Memory Box: Echoes of 9/11

On the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York City, at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, a feature documentary titled Memory Box: Echoes of 9/11 premiered. The premise is simple — it weaves together testimonies that were recorded by eyewitnesses in 2002-2003 with present-day recordings by the same people. A few themes stood out: perseverance, fear, hope, struggle, and resilience.

The “memory box” was the brainchild of Ruth Sergel, who created a homemade recording box that would allow people a literal space in which they could tell their own stories. Over 500 testimonies were recorded in the wake of 9/11 and are available at https://hereisnewyorkv911.org/. On the one hand, it can sometimes be useful to have prompts for such recordings so that responses are gathered to similar questions, but in this situation, with a diversity of people who were survivors, witnesses, family, first responders, medical personnel, young people, and those who worked at Ground Zero in the aftermath, it is helpful that the participants were able to shape their own stories and emphasize the elements that most impacted them.

The idea of longitudinal oral histories is, I think, a powerful one, however difficult it might be to do in many cases. If you have the opportunity to watch the documentary, I encourage you to consider whether you think you would have the same attitudes of forgiveness and compassion evidenced in these memories.

Duty to document

The InterPARES Trust and the Canadian Centre for Information and Privacy Studies combined forces to parse a 2015 scandal in British Columbia known as the “Triple Delete” scandal. A government staffer was charged with willfully making false statements to mislead (or attempt to mislead) under the province’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. This resulted from the deletion of emails related to a freedom of information request relating to the so-called Highway of Tears, an area notorious for cases of missing and murdered women. In order to circumvent the email backup systems that are ubiquitous in most government and private organizations today, these emails had to be thrice deleted:

• once by moving the emails into the Deleted folder
• twice by deleting the emails from the Deleted folder
• and finally by manually overriding a backup, which would have allowed these deleted items to be recovered for up to 14 days

As egregious as this violation of the public trust may sound, the conclusion of this project is that this action was born of a government culture where the tendency is towards secrecy. In order to avoid scrutiny of the decision-making process, government has moved to an oral culture where important decisions are simply not documented. Yet the project asserted scandals that have arisen in the province of British Columbia have come from what the public was not told rather than from blow-back to information that was shared.

On April 16, 2021, the documentary Duty to Document premiered along with an expert panel discussion and Q&A session, which can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcFp9HCnU7g. The session included:

• Luciana Duranti, Professor, Archival Studies, School of Information, University of British Columbia
• Mike Larsen, President, BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association; Co-author of Brokering Access: Power, Politics, and Freedom of Information Process in Canada
• Victoria Lemieux, Associate Professor, Archival Studies, School of Information, University of B.C.; Lead, Blockchain research cluster, Blockchain@UBC
• Andrew MacLeod, Legislative Bureau Chief, The Tyee magazine

They briefly discussed the benefits that can come from proactive disclosure of information but concluded these actions usually aren’t incentivized. Ultimately, these thought leaders concluded that the duty to document should be prescribed in law. More information about this project can be found at https://www.infoandprivacy.ca/duty-to-document/, on the website of the Canadian Centre for Information and Privacy Studies.

On this side of the 49th parallel, I’m afraid we have our own failure to document encouraged by a culture that discourages the creation of records you don’t want to be called on to produce. Personally, the historian side of me likes to point to the 1974 U.S. v. Nixon case, where the U.S. Supreme Court compelled President Nixon to produce recordings from the Oval Office, as the birth of the mistrust of records. But I also recognize that’s too simplistic an explanation.

Perhaps we are starting to figure out part of the incentivizing piece. In North Carolina, the Public Records Act specifies that government agencies that proactively make records available online are then exempt from answering specific individual requests for these records:

(a1) A public agency or custodian may satisfy the requirements in subsection (a) of this section by making public records available online in a format that allows a person to view the public record and print or save the public record to obtain a copy. If the public agency or custodian maintains public records online in a format that allows a person to view and print or save the public records to obtain a copy, the public agency or custodian is not required to provide copies to these public records in any other way.  (NC Gen. Stat. 132-6 (a1))

Therefore, agencies can identify records that are frequently requested and preemptively make them available online. Now if we can just eradicate the fear that the records we produce are going to be used against us. I want to believe there’s a way to balance the needs of constituents to understand the actions of their government with the desire by government leaders to protect the recipe for the secret sauce.

