This post is part of the Intergenerational Conversations series.

Review of William D. McCain, “The Value of Records,” American Archivist 16, no. 1 (1953): 3–11, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.16.1.r33453401378773j.

By Courtney Bailey, Records Officer, North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts [PDF Full Text] | [PDF Article + Full Text]

William D. McCain, the eighth president of the Society of American Archivists (SAA), delivered his presidential address at the 1952 Annual Meeting. He focused especially on the intersection of records management and archives, looking at the historical value of records that warrants their long-term retention. He also touched on the uses of records by the government and the military along with their utility in genealogical and fiscal realms. Much of his address stands the test of time, but there are also some issues McCain did not contemplate that are vital to records managers and archivists today.

McCain indicated that he had read the entire run of American Archivist in preparation for his address and chastised his fellow archivists for demonstrating little interest in documenting the value of the records preserved in archives. He offered three questions to challenge and motivate his listeners, all of which should be a springboard for archivists’ elevator pitches today:

• “Did you ever stop and wonder what useful purpose you were serving in accumulating and preserving records?”
• “Do you consider that you are making any contribution toward the welfare of mankind with your work?”
• “Since you believe that records are valuable, do you think that all people have some idea of their importance?” (p. 6)

McCain praised Venetian professor Baldassare Bonifacio for offering “one of the best statements on the value of records” (p. 10). In his 1632 essay De Archivis, Bonifacioemphasized the irreplaceable value of“‘a well constituted store of volumes and documents and records’” (p. 11) for conveying knowledge and supporting instruction, for promoting clarity, and for maintaining political power.[1] McCain underscored the value of records by pointing to the fragility of memory, suggesting without the “beacon light” provided by records, the conduct of government affairs as well as business and other private affairs would lack the “safe footing” necessary to negotiate future pathways (p. 11). He challenged archivists to embrace a public relations role, specifically to elevate the public perception of their work by focusing attention on how records are created and preserved. So, perhaps the modern challenge for records and information managers is to guide the public to see not only the personal motivations for creating and preserving good records but also the broader good provided to society by archival institutions.

While McCain emphasized the historical value of records, he also acknowledged that grounding records in history becomes a hard sell for archivists when much of the public neither understands nor values history. Even in his day, people seemed more attuned to immediate information than to the reflective analysis that is the backbone of history. Therefore, to bolster his argument, he incorporated many additional examples of records’ values. He pointed out that the practical utility of business and financial records can be more easily grasped by those outside the archives and records management professions than historical value might be. He also pointed to the effective ways the military used records and history to bolster morale and to develop pride and honor among the troops, and he compared this to what local communities can do to engender pride within their populations. Rather than dismissing genealogists as less serious users of archival records, McCain suggested these users have a good grasp on the importance and utility of archival records that makes them particularly good partners for archivists who need to convince the public of the value of their work. Finally, he provided numerous examples of how financial records can be used in the course of litigation and other activities to identify malfeasance.

Reading this address through a modern lens, I recognize two themes worth pursuing to evaluate their relevance to us today: 1) the value of truth in the archives and records management realm and 2) record hoarding. In an era rife with misinformation and disinformation, I find McCain’s analysis of records’ role as an antidote to the untruthfulness of communists quite intriguing. As a historian familiar with the tactics of Americans who were not opposed to exaggerating dangers or conjuring up crises during the Red Scare, I contend that McCain was incorrect in laying the responsibility for untruthfulness solely at the communists’ feet. However, his supposition that untruthfulness can be used to mold and shift public opinion has certainly stood the test of time, as we have witnessed more recently with the emergence of deepfakes or with the Cambridge Analytica scandals.[2] McCain’s solution to untruthfulness was simply to preserve records that capture tradition and precedent and can serve as a shield against instability. He concluded, “If there were no authentic records of our past, the fantastic lying of the Communists would have a far greater effect in their efforts to destroy us” (p. 8). In discussing the value of government records, he also incorporated a striking quote from a former president of Panama who spoke to SAA in 1937 and said, “‘They [public records] are the silent, impartial, reliable and eternal witness that bears testimony to the toils, the misfortunes, the growth and the glories of peoples’” (p. 8). To drive home the point about the necessity of archiving government records, McCain incorporated some of the words of the Archivist of the United States, Wayne Grover, who spoke at SAA’s Annual Meeting in 1950 and who succeeded McCain as the organization’s president in 1953. A fuller quotation than McCain provided emphasizes the danger of a government and an educational system that does not depend on archives:

