Archives Torched in Canada

Climate change has been in the news a lot lately thanks to the extreme severe winter weather that has affected most of the United States and Canada over the past several weeks.  Researchers investigating changes in weather often seek out archival materials in order to glean historical evidence of patterns in weather events and temperatures.  Canadian environmental researchers will be out of luck in the future thanks to the decision of the Canadian government to destroy a number of archives relating to climate research.  In 2012, the government announced it was going to close down national archives sites around the country, but promised to digitize any materials that were going to be discarded or sold.  It turns out that only a small part of the archives was scanned, while the balance was sent to landfills, burned, or otherwise disposed of.  According to this report, archives relating to climate change fared the worst because of the Conservative government's hostility to climate research.  Among the archives destroyed were the environmental research materials of the St. Andrews Biological Station in New Brunswick, the Freshwater Institute Library in Winnipeg, and the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Centre in St. John's.  The report goes on to state that no records were kept of what was discarded, sold, lost, or burned.  The materials that were destroyed are priceless and irreplaceable.  They contained nearly one hundred years' worth of information related to Canadian fisheries, freshwater ecosystems, and oceans.  The savings generated by closing the archives is small--$443,000 dollars (Canadian) a year.  Critics of the closures maintain that they were driven by the Conservative government's war against science and evidence-based climate research. 

Gone with the wind -- burning the archives

Wow. Ran across a blog post about 160 year old legal documents destroyed... apparently this is becoming a genuine web phenomenon as more and more bloggers pick it up. The North Carolina Dept of Archives summarily destroyed a room's worth of legal documents dating from the early to middle 1800's, after it was discovered by a county clerk. Local folks and a local historical society had been enthusiastically working on sorting and preserving them until they made the mistake of contacting that department to ask for professional help in conserving the documents. Whoops! Apparently that's where politics may have reared it's ugly head. The author, Grace, supposes,

HERE’S WHAT I THINK:
After the Civil War (after emancipation), a lot of large land-owners deeded out substantial tracts of land to their former slaves. These former slaves had demonstrated to their masters that they were loyal, hard-working, and would continue to farm and contribute to the plantation collective as they always had. The only difference is that they would own the land they worked, and earn a somewhat larger income as a result of their efforts.

During reconstruction, a lot of land holders, both black and white, had difficulty paying very high property taxes imposed by Federal Occupiers. In swept speculators and investors from up North (these people have come to be known as “Carpet Baggers”.) They often forced white land owners to sell out at a fraction of the actual value of their property. In the case of black land-owners, sometimes all the Carpet Baggers offered was threats. The effect was the same – a vast transfer of wealth from titled property owners to new people who became, in the decades of the late 19th and early 20th century, among the wealthiest people in the South.

How do I know this? Some of my own ancestors were Carpet Baggers from Maryland. They made a small fortune after the war, stealing land, setting up mills, and effectively re-enslaving two or three generations of both poor-white and black natives of Halifax County, North Carolina.

My suspicion is that in and amongst all those now destroyed records, was a paper trail associated with one or more now-prominent, politically connected NC families that found its wealth and success through theft, intimidation, and outrageous corruption.

Prove me wrong. You can’t. They destroyed the records.

See a series of posts following the original where the archives folks reply with lame excuses that the blogger blows away. If you come to this late, and using that link is not helpful, the dates are late December, 2013 - early January, 2014. The destruction of the documents happened on Dec. 6, 2013.

The image is from the original blog, and is captioned, "Boxes of documents from the Franklin County Courthouse seized and burned by the North Carolina State Archives." Found at http://stumblingintheshadowsofgiants.wordpress.com/ written by Grace.

Boston College Archives Subpoena is tip of an iceberg

Some time ago, I wrote a brief post here about a troubling story here in Boston. Boston College archives contain oral histories of some of the people involved in the "troubles" in Northern Ireland, a few still alive. Suddenly, they have been subpoenaed, despite the individuals who were interviewed for the oral histories being promised complete confidentiality. It turns out that the U.S. Department of Justice is helping the British government serve the subpoenas. The Chronicle of Higher Education has an excellent article following up on that short article (my link was to the Boston Globe).