Tweet or consequences

There was a long-running game show called Truth or Consequences that began on the radio in the 1940s and aired on television for much of the 1950s-1970s and even had a brief revival in the late 1980s. In this scenario, telling the truth equated to answering an obscure trivia question; the consequence for failing to know the right answer was having to perform some awkward and likely embarrassing stunt.

There are some days when I find myself wondering if we’ve lost the meaning of the word consequences, or at least lost its impartial application. Too many stories about bad actors operating with impunity litter the airwaves, media, and news feeds — with bad actions running the gamut from carelessness to intentional misinformation to actual illegalities.

Then there was last month’s story about the radio announcer for the Charlotte Hornets who got fired for a tweet in which he mistyped two letters in the word Nuggets and instead unintentionally tweeted out the N-word. To his credit, John Focke didn’t question the Hornets’ decision and instead offered two bits of advice to anyone using social media:

• Don’t be in a hurry
• Proofread what you write

But this is hard advice to follow in a world that clearly favors quick, unfiltered responses.

To my earlier point about the unequal application of consequences — a radio personality in Denver made the same mistake around the same time as Focke, but he kept his job. I’m certainly not implying Focke was treated unfairly or should have retained his job. His error was egregious and entirely avoidable. But as someone whose origin story includes learning consequences as my first “big word,” I guess I dream of a world where there’s not quite so much grey area when it comes to seeing them doled out.

For those of us in the records and information business, this story also has important implications. Focke quickly realized the problem with the tweet and deleted it. But he couldn’t escape the consequences because his tweet had already been screen-shotted and persisted even after he deleted it from his account. The Internet never forgets! And the justification on which the Hornets based their firing decision was that Focke had violated their organization’s social media policy. Although an unfortunate example, certainly evidence of the importance of having documented and distributed policies and procedures in place.

Archival moral theology

A while ago, I read an article by James O’Toole entitled “Archives and Historical Accountability: Toward a Moral Theology of Archives.”  This article was published in the Fall 2004 issue of Archivaria.  At the time of its publication (and still currently), O’Toole serves as a history professor at Boston College; he previously taught history at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.  But he also has a library science degree and began his professional career with a number of archival jobs — at the New England Historic Genealogical Society, the Archives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and as Archivist of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston.  Anyone who’s received their archival training in the last several decades is probably familiar with his book (whose second edition was co-authored by Richard J. Cox) Understanding Archives and Manuscripts.

The article is thought-provoking, so I knew I needed some time to mull it over.  And it also prompted me to dig into one of its inspirations.  But I think now is the right time to delve into the principle of accountability and take a closer look at archival moral theology.

O’Toole began by looking at Frank Burke’s 1980 talk about archival education where he presented the idea that the archival profession has plenty of “parish priests” who take care of the day-to-day work but needs more “theologians” who can focus more on the teaching and researching that is typically done by academic professionals.  With that background in place, O’Toole provided an explanation of theology, whose task he defined simply as “[finding] the words to say what we want to say about some very big issues” (6).  He borrowed from Scottish Anglican theologian John Macquarrie the division of theology into three branches:

1. philosophical theology, which “sets forth the fundamental concepts and presumptions of the discipline” (6)
2. symbolic theology, which delves into the symbols and metaphors used to give expression to our understandings of the divine
3. applied theology, which looks at how faith is executed in people’s day-to-day lives

O’Toole argued that these divisions appropriately apply as well to archival work.  The philosophical part of our work is our commitment to the importance of the archival imperative and our consideration of why we do this work:

“that the documentation of human affairs has enduring relevance by providing continuity, even self-continuity; that records constitute the collective memory of individuals and societies and that this memory is essential to those societies and the people in them; that records support and sustain other important societal values” (8).

He defined our “accepted dogmas” as the symbolic theology of archives, including provenance, original order, description, etc.  And the applied theology of archives “encompasses all those things archivists do to realize their philosophical and symbolic insights, including acquisition, appraisal, arrangement, establishing fair and equitable use policies, physical preservation, programmatic stability and growth, and so on” (8).