Compare it with the kind of permanent amnesia that would set in on a government with the factual record of its past, as represented in its archives, obliterated: The hundreds of thousands of documents that give cohesion and consistency to the organization and conduct of our national Government; the wealth of hard-won experience and knowledge, in all its immense and intricate detail; the documents that by the tens of hundreds of thousands record our rights and duties and status as citizens, and link us as individuals into the great chain of past and future.[3]

While archivists still cling to the principle of authenticity, be it through demonstrating the provenance of tangible items or comparing hash algorithms for digital files, bastions of truth and impartiality are harder to come by these days. In 2016, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year was “post-truth,” so it is increasingly challenging to rally around the idea that records can adequately cement a concept of truth.[4] Scott Cline has also demonstrated his reticence to define a singular truth for archivists, instead looking to the virtue of truth as “an ideal toward which archives and archivists strive—not the truth, but rather the multiplicity of truths that animate the diverse communities that create, use, and benefit from archives.”[5] Cline goes on to explain that through a postmodern lens, truth is not objective but consists of “asking the right questions, gathering and presenting defensible evidence, appropriately analyzing, and developing valid conclusions.”[6] Rather than try to identify “the truth,” Laura Millar honed in on evidence as the touchstone that can link memories and facts. She concluded with a challenge, for archivists and records managers and especially for the general public:

Evidence is not a frill. It is a cornerstone of an accountable, responsible democracy. We need to shed the assumption that evidence—records, archives, and verifiable data—will be created as naturally as breathing and then will continue to exist, authentic, whole, and intact, for as long as we want.[7]

Unlike the poetry of the former Panamanian president in the early twentieth century, the professional literature of the last several decades has actively debated the notion that archivists can play an impartial role. Rand Jimerson asserted, “Far from being a neutral repository for recorded memory, archives (and archivists) actively mediate and shape the archival record.”[8] So, while the interest in truth that McCain demonstrated persists, the boundaries of truth and the embracing of impartiality have shifted over the years.

In the other theme of his article, McCain explained at length the title he almost chose for his address, “Shall Our Records Engulf Us?” In the three-quarters of a century since he penned his speech, much has changed about the creation and retention of records, yet McCain touched on many issues that are still relevant to records and information management work today. His analysis of the problems of record hoarding, of the incomplete solutions devised to address unnecessary creation of records, and of the complications researchers face with an overabundance of records all resonate in today’s environment.

The vast number of records being produced by the federal government as a result of the New Deal and World War II had already attuned professionals to the problems of keeping too many records. McCain acknowledged that records management experts were working on this issue and studying ways to “prevent the creation of useless records” (p. 5). Yet McCain pointed to many sources that reinforced the tendency to keep too much rather than taking the time to appraise which records have long-term value, and he highlighted proposed solutions that seemed incomplete—like the US Army’s decision to change a report form’s size rather than limit the frequency with which reports were submitted. In today’s environment, these conversations likely involve digital (or digitized) records, but the outcome is much the same, with any solutions likely to address only partial issues and to demonstrate a willingness to pass the bulk of the problems on to our successors. For example, the National Archives and Records Administration developed the Capstone approach to address the burgeoning volumes of email for federal employees, choosing to frontload the appraisal process into identifying the positions most likely to create and receive emails of long-term value.[9] Yet the quantity of records produced by the federal government remains astronomical.

