by Rick Barry,
Barry Associates
This paper was originally written and published as a book
review in Archives and Manuscripts,
the journal of the Australian Society
of Archivists, November 1998, Vol. 26, No. 2, p. 424. Subsequently, I have developed it into an
essay that also raises questions for the archives and records management
community, policy makers and for society more generally. This is that subsequent and otherwise
unpublished essay. It contains both the full text of the original review and my
own commentary on some of the important issues that the book raises.
The book: Unbridled Power: Inside the Secret Culture of the IRS, by Shelley L. Davis,
with a foreword by Mary Matalin, New York: HarperBusiness, 1997, 284 pp.
Hardcover. ISBN: 0-88730-829-5. Available through Amazon.com, which at the time of writing
assigned to it the “ Avg.
Customer Rating” .
R.B., March 2001.
Are you afflicted by archives and records management
(ARM) literature that you can’t read in bed?
Do the discourses of theoreticians make you sleepy? Do the writings of ‘policy wonks’ make you
yawn? Do you get the nods in
conference presentations? Do you long
for some ARM literature that lights a fire in your belly?
Search no more.
Here is one that you can read in bed – and not to fall asleep with. Indeed, there is the risk that your pillow
partner might wonder if you are reading a salacious book covered with a
respectable, professional looking jacket.
Shelley Davis has done us all a favor – and, so far
as I can see, with little more than a “Thanks for sharing” from the archives
profession and the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). She feels her work and book tried to
elevate both NARA and the profession.
She has done something that I don’t know anyone else has cared enough to
do: observed – from the outside looking in – the recordkeeping function and
community at work in a powerful government agency, the U.S. Internal Revenue
Service (IRS), the agency charged
with the collection of Federal income taxes.
Davis says that she wrote about what she saw the way
she saw it. The story isn’t
pretty. She uses real names and real
dates. According to Ms. Davis, no one
has felt her story to be untrue or sufficiently inaccurate to sue or even
threaten to sue her for libel or defamation of character – even in the
litigious United States. The book does
not suggest that what she observed at IRS is representative. On the contrary, it was the sharp contrast
to the way in which she had become accustomed to serious recordkeeping in the
Pentagon that made her realize just how unrepresentative was her experience at
the IRS. She uses this story to warn us
what can happen when virtually no one is watching the store or able or willing
to do something about it – agency managers, archival organizations responsible
for receiving related archives, legislative oversight committees, professional
associations and public advocacy groups.
Certainly this book should be of great interest to
people in the United States – ARM professionals, public officials, legislators
and other elected officials, and a public concerned about accountability and
human rights. But why should anyone outside of the U.S. care about such matters
or wish to read this book? Because the
issues it gives rise to, the thoughts it should make us all pause to consider,
are relevant in most countries where there exist powerful government organizations
charged with carrying out such functions as intelligence, criminal justice, tax
collection, social services, collection of census or other sensitive personal
information, such as social services.
These are organizations that, in democracies, are
typically the concern of legislative oversight bodies because they can be among
the most intrusive into the personal lives of ordinary citizens and the
attendant dangers inherent in their potential abuse of power. This book is about one such agency of the U.S.
Federal Government – the IRS, an agency of the Treasury Department. The book is about one such agency and is
told by an experienced government historian who was no stranger to
recordkeeping[1].
When such organizations – in whatever country – fly under
the radar of oversight bodies and allow recordkeeping to be carried out by
ill-trained or uncaring staff, the potentially damaging impact on human rights
and accountability under the law can threaten the underpinnings of government
by law. It is even more so the case
when they cause legislation to come about that can then be interpreted in ways
that exempt them from the other laws and professional norms specifically
established to govern proper recordkeeping.
It is all the more ironic if this is done in the name of protecting the
confidentiality of personal information.