O’Toole was careful to make a distinction between theology and ethics, which he described as the “specific behaviours that archivists should either cultivate or avoid” (9).  While he acknowledged the importance of codes of ethics that many professions embrace, he also argued “they are unavoidably situational, designed to offer guidance in particular instances” (10).  He instead attempted to provide a broader and more long-term vision of the responsibilities of archivists.  Key to his understanding of the moral theology of archives is historical accountability:

“Do archivists bear any moral responsibility to a more open-ended future, a time when the practical impact of any particular cases will have diminished or disappeared altogether and the actions of those involved will matter only historically?  Such accountability is vaguer, perhaps, since we cannot now foresee the exact circumstances that will call for it or the possibly competing cultural values that will be at stake.  Yet there is (or ought to be) a kind of historical accountability, an effort to judge as good or bad the particular ways in which we, individually and collectively, have treated each other, and records and archives have their role to play in that process” (11).

He acknowledged that judgments about history morph over time, but he pointed to two examples of situations in which historical records helped to provide some long-term accountability for wrong actions:

• totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany, Armenia, the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, etc. — with the simple acknowledgment that “documentation may be used to manage tyranny while it is in power and to expose it afterwards” (12)
• violations of human rights in democratic societies — including slavery, interment camps, displacements and assimilations of native populations, eugenics, etc.

O’Toole did caution against looking to records for quick fixes:

“Historical accountability requires that we look at such examples not as mere exercises in breast-beating or self-flagellation, opportunities to feel good about ourselves by feeling bad, or chances to reassure ourselves that we are more moral and, well, just better than those who went before us.  Rather, they highlight the importance of taking a long historical view and exploring the ways in which records of the offences may be used to expose them and to pass moral judgments on those who perpetrated them” (13).

But he did assert that historical accountability is part of the archival mission and, therefore, helps to define a moral theology of archives.  He provided examples related to appraisal and acquisition, emphasizing that a broad moral theology can close some of the loopholes that may exist with simple codes of ethics.  For example, acquisition decisions “in accordance with their institutions’ purposes stated policies, and resources” (as stated in the SAA Code) might result in the loss of documentation of child sexual abuse because a different use of the records could be “contrary to the interests of their creators” (14).  Secondly, he challenged description archivists to take a step back and first gain a better understanding of the record-keeping systems in which institutional records were created so that changes in purpose, form, and usage of the records can be acknowledged in their description.  Lastly, he contended that records that are retained by archives but inaccessible to researchers fall short of the measure of accountability.

O’Toole concluded with his “fundamental reason” for archival work: “a belief in the value of preserving part of society’s collective memory and helping to bring that memory to bear when and where it is needed” (19).  He also listed several questions that deserve further attention:

• What defines a moral archivist, and how can archivists develop our moral sense?
• Can/should a moral theology be part of the archival curriculum?
• Where are the academics who can devote their intellectual prowess to defining a moral theology of archives?

 

Knowledge as hope

“The pursuit, production, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge are the central activities of a civilization.  Knowledge is social memory, a connection to the past; and it is social hope, an investment in the future.  The ability to create knowledge and put it to use is the adaptive characteristic of humans.  It is how we reproduce ourselves as social beings and how we change—how we keep our feet on the ground and our heads in the clouds” (101-2).

Louis Menand penned these words in this 2010 book The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University.  But as our civilization is currently in the throes of a global pandemic, they serve as a good jumping off point for considering what we know and what we need to know, as well as how this knowledge can provide us with hope for the future.

Earlier this month, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) published a call to action for the documentary heritage community, laying out a succinct argument about the current value of documentation of prior health crises while also contending the resources overseen by memory organizations provide perspective, understanding, context, blueprints for action, and “social connectivity and resilience.”  They called for shared responsibility to address this crisis and laid out four areas for action:

