I asked this on the SAA records management section Listserv, am posting it
here, as well.  This includes a an illustrative question I asked a
conference speaker some of you may have heard speak in the past, as I
have.  For those of you who work at universities and colleges that offer
library and information science courses, do your RIM Month activities
include outreach to and from the academic classroom?

The reason I ask is that although I'm a big fan of Rand Jimerson's *Archives
Power*, I find that archival literature has not caught up to where RIM is
in some cases.  Howard Zinn, still mentioned often on Twitter by recent
GSLIS grads from various programs across the U.S., seems especially quaint
to me.  Not so much due to his main theme of inclusion, which resonates
with many, but because he did not consider how RM works, even as it was
then.

I'm curious about formal or informal outreach by college and university RMs
to GSLIS faculty (some of you may have educator duties yourself) during RIM
Month or at any time, actually.  Using examples RMs see in their own dialy work
might be impossible, for undersandable reasons.  Which is why I'm curious
about the use of archival literature in the classroom.  I'm thinking of
issues such as what I asked former Department of Justice attorney Anne
Weismann, later a transparency advocate with the Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.  I approached her after she
represented CREW on a panel Society of American Archivists conference in
2014 and asked this:

"I see many opposing dynamics in records issues.  Your present role and
past role as a DOJ lawyer illustrate them well.  Keep hold of what you say
in transparency advocacy but look at it through the lens of your prior role
in government.  You receive or send electronic records of sensitive
deliberations through email.  Your next step is to declare them non-record
or record, permanent, temporary, transitory.

You know the matter at issue is complex and deliberations useful for
institutional memory and later for historical research in archives by
others.  But you fear the words may be cherry picked and demagogued to harm
your colleagues and department/agency.  Is the existence of the records
statute sufficient for you to declare the item a record, and if
appropriate, put it into a permanent bucket?

Are you tempted to call it Transitory?  With only the final product making
it into the permanent record as "historical?"  Or would you delete it as
non-record, justifying withholding it from the record keeping system
altogether, by pointing to your understanding of RM guidance on manual
declaration that you've received from colleagues within your employing
entity?"

She had no answer for me, just indicated it was an interesting question.
Yet it lies at the heart of many of the struggles many of us are (or should
be) better positioned to understand than the general reader of countless
news stories.  The desire to use modern communications methods to do
business, while reducing the risk of having ones' words weaponized and used
in an adversarial fashion, rather than for pure knowledge.

Or, as university records manager Richard King once wrote on the old A&A
Listserv, in a note which might have been intended to go to a colleague,
not the List, caution in record keeping simply so so nothing will bite
anyone "in the tookis?"
 forums.archivists.org/read/messages?id=139782#139782 .

I have an empathetic understanding of why this occurs, although it took me
a while to reach that point.  (I am a historian dependent on records, after
all.)  My focus is on how to prepare for its mitigation and understanding
the professional context of records now being preserved, whether in
graduate level history courses or in GSLIS programs.

Maarja
[log in to unmask]
Washington, DC
Blog:  Archival Explorations
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__archivalexplorations.wordpress.com_&d=DwIBaQ&c=pZJPUDQ3SB9JplYbifm4nt2lEVG5pWx2KikqINpWlZM&r=b5NZPQUb9_r2rQ3Zd74ATT3aSs9yKyRnJLOhqJvd7fE&m=uNMIobXk-DIVkZH7tkULr-QpHm820KZMP10KVrRUztw&s=yOssDKYthjjeELKoYQgfvOeQbzEvF1ybcOk8yqMKU9Q&e=

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