McCain also cited several scholars who recognized in the 1940s that too many records created a problem for researchers who would have a hard time sifting through to find gems relevant to their pursuits. This trend was exacerbated for many decades after McCain’s address, as most repositories continued accessioning materials but usually only shared in their public catalogs collections that had been processed. In the manual she wrote for the New York State Archives and Records Administration’s Documentary Heritage Program in 1991, Kathleen Roe emphasized the need to provide description of archival collections at least at the accession level, so they could be identified by researchers.[10] The More Product, Less Process (MPLP) movement begun by Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner in 2005 brought the needs of researchers to the forefront of archival processing, but it focused on existing backlogs and was never intended to decrease the volume of records in archival repositories.[11] More recently, some scholars have suggested that archivists apply the MPLP approach to email and born-digital archives so researchers’ needs can also become part of the conversation about these records rather than focusing almost exclusively on the records’ long-term preservation, with no plan for access.[12] Yet the solution for providing adequate access to a huge volume of records—both on paper and digital—still largely evades archivists and records managers.

While I identified several themes in this address that correlate to modern records management, many developments have occurred in the field since 1952 that McCain did not anticipate, including new considerations about what constitutes a record, developments related to the field of genealogy, and a deluge of digital assets that now shape the work of modern records managers. The connotation of what a record is has shifted, with those who manage records naming the field everything from records management to information management to records analysis to information governance.[13] The first two definitions of “record” in SAA’s Dictionary of Archives Terminology read as follows:

• “information or data stored on a medium and used as an extension of human memory or to support accountability”
• “information or data created or received by an organization in the course of its activities; organizational record”[14]

Both modern definitions incorporate an element that McCain did not directly address: data. Although there was undoubtedly data being accumulated in his era, conversations about the retention and usage of big data were not yet occurring.[15]

McCain touched on genealogists’ use of records, but the quantity and variety of information available to genealogists has exploded since his time. Organizations like Ancestry and FamilySearch provide online access to millions of records, many of which they have gathered by sending volunteers across the nation to digitize collections of court records and other relevant series in archives. These online platforms then leverage the possibility of crowdsourcing information, allowing users to share pictures and information they may have collected individually to help others piece together their own ancestral tapestries. A type of data that McCain did not foresee being used for genealogical purposes is DNA, but now businesses like 23andMe collect specimens and catalog this biological data to clarify ancestral lines and fill in gaps in family trees.[16]

Although computers existed in McCain’s era, they certainly were not ubiquitous to the work of records managers and archivists like they are today. With the exponential growth of computing capacity and platforms, records managers and archivists now have to consider not only paper records but also born-digital records, only some of which may come in the form of the more mundane and relatively easily managed documents generated by word processing software or data housed in spreadsheets. While the growth of digital records could have provided an opportunity to re-envision how records are managed, too often, the simple default has been to apply paper processes to digital records, often with disastrous consequences. In a 2014 report, the Republic of Estonia’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications succinctly summarized a situation that has global parallels, saying, ‘“There is still much duplicated and manual work done, paper-based logic is yet being copied to the electronic environment. At the same time, the necessary information is difficult to find and use.’”[17] Colleagues and donors likely also now generate records using myriad apps and platforms that may or may not contemplate the longevity of the record in their business model, making it challenging to identify and protect records until their intended disposition. Babatunde Kazeem Oladejo and Darra Hofman suggested that because of the role that data analytics plays in the social media landscape, platforms in essence turn posts into records because “they are instrumental to the practical activity of the platforms, which function as part of the platform’s fonds.”[18] These developments require records managers and archivists to consider issues like how to render born-digital records for researchers and whether it is more efficient to maintain paper alongside digital records or to digitize paper.