1. Lean on the Memory of the World Programme and its network to guarantee the preservation and accessibility of our documentary heritage.
2. Memory institutions should use this crisis to foster conversations not only about disaster management but also about risk mitigation, especially in a financial sense as many repositories are seeing their funding streams dry up without the presence of patrons.
3. Target not only traditional researchers and community members but also policymakers, media professionals, and scientists who could use the resources of memory institutions to gain insights and perspective and to guide the development of educated responses.  To be clear, UNESCO is not suggesting turning away from the student and community members that are often the focus of outreach efforts — in fact, they emphasize the value of digital resources to students who are learning remotely and of virtual community-building activities.  But by adding a lens to our array, memory institutions might enable leaders to demonstrate to the public what our roles and responsibilities are in the midst of a public health crisis, based on the responses to earlier crises.
4. To underscore the importance of memory institutions, they asserted: “Archives, libraries, and museums have always been the custodians of reliable and quality information.  With increased disinformation around the COVID-19 pandemic, memory institutions can collect, catalogue and disseminate fact-based, scientific information and provide critical, comparative perspectives.”  I’m still haunted by Jon Meacham’s analysis that I heard last month, and it certainly underscores the importance of this task in current circumstances: “to a large extent . . . the Enlightenment’s on trial here.  Facts and data that shape human decisions because they are objectively true, that is something that is now very much under assault.”

In response to this communique, the International Council on Archives along with the International Conference of Information Commissioners — and with the support of ARMA International, the Committee on Data of the International Science Council (CODATA), the Digital Preservation Coalition, the Research Data Alliance, UNESCO Memory of the World, and the World Data System — issued a statement and challenged archives, records, data, and allied communities to join them.  They make three points in their call to action.

1. Decisions must be documented — both to inform future decision-making and to ensure the accountability of leadership.
2. Not only government but also commercial, research, and educational institutions have an obligation to secure and preserve records and data.  They conclude, “The economic and societal impact of the current pandemic needs to be evidenced, not only to prevent and/or anticipate similar events but to understand the effect this event will have on current and future generations.”
3. Digital content as well as paper records need to be preserved — and not only from ongoing institutions but also from those that go defunct as a result of this crisis.  They include some appraisal recommendations, asserting, “it is necessary for archives to be recognised and resourced as the custodians of the raw data that underpins composite data or reported information.  The duty to document this information does not cease in a crisis, it becomes more essential than ever.”

Tangentially, they also identify an issue that needs to be addressed, specifically the fact that teleworking is dramatically changing the ways that many people are creating and maintaining records.  Although they don’t use this space to elaborate on the problem, they do link out to the “bit list” of digitally endangered species, as identified by the Digital Preservation Coalition.  Fodder for future analysis.

Ode to Archives Month

I think this 1968 song written by Paul Simon and appearing on the Simon and Garfunkel album Bookends provides some good material for reflection during Archives Month:

“Bookends Theme”

“Time it was,
And what a time it was,
It was . . .
A time of innocence,
A time of confidences.

Long ago . . . it must be . . .
I have a photograph.
Preserve your memories;
They’re all that’s left you.”

“The Site of Memory”

At the Society of North Carolina Archivists annual meeting this year, I had the pleasure of hearing Holly Smith (the archivist of Spelman College) deliver the keynote address.  She spoke about the importance of documenting underrepresented communities and made several comments worth noting:

• She quoted the West African proverb, “No one is ever truly dead until they are forgotten.”
• She acknowledged HBCUs have a challenge to avoid developing a singular narrative of African Americans.
• She contended that we are all repositories — and sometimes people may choose not to share their stories, so we as archivists must respect that wish and trust them as stewards of that information.

She also referenced the writing of Toni Morrison on the differences between facts and truths, which motivated me to find this article and see what this great novelist had to say.  In 1995, her talk “The Site of Memory” was published in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir.  Morrison compared her work as a modern writer to that of the authors of slave narratives.  While they frequently felt inhibited from revealing their interior lives, Morrison suggested her purpose is “moving that veil aside.”  In order to do so, she needs two things — to trust her own recollections as well as those of others.  Because these interior lives may not always be a part of the record, she sees herself as a literary archaeologist.  By adding a dose of imagination, Morrison creates fictional masterpieces.

Morrison incorporated the words of other well-known authors to delve into the concept of memory:

• Zora Neale Hurston: “‘Like the dead-seeming cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me.'”
• She looked at how Frederick Douglass, Simone de Beauvoir, and James Baldwin wrote about the death of relatives.  Morrison said of her own ancestors, “these people are my access to me; they are my entrance into my own interior life.”