This is an issue appearing again in the new
Millennium with respect to e-commerce and e-business legislation, such as the Uniform
Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) and
Uniform
Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) about which ARM professionals
have been virtually silent. Yet,
definitions of what is a record in the e-business/e-commerce environment are
being crafted into legislation by attorneys with little or no knowledge of
recordkeeping or involvement of recordkeeping professionals. When so fashioned,
it should not be surprising that such definitions are likely to reflect the
demands and conveniences of business interests rather than accepted
professional standards. From what I can
gather from colleagues in other countries, this is not unique to the U.S.
As the old saying goes, there are two things in life
that no one escapes: death and
taxes. The U.S. has no monopoly on
either. Nor does it have a monopoly on government
organizations that abuse their power.
And it is not alone in having such organizations that purposely, or
through executive neglect, turn recordkeeping practices into enablers of such
abuses – no more than Australia is alone in its “Heiner case”[2], or Canada or France in their “Tainted
Blood” cases. Having practiced in
countries in most continents of the world, from the Americas to Europe, Africa
and Australia, I have observed and heard about all too many such cases – again
illustrating the international relevance of this book.
Just as we find ARM problems to be in many ways
international in character, we also find our professionals crossing boundaries
much more commonly these days to share professional problems and experiences
and to seek underlying common solutions.
This has always been the case in the International Council on Archives
but is increasingly the case in national professional groups. We observe this in many ways:
Why is this?
Because, like everything else, ARM professions increasingly are seeing
the challenges and opportunities of global politics, economics and
communications and are willing to take good solutions wherever they find
them.
Without revealing too much about “who did it,” the
basics can be briefly summarized by drawing from political pundit Mary
Matalin’s foreword to the book:
“Shelley Davis says she isn’t as afraid for herself as she is for the country, unless the IRS is reformed, and reformed fast. … This is a person whose only crime was trying to do her job, as best she could. Part of that job involved telling her bosses, ‘Heads up, guys, but do you know we’re breaking the law?’
“As she reveals, the IRS routinely destroys its own records. That’s against federal law. And the problem with breaking the Federal Records Act is, as Shelley says, that without records, there is no history. Without records, there is no accountability.”
Davis arrived on board the IRS in 1988 as the first
and, until now, last IRS Historian, full of the challenges of the new job, but
also failing to fully appreciate until it was too late that this was no
Department of Defense, where she had been a historian for the previous nine
years, when it came to recordkeeping.
This naiveté was very soon replaced by the cold light of daily
experience. When she first visited IRS
for the job interview, she noticed that, very much unlike the Pentagon, the
corridors were barren of any sense of history in the form of remembrances or
icons of the past – portraits, pictures, framed copies of key documents,
sculptures, models or other tokens of respect to the organization’s visions,
traditions, leaders, ideas. Her initial
instincts that this organization didn’t have a sense of national history or its
place within that history or even, of its own history, were to be painfully
confirmed in subsequent days and years.
Davis’ next hint came after taking up her new post
when the head of the records management organization, someone who had been
transferred to that position from her earlier job as a personnel officer, told
her that she would have to wait a couple of weeks before she could meet with
her because she was just too busy.
Davis reports that, when the two did finally meet, her invitation to
cooperate was icily received. This was
a harbinger of things to come. More
importantly, she found great difficulty in getting answers to simple
questions: Where are the records? How many are in the National Archives? How
often do you send records to NARA? Are
there places in the building I should look to find records?
The picture that emerged, following visits to NARA
and discussions with the NARA appraisal archivist for IRS, was that IRS had
been successfully ignoring for decades the apparently all-too-private NARA
requests for the transfer of records of archival value. It was explained that NARA simply did not
have the legal teeth to prevent IRS or any other agency of the government from
doing otherwise. If anything, things
had gotten worse over the years rather than better. There were independent revelations to Congressional officials
that IRS staff frequently violated the privacy of citizens by viewing the
records of citizens who were not part of their authorized cases at all –
neighbors, Hollywood celebrities, political figures, etc. Congress heard and tightened up the Internal
Revenue Code.
