody notices any single act of it. A description is improved. A duplicate is deduplicated. A version which was superseded years ago is quietly not migrated to the new system. Ten years later the collection tells a smoother story than the events did, and no one can say when that happened.

Our own institution supplies the argument. Between 1982 and 1986 a stewardship decided, privately and I believe in good faith, what members would be permitted to read about a decision it had taken. Nobody involved was behaving badly. The result is that we cannot now answer an ordinary question about our own past, and that the absence has acquired a meaning far larger than whatever it was concealing.

A record cannot be corrected in public if its earlier form has been made impossible to examine.

That sentence is the whole of my position and it is narrower than it sounds. It is a presumption, not a rule. It applies where the law and our obligations to living people allow, which is a large exception and I do not pretend otherwise. It says nothing at all about material whose only readership is prurient.

Because that is the argument I am most often assumed to be making, let me refuse it plainly. Curiosity creates no entitlement. A reader's interest in a document is not a public interest. I have declined two applications this year on that ground and I would decline them again. Openness is a discipline the institution owes its members; it is not a service to people who like reading about strangers.

The concession my colleague is owed is this. She writes that preservation sometimes removes the person, and I have watched it happen. There is at least one case in our collection where the honest thing was to close the scan and where the catalogue entry alone still does a small amount of damage every year. I signed that treatment note. I do not think my presumption survived contact with it intact.

What I resist is the idea that closure is neutral because it is quiet. A record which is closed with a visible entry and a review date is a decision the Institute can be asked about. A record which is simply no longer there is a decision nobody will ever be asked about, including by the person it was made for.

So we have the worst arrangement except for the alternatives: criteria, a written weighing, a date in February, and two people who disagree continuing to reconcile the Record together. She thinks the review is an annual refusal. I agreed with her at the meeting and asked for it to be minuted, which is the only thing I have won this year.