Tying together the various pieces she introduced, Morrison contended that “the act of imagination is bound up with memory.”  She compared the imagination of writers to flooding by rivers:

“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.  Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.  It is emotional memory — what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared.”

And to incorporate the point referenced by Holly Smith: Morrison acknowledged, “Fiction, by definition, is distinct from fact.”  But she went on to say that the more important distinction is fact from truth — “facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot.”  This relates back to her point about being a literary archaeologist, for she takes the image created by “the remains” of someone’s life story and adds her own recollections and imagination to create “a kind of a truth.”  I think ultimately she’s suggesting truth is more nuanced and doesn’t exist without our own personal filters.  In many ways, this is similar to my topic last week and Lee Smith’s evaluation of facts and truths.

Writing memories

It’s time to get down in writing some of the ideas I’ve had on the back burner for a while, and the first of these relates to a talk I heard Lee Smith give at the National Humanities Center in March.  It was largely a reading from her memoir Dimestore, but she also provided some insights into her thoughts about writing.  In some ways, she found it more challenging to write nonfiction because she found herself stopping to ask, is this true?  But at the same time, she suggested writing is a therapeutic activity because it can fix loved ones in our memory.

Smith drew an interesting distinction between facts and truth.  After many decades of writing fiction along with this more recent nonfiction effort, she decided she can tell “the truth” better with fiction because she can make her story work to fit that truth, where the stories of real life may not quite so neatly add up to the narrative she wishes to communicate.  When she was writing the memoir, she brought her cousins together for a family reunion and realized everyone had different stories from shared events.  She decided that in the context of a memoir, as long as she believed them to be true, she could incorporate her memories into this work of nonfiction.  But she eventually decided she considers herself to be more of a storyteller than a writer.

This term storyteller actually has some interesting connotations.  As Smith pointed out, when she was growing up, if someone was accused of “telling a story,” it had the connotation of telling a lie.  Yet by the age of 9, she had begun her career of writing stories for entertainment — sometimes related to stories she heard at her father’s dimestore or at the courthouse where her grandfather was treasurer or at her grandmother’s house or in her mother’s kitchen.

In 1983, Smith wrote a novel entitled Oral History.  She explained she had worried about the homogenization of American language, so she spent many years recording her family in southwestern Virginia and wrote this novel to try to preserve some of their vernacular.  In a chapter narrated by the character Sally, she includes this commentary about memory:

“A lot of big things happened, is what I’m saying. It’s funny how you don’t remember those, though, how after the passing of so many years what you hold to is what you never thought about at the time, like Pappy out on the porch singing or me and Mama having coffee so early in the morning” (244).

So what are the connections between writing and memory and fact and truth?  Whether or not we ever put pen to paper, I would suggest that the memories in our own lives that we hold dear are those that resonate with the narrative we’ve constructed of our lives — the events and people that come together to make us who we are.  Absent a daily diary, most of us don’t possess the day-by-day memories of every occurrence, but we remember the more formative interactions, both good and bad.  In doing so, perhaps we are reinforcing “the truth” of who we are.

“The Messy Business of Remembering: History, Memory, and Archives”

Mark Greene made a relatively early attempt to relate postmodernism to archival work.  In a 2003-2004 issue of Archival Issues, Greene wrote about “The Messy Business of Remembering; History, Memory, and Archives.”  He explained archivists were somewhat late to the game to begin discussing postmodernism because of the trend away from allying with historians (who’d been considering postmodernism for some time) and more towards information science.

Although this may in fact defeat the purpose of discussing postmodernism, for reference, here’s a definition from PBS:

“Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality.  In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality.  For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person.”

Greene contended that postmodernism is relevant to archivists in everything from acquisition choices to the legitimacy of uses of archives.  He used as a springboard for his analysis a 2002 article by an Amherst historian that presented a positivist view of historical research.  Where positivism asserts that “‘history is what trained historians do'” (96), Greene countered:

“Neither truth nor history nor even memory should be the secret of the few.  If we do it right–and as archivists we have something to say about that because it depends in some part on how we solicit, welcome, and assist both historians and genealogists in our reading rooms–everyone can play a part” (97).