In 1976, Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code
was revised by Congress to include severe punitive measures for anyone found to
be misusing confidential taxpayer information.
However, this change provided IRS a new “6103 defense” upon which to
deny access to, or accessioning of, IRS policy and administrative records
including records of its Commissioners that contained no information that could
be traced back to any individual taxpayer. Nor would it disclose records on
policy and procedural matters regarding how individual audits were selected and
conducted, or that would show whether or not any were politically directed from
outside the IRS, even where taxpayer identification was not at issue. Moreover, if the intelligence community
makes use of records redaction practices to protect intelligence methods and
sources, couldn’t the IRS do the same where taxpayer identity might be at
issue?
Consequentially, access to non-taxpayer records –
even those that had been released to journalists and researchers prior to 1976
– were denied. One of the few IRS
records Davis found at NARA was a refund letter to President Lincoln’ estate
informing that he had overpaid his taxes.
IRS contended that, under 6103, it would be illegal to permit public
access to that document.
Davis reports how, for seven years, she tried to
change all of that by working through the system until her options were reduced
to either living with what she knew was a very bad situation or becoming, very
much out of her character, a whistle blower.
She wrote a report summarizing the situation and warning IRS management
that the agency was operating in contradiction to the law. She sent the report to the Archivist. She received a ‘Thank you’ note that did not
address the substantive issues she had raised in her report. When the options closed down, she finally
resigned her position in December 1995.
With Government doors closed to her, she subsequently turned to writing
this book.
ARM practitioners, as well as professional
organizations and educators in these fields, in countries the world over will
hear messages that may sound like echoes reflecting off their own societies and
governments. The paragraphs below
summarize some of the important questions this book gives rise to and lessons
that this reviewer learned from reading Davis’ book.
From the most basic organizational standpoint, how
are powerful public organizations run?
What are their key internal policies, practices and decisions? What
deliberations are behind them and how do they change over time? How is accountability assured? How do legitimate overseers, investigators
or researchers shine light into the inner workings of such organizations in the
absence of access to authentic, reliable, complete and well-maintained trustworthy
records?
Especially when records of continuing value are
regularly destroyed without ever having been appraised, scheduled, and
accessioned or – where schedules do exist – disposed of in a manner that
violates such schedules or related laws?
That is the stuff of this book.
Preservation is a hot topic in the ARM community. We worry greatly, as we should, about
continued access to records in the face of technological obsolescence. We conclude: we should concern ourselves not simply with the technological
longevity of physical storage media on which records are maintained, but also
with whether the technological tools (hardware and software) will be available
in future to access and make such records understandable even if the media
survives.
Davis’ book does not address those issues[5].
Rather, it addresses the prior socio-organizational issue: are we losing access to important records
because they are not created in the first place or because they are being
destroyed illegally or improperly through neglect or poor management before
technology ever becomes an issue? As
important as technological issues are, our first concern should be to ensure
that appropriate documentary evidence of what has transpired is produced in the
form of trustworthy records. Only when
both the socio-organizational and technological issues are properly addressed
can we ensure that records are worthy of supporting the accountability aims of
an organization or society.
Who oversees how well and responsibly organizations
such as the IRS are run when even presidents, prime ministers, legislators and
legislative oversight committees fear that looking too deeply into such
organizations might put them at personal risk of retaliation, even if they are
‘clean’ in their own tax dealings?
Davis recounts in her book how she was threatened with arrest in the
lobby of the IRS building on her last day at work when she was falsely accused
of possessing two building passes.
Recent Congressional investigations into the workings of the IRS, at
which she testified, revealed that even some congressmen who had earlier called
for closer examination of the agency indicated that they had subsequently been
targeted.
