Rick Barry makes some excellent points about annotations, marginalia, 
and email.  His John Poindexter-Oliver North example illustrates the 
context issue very well!  (Obviously, there are at least two types of 
duplicates -- exact duplicates and ones which have value added due to 
executive annotations.)

I don't look for a consensus view from this List on the issue of 
official records and duplicates.  There are too many variables in 
organizations for there to be a consensus.  What helps one organization 
can harm another.

An entity with a relatively benign mission and a low risk of being sued 
may view records very differently from one which depends on spin to 
"sell" a product which insiders know to be faulty or even harmful to 
the public.  The former may enourage employees to create records, 
preserve knowledge and to share information internally.   And not worry 
a great deal about how many duplicates or annotated copies of records 
are floating around.  The latter may run totally scared on 
recordkeeping, urging employees to write down as little as possible and 
to keep knowledge of ethical problems to themselves.

Records can be benign, useful tools, the source of knowledge, insight, 
context.  They can help officials benefit from institutional memory and 
production of internal histories; analyze and learn from their 
predecessors' successes and failures;  better understand their clients, 
customers, interest groups, voters, etc.

On the other hand, records can contain information an official wants to 
shield from public view, because it points to wrongdoing or is subject 
to misinterpretation or simply warrants business confidentiality.  A 
successful lawsuit could put a company with a faulty product out of 
business.  Public disclosure of the evidence of questionable activities 
could harm an official's political career.  Or information taken out of 
context simply can be misunderstood by the public and used against an 
executive or a public official, fairly or not.  Or provide ammunition 
for an opponent or competitor.

Obviously, many organizations fall somewhere between two extremes, not 
afraid of records and knowledge but mindful of the need to safeguard 
internal deliberations and records.   The exact balance and assessment 
of risk won't fall out the same way for every organization.

I suspect that people who do little research or who have faced many 
lawsuits probably are more sympathetic to the "keep as little as 
possible for the shortest time" approach.  If there are few records 
around, it may not hurt their ability to do their job.  There even are 
institutions which see little need to rely on corporate memory, 
learning from the past, etc.

Other organizations depend on corporate memory.  People who have to 
analyze past actions are more inclined to see the value in an audit 
trail which answers questions asked by internal clients.  Even the 
marginalia on a handout or the annotations on a copy can provide clues 
as to how something played out, enabling the internal researcher to 
look in the right files to get the needed answer.  Or ask the right 
person what happened during or after a key meeting.  Or conduct oral 
history interviews which use old notes and records as a starting point 
for questions that need answers.

An aside, if I may.  Most historians believe that the best oral 
histories result from looking at records.  It helps to occasionally 
hand internal documents to interviewees to jog their memories.  We at 
GAO did a number of oral histories during the early 1990s.  Soon after 
coming to GAO in January 1990, I helped research an oral history on 
GAO's now defunct International Division.  The discussion of GAO's work 
during the Vietnam War in the narrative and in the appendix was 
especially interesting.  Yes, GAO actually had a sub-office in Saigon 
during the war, established by Comptroller General Elmer Staats in 
1966.  See http://archive.gao.gov/t2pbat8/143539.pdf for the published 
oral history interview.  For the history buffs among you , see the 
chapter on Elmer Staats that I later researched and wrote and web 
published at http://www.gao.gov/about/history/gaohist_1966-1981.htm .  
I included some pictures of our auditors in Saigon.

Well, this is running long, as usual.  Back to records and duplicates.  
 From reading your postings, I can tell that it can be really tough to 
strike the right balance on some of this.  And, as always, much depends 
on where you sit.

Maarja (who has spend most of her nearly 33-years of Federal service 
doing research)


  

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