So where some contend that historical uses of archival records are more important than those relating to social memory, Greene painted a more inclusive picture of archival use.  He incorporated the analysis of management and business design expert Chauncey Bell about what the job of  an archivist should be:

“‘your job is not about storing and sorting information.  It is about appraising and keeping records of history-making events and the acts spoken by history makers, and doing that in a way that allows you to be effective partners for those history makers in their re-membering of the past'” (99-100).

Greene also looked to the words of psychiatrist W. Walter Menninger for an explanation of history:

“‘history is a record of present beliefs and wishes, not a replica of the past.  Remembering . . . is a reconstruction using bits of past experience to describe a present state'” (100).

Rejecting the notion of archivists merely as gatekeepers, Greene asserted that archivists cannot claim the neutrality of archival records because “Both the creation and the selection of archival material are tainted, if you will, by the values, missions, and even resources of the creators and the archivists” (101).  Not only do individuals and societies create and shape history and memory, but so do archivists.  He also pointed out that the ownership of history, memory, and the records that shape them — both literal and figurative ownership — is a challenge archivists have yet to resolve.  He concluded that dealing with these complications can be solved only with humility and courage.

“Embracing the Power of Archives”

Randall C. Jimerson delivered his presidential address at the 2005 annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists held in New Orleans.  Jimerson began his archival career at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan (1976-1977) and then spent two years as archivist at Yale University (1977-1979).  He was university archivist and director of the Historical Manuscripts and Archives Department of the University of Connecticut Libraries (1979-1994), where he also taught and led the graduate program in History and Archival Management.  Since 1994, Jimerson has been director of the Graduate Program in Archives and Records Management at Western Washington University in Bellingham, also serving as professor of History since 2002.  An expanded version of the address he delivered was published in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue of the American Archivist.

Jimerson’s address was a portent of the arguments he developed more fully in his 2009 volume Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice.  He borrowed the metaphors of Eric Ketelaar and analyzed archives as temples, prisons, and restaurants.  Jimerson suggested these representations illustrate the “trinity of archival functions: selection, preservation, and access” (20).

• In the archival temple, records achieve authority, immortality, and validity.  He cited numerous archival thinkers regarding the active role that appraisal requires.  He acknowledged that appraisal shapes “society’s collective understanding of its past, including what will be forgotten” (25).  Jimerson cautioned against conflating archives with memory but suggested “records of the past provide a corrective for human memory, a surrogate that remains unchanged while memory constantly shifts and refocuses its vision of the past” (26).
• Control is the foundation of the archival prison.  From the physical control imposed by lockers, closed stacks, and surveillance cameras to the intellectual control created by the arrangement and description of records, archivists regulate access.
• The archival restaurant is the locus of interpretation and mediation.  Jimerson contended that archivists cannot be fully objective regarding archives — “as archivists we cannot avoid casting our own imprint on these powerful sources of knowledge” (21).

He concluded the arc of these metaphors by saying,

“May our archival temples truly reflect values worthy of veneration and remembrance.  May our archival prisons minimize locks and security and emphasize accountability, preservation, and access.  May our menus be clear and understandable, and our table service efficient, thorough, and helpful” (32).

Jimerson’s challenge to archivists was to “embrace the power of archives and use it for the good of humankind” (24).  He clarified this notion as making “society more knowledgeable, more tolerant, more diverse, and more just” (28).  In order to accomplish this goal, he asserted that archivists must abandon “our pretense of neutrality” because only through recognizing our impartiality can we “avoid using this power indiscriminately or, even worse, accidentally” (28).  He also echoed Ketelaar’s advocacy for transparency in archival selection and access decisions.  Jimerson cautioned against sidestepping the social and cultural responsibilities of archivists while instead focusing myopically on technical issues.

Jimerson asserted that archives carry out a function of social responsibility by documenting and protecting the rights of citizens.  He pointed to the works collected by Richard Cox and David Wallace in Archives and the Public Good for evidence of archival records being used as agents of accountability.  He also echoed the words of Howard Zinn in challenging archivists to “commit themselves to ensuring that our records document the lives and experiences of all groups in society, not just the political, economic, social, and intellectual elite” (30).  Herein lies the power.