Archivists, professional associations and academic
leaders, as well as public policy makers and the public at large need to be
alert to the crucial importance of proper archives and records management
legislation at it governs all levels of government and the private sector. What are the leading legislative models for
the organization of national, state and local archives and the appointment of
their archivists (civil service, political appointment, reporting
relationships)? How can such models
help to minimize the incidences of ARM professionals being placed in
adversarial or non-consequential positions vis-à-vis the societies they serve? Why has the subject of organization
arrangements and alternatives for national, state/provincial and local archives
only very recently and seldom been addressed in research projects, professional
conferences and journals? Is it seen to
be unimportant? Is it because such
organizations are typically the creatures of very old legislation that cannot
be changed in the short term?
Recent examples of the recognition of organization as
a critical public policy issue include the “English Report” on the organization
of the National Archives and Library of Canada. The appointment of the
National Archivist of Canada in 1999 was delayed for a year or more until that
study was completed and acted upon.[6]
A similar study was recently completed in New
Zealand, again as a prior condition for the appointment of a new National
Archivist of New Zealand that was pending at the time of this writing. The position of the National Archives of Australia and the
National Archives of New Zealand (renamed Archives
New Zealand in 2000) were elevated as a result of these studies. The theme of the 1997 National Association
of Government Archives and Records Administrators (NAGARA) conference was organizational change
and included presentations on organizational studies and issues by representatives
of the U.S. and Canadian national archives.[7]
In some cases, the national archives is a party to or
the subject of litigation thus limiting, sometimes for several years, the
national archivist from speaking out on ARM topics of central importance to the
profession. In others, where there is a
strong tradition or legal system of separation of powers at different levels of
government, national archivists are reluctant to speak out on ARM matters of
even widely published cases of egregious abuse of recordkeeping practices at
lower levels of government on the grounds that such cases are out of their
jurisdictions. However good the
reasoning, the message is that there is a lack of a national professional or
ethical compass for the ARM profession.
In still other cases, particularly in some developing
countries, national archivists and national archives organizations are not
given the status of a national archives as such and are very low on the
government totem pole, organizationally and in terms of seniority of the
director’s position. In all these
cases, it makes for a situation in which the national archivist and national
archives organization have a very limited role in providing leadership for the
profession in their countries.
Particularly when the staff of national archives
makes up a major element of national professional associations, they may act as
a dampening influence on the potential for the professional association to fill
the leadership gap for the profession.
In countries where neither the national archivist nor the national
professional association are, for whatever reasons, fulfilling a central
leadership role for the profession – for example monitoring for unethical
practices, as we expect other professions to do – where do we expect
professional leadership to come from?
The International
Council on Archives’ CITRA group could provide a great service to the
international ARM community by sponsoring some scholarly research into organizational
models at the national level, but has shied away from any such role. Similarly, the NAGARA and like organizations
in other countries could perform a similar service at the state/provincial and
local levels.
And what about the records of business organizations,
educational and non-profit institutions?
How adequate are the laws that govern their recordkeeping practices
beyond the requirements of tax laws and requirements of regulatory
agencies? What protections are afforded
records managers in the private sector who are pressured to dispose of records
in an unethical manner? Who provides
the professional compass for this group?
In a recent interview by an author writing about
recordkeeping for a Chief Information Officers audience, I was asked: “Could
you provide a checklist for CIO’s to implement a retention schedule in the
absence of a records management professional or unit?” The focus was obviously on meeting minimal
retention requirements of recordkeeping laws/regulations without any
consideration for where retention fit into a broader recordkeeping system or
the importance of taking a professional approach to such a system.
(My response was that I would not suggest any such
easy-bake checklist; although I did offer a 10-step tool for assessing the
state of recordkeeping in the organization.)
Most democratic countries have specific laws
governing proper recordkeeping.
