From the  Washington Post's Sunday Outlook for November 6, 2005, see the commentary,  "For History's Sake, Nothing Like a Paper Trail" by Russell Riley, professor at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/04/AR2005110402284_pf (registration required)

Most of Dr. Riley's commentary focuses on efforts to reconstruct what happened during various Presidential administrations over the last few decades.  He discusses changes in record keeping, based on what people have told him in oral history interviews, etc.   Michael Beschloss, Lloyd Cutler, Linton Weeks, John Earl Haynes and Eduard Mark have discussed some of this "diminished recordkeeping" elsewhere.  The part of the article which probably caught the eye of records managers is the part which in which a White House aide described shredding his daily work notes each evening.  I would guess that the notes probably fell under the scope of the Presidential Records Act.  I don't know if Dr. Riley asked if he was authorized to destroy them like that.

Dr. Riley writes, "Ever since President Richard M. Nixon got tangled up in the transcripts of his own tape recordings, the White House has operated more and more as an oral culture. Anything that shows up in written records can become a target for a hostile investigator.  Accordingly, White House staffers have learned over the last few decades that the less committed to paper or computer, the better. Those gaps in the written record have made my job -- recording oral histories -- more important than ever. But these imperfect recollections, however candid and enlightening, cannot capture the tone nor match the accuracy of contemporaneous notes."

According to Dr. Riley's research,  "One political aide, according to oral history interviews with two of his colleagues, kept each day's essential observations on a single index card, which was ritually deposited in a shredder on the way out the door each night."

Dr. Riley believes that "The consequences of this behavior for historians will, of course, be tragic. The kinds of written records we have relied on for a millennium to reconstruct the crucial events of the past will be either compromised or in many cases nonexistent, leading to what can rightly be called a vanishing history of the American presidency."

If you want to read more about this, click on the link I provided above.

Maarja

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