Comments on Glenn Sanders and Dwight WALLIS posts in this thread.

>umm, if the Harvard U charter got lost, would Harvard really have
problems
>establishing proof of legal identity etc? I suspect they have a few
>photocopies available which a court might be happy with.
>
>In any organisation I've worked in over the last 30 years, all such
[vital] documents are
>easily replaced if lost, by copies which can be obtained from
government
>companies registries, legal advisors offices, or (assuming no
litigation)
>suppliers, although I admit it is embarrassing to ring a supplier and
ask for
>a copy of your own contract.

Glenn,
Don't the copies, say of a Harvard U. charter, invalidate any attempt to
apply a retention on the original document?  Or if there is no
retention, does that give carte blanche to wholesale destruction of
original vital records and any copies standing ready to be reborn as
default vital records.

I can see how you might manage copies in an enterprise setting.  But in
the new web-wide world, how do you apply retentions to documents that
escape into the public?  Is it a case of trying to retain the Djinn
after you've rubbed the oil lamp?


Great chain, everybody!  Thanks to Dwight WALLIS for mentioning...
>To add further to this rather cosmic subject, I recently finished
>Jacques Derrida's "Archives Fever" - a book I can't begin to claim
>that I fully understand. But Mr. Derrida left me with an interesting
>concept: Archives are a "commencement", and are more about
>the future than the past. What we collect now informs our future;
>and that collection is a subjective art, no matter how objective
>we attempt to be.

I know I picked the right profession when someone in it has read Jacques
Derrida who once and last said about our profession's bread-and-butter
medium, "I leave a piece of paper behind, I go away, I die: It is
impossible to escape this structure, it is the unchanging form of my
life." -- http://www.studiovisit.net/SV.Derrida.pdf. 
Grayson Cooke in Transformations J. has an interesting article
discussing Derrida's thoughts on our Everything is Miscellaneous world.
http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_17/article_03.shtml


Observation: our own fears of mortal impermanence may be at the root of
our trying to retain documents permanently.  Here's my contribution to
RIM myths.  I saw written on an records transmittal form, "Destroy Year:
Do not destroy!"


Angel Ramos
Specialist, Records Management
Bridgewater, NJ, USA

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