However, they also have many other laws governing other aspects of
government and providing statutory authority for the existence and mission of
government agencies. ARM professionals
and legislators need to be alert to 6103-type changes in laws that govern
individual agencies such as those in the intelligence, social services, tax and
census collection areas to ensure that such laws do not provide improper
hatches through which agencies can escape overarching recordkeeping laws. They equally need to ensure that designated
ARM officials are empowered to deal with agencies that ignore recordkeeping
laws, or to ratchet the matter up to higher authority and the public as
necessary to bring about compliance.
One has to wonder how it is that NARA has been
virtually powerless for the preceding 30 years to change practices at the
IRS. Do we need legislative changes to
give our national archives greater power to invoke assessments of agency
recordkeeping on demand? Should the
national and state archivists be legally established as the final authority
within their executive branches for the handling of recordkeeping disputes?
Should those archivists be required by law to formally notify the President or
governor in cases of agency non-compliance; and, if nothing happens within a
limited time period, to notify the appropriate justice department and
legislative oversight bodies and advertise the situation in the press? Might the very presence of such laws help
to avoid really bad situations before they erupt?
What about whistleblower and Freedom of Information
legislation? Might they be better
related to recordkeeping? Do our professionals tend to look down on
whistleblowers and, if so, why?
Shouldn’t ARM professionals be in the forefront of whistleblower
protection legislation? Might such legislation not afford a needed umbrella for
those among us who have the intestinal fortitude to stand up for proper
recordkeeping practices when ethics and sound practices are being trashed
within their own organizations?
Periodically, we hear discussion on the various ARM
lists of the tensions between archivists and records managers, between
archivists and historians, and between archivists and information management
and technology specialists. This book
reminds us of the vital importance and changing nature of professional
relationships, putting aside our professional differences and genuinely working
toward more integration of these related functions.
This does not have to mean some kind of homogenized
diet drink in which the identities of the parts are lost in the mix. Rather, the salad is the better metaphor,
where the individual components are easily identified but a common dressing
unites them and the resulting combination is something better than the
individual parts.
It not is possible to integrate these functions and
groups by policy and organizational means while still maintaining the special
perspective and skills that each brings to the table? Should the professional
relationships among these groups be revisited?
Should ARM professionals prepare themselves both educationally and
career-wise in ways to become acknowledged as competitive candidates for chief
information officer roles? Particularly
if these functions become more integrated, is that approach desirable or necessary
to stand a better chance of getting recordkeeping right in a digital records
world?
Even within the ARM field, have we done enough to
better integrate the records management and archives professions and
practices? Why are these groups seen as
separate professions more in the U.S. than in Australia, Canada or Europe? Does the existence of separate professional
societies really help either profession?
Should not both groups have a sound understanding and experience of the
other? In a very modest way of asking
that question, the SAA and ARMA for years have been discussing the possibility
of having a joint conference together.
Since the sites for annual conferences have to be planned many years in
advance, it is unlikely that such an event could happen as a joint annual
meeting. When will both organizations
stop discussing the desirability of a special joint event and do it?
[NB: The Australian Society of Archivist
(ASA) and Records Management Association of
Australia (RMAA) planned their first joint meeting for September, 2001,
see http://www.archivists.org.au/events/conf2001/. A SAA/ARMA Joint Committee has been
established for better coordination of professional interests in the two
organizations.]
The ARM community has done some very worthwhile
development projects in the past several years, especially in the area of
electronic records management. We’ve
done scarce little if any however regarding changing organizational tools for
recordkeeping. What national, state and
local government level organizational models work best by way of minimizing
improper political influence over sound recordkeeping practices?
For example, the New South Wales, Saskatchewan and
Kentucky archivists enjoy similar protections whereby they have a board to
report to that includes representation from their governing legislative and
Supreme Court bodies. How has this
model worked? Would others benefit from
it? How about the different approaches
wherein major decision making is left to the archivist versus the above cases
where the board must decide. Do
archivists see the latter model as giving up power or as a good way to avoid
political interference? What about
university and private sector organizations?