The explosion of digital records has also created consternation for both records managers and archivists as we try to evaluate the values of records, to appraise which records deserve long-term preservation, and to determine the best methods for maintaining these records for their primary and secondary uses. We would do well to revisit the question posed by McCain, “Did you ever stop and wonder what useful purpose you were serving in accumulating and preserving records?” (p. 6). In a paper world, it is fairly obvious what a donor intends to deposit in an archival repository. But in the world of born-digital records, as some archivists have embraced digital forensics with its capability to discover hidden and deleted files among the bits and bytes transferred by a donor, it has raised not only ethical issues about what an archives should retain but also practical concerns about whether the entirety of a disc image should be preserved as opposed to the smaller swath of easily visible files. In his essay in honor of Mark Greene, Ben Goldman contemplated the consequences of embracing redundancy as the model of digital preservation, especially in light of its carbon impact, and challenged archivists to reconsider the viability of unnecessarily ingesting huge amounts of unwieldy disk images.[19]

Despite the timelessness of much of McCain’s address, I identified several topics common to the professional dialogue today that did not appear on his radar in 1952, including environmental consequences and the right to be forgotten. First, there are grave environmental consequences from the creation, retention, and destruction of records. On the one hand, recycling paper is now possible on a mass industrial scale, but that does not offset the need to think more carefully about what records are being created—rather than, like the Army in the 1950s, just changing the size of the form. For many decades, converting paper records to microfilm or more recently to digital formats has been deemed the solution to decreasing the space required to store records, but this solution too often has not included consideration of whether the microfilm and digitized images require permanent retention or should be discarded at some point in the future. While discarded paper records may have wound up in a landfill for many decades, now the redundant, obsolete, and trivial data that is routinely retained—not to mention the intentionally duplicated copies of digital records—requires a staggering amount of resources, especially water and electricity. A recent case study published by MIT Press also pointed to the noise pollution that accompanies server farms and the mounding and often poisonous detritus of the digital revolution.[20] Where McCain was concerned that the “vast bulk [of records] may discourage and repel the researcher” (p. 5), the consequences of uncorralled digital records are even more severe in our era and demand a reconsideration of the value of records.

Secondly, with the explosion of digital records that are so easily replicated and seemingly remain somewhere even beyond the use or wishes of the creator, there has developed concern around the right to be forgotten. The European Union (EU) has taken the lead in crafting legislation that enables individuals to require search engines like Google to remove links to unfavorable news stories, court judgments, or other documents that populate search results.[21] While EU laws like the General Data Protection Regulation have gotten a toehold in the United States, the right to be forgotten is still being debated for its seeming conflicts with First Amendment protections. Contrary to McCain’s notion about the necessity of maintaining records to combat the fragility of human memory, many archival repositories have developed policies regarding take down requests made by individuals who do not want archival resources about themselves available online.[22]

McCain’s message about the value of records and his challenge to the profession to be thoughtful about how we legitimize the work of archivists and records managers in the eyes of the greater public need to be championed today. He thoughtfully identified the value of records and couched his analysis within a framework of records’ usefulness, both to their creators and to other parties. While we as modern records managers and archivists must expand the scope of our practice beyond his ken, his insights remain valuable to the conversations of our professions. As the Venetian professor Baldassare Bonifacio also concluded, archives and records bring value because “‘If we had been completely deprived of these precious crumbs, we should all be compelled to grope in the dark, to feel our way with our hands not only in history but also in the other disciplines’” (p. 11).

---

[1] Baldassare Bonifacio’s essay De Archivis was translated and published by Lester K. Born in his 1941 article, “Baldassare Bonifacio and His Essay De Archivis,” American Archivist 4, no. 4 (1941): 234, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.4.4.36u35457n6g45825.

[2] An analysis by the US Government Accountability Office provides a brief overview of deepfakes. “Science & Tech Spotlight: Deepfakes,” February 2020, https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-20-379sp.pdf (accessed June 23, 2024). Margaret Hu explains the Cambridge Analytica scandal in “Cambridge Analytica’s Black Box,” Big Data & Society (July–December 2020): 1–6, https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720938091.