These kinds of questions are worthy of serious research and certainly
have international relevance. There
would be worse topics for funding by the National
Historical Publications and Records Commission, the grant-funding arm of
NARA.
Have ARM professionals become too insular in their
deliberations? What must archivists and
records managers in all their roles – as employees and managers of
recordkeeping organizations, as academicians and researchers and as members of
professional associations – do better than has been done thus far to create a
greater public and organizational awareness and acceptance of the value of
preserving information assets of continuing value whether required to do so by
law or not? How can ARM professionals
better understand, identify and articulate the added value of their own roles
and of the recordkeeping function in their organizations in ways that
executives and other lay people will appreciate and support? What can be done to establish the critical
role of recordkeeping professionals and systems in democratic societies and
governments in ensuring accountability and historical perspective with respect
to their most secretive and closed agencies?
Are we doing enough in our archival studies programs
to forewarn and prepare students who aspire to responsible archivist posts of
the potential minefields and tests of their ethical foundations? Are the products
of such programs able, willing and equipped to take the heat of the kitchen
when their jobs may be at stake? More
importantly do we, as professionals, really want to hear about uncomfortable
ethical cases? Are we more comfortable placing codes of ethics in frames and
hanging them on the walls of our offices than we are looking down some rather
dark holes? I believe that a
forthcoming book by Richard Cox and David Wallace that addresses many
real-life, records-related ethics and social impact cases will demonstrate that
this is a topic that will gain growing interest by ARM professionals and
others.
At a more mundane level, are there inaccuracies in
the Davis book? A couple of people with
whom this reviewer spoke say there are and that Davis had her own agenda in
writing the book. But none would get
specific with me.
Are these behind-the-scene speculations getting in
the way of the bulk of Davis’ observations and messages? If there are questions of this nature,
wouldn’t the profession be better served by dissenters asserting the
inaccuracies or dark agenda, putting them up to the light of day and asking Ms.
Davis in an open forum to defend herself against such assertions? Or else drop them.
Davis’ writing reveals a respect and zeal for good
recordkeeping and archival practices that is rare outside the ARM profession –
and when all other avenues failed, she sacrificed her livelihood and government
career of some 20 years to go public with what she believed to be a very bad
situation.
In a meeting with this author, it was apparent that,
although not bitter, she remains saddened about what she regards as the
dismissal of her assessment report on the state of recordkeeping in IRS (while
still an IRS employee) given by the National Archives and subsequently the
deafening silence awarded to this book by NARA and the ARM community despite
its considerable success on the bookstands.
In an effort to paint a balanced picture of the book
in this review, I attempted to learn from NARA if there were untruths or
inaccuracies in the book. After
organizing a meeting with NARA officials responsible for IRS records, it was
canceled on direction of the NARA General Counsel on the grounds that NARA
should not be asked to comment on a book – even a documentary like this. Fair enough! NARA did provide extensive background materials regarding its own
assessment of IRS recordkeeping practices that, in some important ways, was considerably
at odds with Davis’ account and offered to respond to any specific examples of
differences in findings.
If Davis is not regarded as something of a pariah by
NARA or ARM professional associations, after the successful mainstream
publication of her book, why has she not been invited by these organizations to
speak about her very hard learned lessons – the good and the bad – concerning
recordkeeping during the course of her 20 years as an archivist and
historian? Perhaps it would add a
little pizzazz, not to mention healthy discussion of the relationships between
ARM professionals and historians, to our often otherwise inbred conference
programs.
[NB: Davis was invited to the 1999 SAA Annual Meeting
in Pittsburgh PA. Her presentation was,
“Lessons in Sportsmanship for Archivists Learned from Wrestling with the IRS
Records Bear.” It was one of the
lesser-attended sessions that year.]
Archivists and records managers will not necessarily
agree with Davis’ every point; but this is true with some of the best writings in
professional discourse. Nor will many feel comfortable with her in-your-face
way of putting things or ad hominem
remarks about individuals she encountered at the IRS. She admits that at least some of this was done at the request of
the publishers to spice up what might otherwise have been considered a dull –
even if important – accounting of recordkeeping in a federal agency.
Nonetheless, her story should be of deep interest to
all professional archivists and records managers; and we should not allow her
sometimes off-putting presentation to get in the way of its underlying
accounting. It is a rare event when
someone who is both professionally qualified and a dedicated supporter of both
NARA and the archives and records management field shares a user’s perspective
on recordkeeping practices. Even if
unrepresentative of how most organizations behave, her insights of how it was
done in IRS are worthy of thoughtful consideration for all of us.
Her observations are provocative. But the ARM community should not be repelled
or defensive, or discredit her for that.
The only questions are: Since
they haven’t been challenged, can we assume the basic accuracy of her reporting
and, if not, in what ways? Can we take it and learn from what she has to say?
I, or one, think the profession is quite up to the challenges presented in the
Davis book – possibly even yearning for it.
Remember, this book was intended for public consumption. It is intended to shake up the reader and
induce a better understanding the importance role of records and recordkeeping
in a democratic society. Don’t expect it to read like a paper out of A&M, The American Archivist or Archivaria.
Will we use some less well-done aspects of her
presentation that are emotional or lacking in science to justify ignoring the
basic messages about recordkeeping that she has recorded? Hopefully not! Whistle blowing almost always has those attributes along with
some very important messages that are easy to get lost along the way. Nor should we consider it dishonorable for
whistle blowers like Davis to ‘sell’ there stories when they have usually, and
after deliberation, foregone their jobs and sources of family income to do what
they thought was ethical. Selling their
stories, even if sometimes giving in a bit to the publishers to spice things
up, is small recompense for their lost future careers, income streams, pensions
and health plans.
For reminding us in this book what the best of what
we do is all about, archivists and records managers owe Davis a debt of thanks.
© 2001 Richard E. Barry
[1] Some detractors of this book raise
questions about the author’s credibility and her authority to write such a
book. For this reason, and because the
interaction between the author as IRS Historian and the IRS records management
office and National Archives is such a central element of the book, it is
important to briefly comment on Davis’ background. Although her career was ultimately as a historian, Shelley Davis
gained records management credentials through education, through working in the
trenches and even through marriage.
After receiving her MA in military history from the University of
Nebraska, which included course work in archival studies, she began her professional
career as an assistant archivist at the University Library. She later married an Air Force records
management officer who wrote the Air Force’s records management manual. After-work discussions of records management
issues were not uncommon in the Davis household.
[2] For details of the Australian Heiner case, see the commentary by leading Australasian archivist Chris Hurley on the Records and Information Management On-line Service (RIMSO) website at http://www.caldeson.com/RIMOS/heiner.html.
[3] True at the time of initial writing in 1998.
[4] Duranti and Ardern bring a Canadian perspective to their American colleagues. Duranti, even more than her Canadian perspective brings a perspective from the European tradition of recordkeeping and on diplomatics and its application to contemporary recordkeeping, stemming from her Italian upbringing and practice and doctoral education in Rome.
[5] For an excellent treatise on this subject, see Authentic
Electronic Records: Strategies for Long-Term Access by
Charles Dollar. Cohasset Associates, Chicago, info@cohasset.com,
1999, 248 pp. An excerpt from a
pre-publication version of this book may be found in the Guest Authors section
of this website at www.rbarry.com/CSum1.html.
[6] The Role of the National
Archives of Canada and the National Library of Canada, Report by Dr. John English et al, submitted
to the Honorable Sheila Copps.
[7] Presentations at the 1997 NAGARA conference, including papers by Lewis J. Bellardo, Deputy Archivist of the U.S. and Andrew Birrell, Director General, National Archives of Canada, are available on this website at www.rbarry.com/change.html.