[3] Wayne C. Grover, “Recent Developments in Federal Archival Activities,” American Archivist 14, no. 1 (1951): 5, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.14.1.36g4k56w5302u106.

[4] The definition of post-truth is “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Oxford Dictionaries, “Word of the Year 2016,” https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2016/ (accessed May 31, 2024).

[5] Scott Cline, Archival Virtue: Relationship, Obligation, and the Just Archives (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2021),100.

[6] Ibid., 104.

[7] Laura Millar, A Matter of Facts: The Value of Evidence in an Information Age (Chicago, Neal-Schuman, 2019), 145.

[8] Randall C. Jimerson, Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice (Chicago, Society of American Archivists, 2009), 216.

[9] National Archives and Records Administration, “White Paper on the Capstone Approach and Capstone GRS,” April 2015, https://www.archives.gov/files/records-mgmt/email-management/final-capstone-white-paper.pdf.

[10] Kathleen Roe, Guidelines for Arrangement and Description of Archives and Manuscripts: A Manual for Historical Records Programs in New York State (Albany: New York State Archives and Records Administration, 1991).

[11] Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner, “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing,” American Archivist 68, no. 2 (2005): 208–63, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.68.2.c741823776k65863.

[12] See Lise Jaillant, “More Data, Less Process: A User-Centered Approach to Email and Born-Digital Archives,” American Archivist 85, no. 2 (2022): 533–55, https://doi.org/10.17723/2327-9702-85.2.533.

[13] For the international records management community’s standard benchmark definition of records management, along with a discussion of the “nebulous” definitions of information governance, see Julie Brooks, “Perspectives on the Relationship between Records Management and Information Governance,” Records Management Journal 29, no. 1/2 (2019): 5–17, https://doi.org/10.1108/RMJ-09-2018-0032.

[14] Society of American Archivists, “Records,” Dictionary of Archives Terminology, https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/record.html.

[15] The term “big data” originated in the 1990s. For an analysis of the various traits that have been assigned to big data, see Rob Kitchin and Gavin McArdle, “What Makes Big Data, Big Data? Exploring the Ontological Characteristics of 26 Datasets,” Big Data & Society (January–June 2016): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716631130.

[16] “Ancestry Family,” Ancestry, https://www.ancestry.com/c/ancestry-family; Homepage, FamilySearch, https://www.familysearch.org/en/united-states/; “A Family Tree,” 23andMe, https://www.23andme.com/topics/ancestry/a-family-tree/

[17] Quoted in Brooks, 8.

[18] Babatunde Kazeem Oladejo and Darra Hofman, “Records in Social Media: A New (Old) Understanding of Records Management” Records Management Journal 33, no. 2/3 (2023), 152.

[19] Ben Goldman, “It’s Not Easy Being Green(e): Digital Preservation in the Age of Climate Change” in Archival Values: Essays in Honor of Mark A. Greene, eds. Christine Weideman and Mary A. Caldera (Chicago, Society of American Archivists, 2019), 174–87.

[20] Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, “The Cloud Is Material: On the Environmental Impacts of Computation and Data Storage,” MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (Winter 2022), https://doi.org/10.21428/2c646de5.031d4553.

[21] Binoy Kampmark, “To Find or be Forgotten: Global Tensions on the Right to Erasure and Internet Governance,” Journal of Global Faultlines 2, no. 2 (2015): 1–18, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/jglobfaul.2.2.0001.

[22] For more information on takedown policies, see Content Reuse Working Group, DLF Assessment Interest Group, Writing a Takedown Policy, 2023. Digital Content Reuse Assessment Framework Toolkit (D-CRAFT); Council on Library & Information Resources. https://reuse.diglib.org/toolkit/writing-a-takedown-policy/.