It turns out that the subpoena is under a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT), which began to be entered into about 30 years ago, according to the Chronicle. These treaties create mutual obligations between the agreeing nations to assist in "criminal" investigations and prosecutions. The U.S. entered its first MLAT in 1976, with Switzerland. Before the rise of MLATs, police or investigators had to move through courts and diplomatic channels with letters rogatory. Now they can simply go police to police. Sounds really good when you are talking about following terrorists or drug smugglers or such evil doers. The problem comes, according to Senate Executive Report 104-22, titled "Treaty with the Republic of Korea on Mutual Legal Assistance on Criminal Matters," dated 1996, from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The report notes that the problem with these MLATs is that the crimes that the other country requests the U.S. assist with investigating need not be criminal under U.S. standards. So under MLATs, can the United States be pulled into investigating foreign nationals for activities which are political crimes only under the terms of another nation's draconian laws, but which would be perfectly legal under our own laws? The Senate report says political crimes are an exception. But Chris Bray, writing for the Chronicle, does a masterful job of analyzing how this example is sliding past the definition police.

The MLATs vary in how broad the terms can be -- some are broad enough to include civil and administrative proceedings in addition to criminal proceedings, so that forfeiture proceedings could be covered in drug investigations, for instance. All of the treaties have exemptions to the types of actions, but these tend to be based on the national security interest, not interest of individuals, or ethical guidelines, so that saying that individuals might be killed because you opened the archives would not be a reason for an exemption. In the U.S., MLATs are executed through the criminal division of the Justice Department, which seems to be exactly who was serving the subpoena on Boston College. Kudos to Chris Bray at the Chronicle for doing great research on the problem!

"A Breach of Trust" at the New York Public Library

The archives collection of the New York Public Library is a treasure trove containing the papers of President Thomas Jefferson and authors such as Herman Melville and Truman Capote. It has a reputation for adhering to the highest standards of archival practice. Now, however, a ugly dispute between the library and author Paul Brodeur, who used to write for The New Yorker, has become public knowledge thanks, in part, to this article in today's New York Times. Brodeur, "known for his zealous pursuit of asbestos manufacturers and corporate polluters as a journalist," donated approximately 320 boxes of his papers to NYPL in 1992. He was led to believe that the library finished processing the collection in 1997, but later learned that the processing was not in fact finished until 2010. In addition, Brodeur was

notified ... that [NYPL] no longer wanted three-fourths of his papers. He was instructed to either retrieve the undesired documents or to allow the library to destroy them ... [Mr. Brodeur] was livid. In a June 2010 letter to the library demanding the return of his entire collection, Mr. Brodeur wrote, "I no longer have confidence in the New York Public Library's stewardship of the papers I donated more than 18 years ago."

The record for the collection indicates that it now contains 53 boxes, not the 320 Mr. Brodeur originally donated. The library explained to him that "as they did with every donation, they had carefully weeded out what would be useful ... (original letters and rare primary documents) amd excluded less-meaningful artifacts (photocopied news stories and multiple drafts of New Yorker writings)."

NYPL's disposition of the papers is consistent with the deed of gift Mr. Brodeur signed, in which he relinquished all rights to his papers. However, why did it take the library almost two decades to process the collection and decide it did not want the bulk of it? Mr. Brodeur apparently had no reason to believe that the collection was not processed in 1997, when he was told that the "documents had been reviewed and prepared for public viewing" and invited to tour the archives by a senior curator. As Richard J. Cox, Jr., a professor of archival studies at the University of Pittsburgh points out, the library decision seems to have come "out of the blue." Mr. Brodeur now regrets his decision to donate his papers to NYPL, and is vowing to "continue fighting for the return of all his work. 'None of this would have happened if the library had decided to return my collection.'"

Felix Salmon's blog post on this topic highlights an essential lack of meeting of the minds on the part of NYPL and Brodeur. The library sees Brodeur as a writer, and deems only what he actually wrote to be of archival value and worth saving. Brodeur, however, sees himself as an investigative journalist; to him, the sources he used are of equal value and equally worth preserving. As Salmon says:

The NYPL is treating Brodeur as it would an imaginative novelist, which seems to me to be something of a category error. All writers are not the same, and if you’re going to go to the trouble of archiving a journalist’s work, you should take the subject matter of the journalism seriously and also preserve the record of how that writer wrote, on top of what that writer wrote.

What will happen to the bulk of Brodeur's materials which were rejected by NYPL? Brodeur has constructed a storage shed at his home on Cape Cod where he is planning to store them. This is not a secure facility and does not have climate control. Nor is it easily accessible to potential researchers. Victims of asbestos exposure are fearful about the possible loss of Brodeur's sources because they consider them to be a unique font of information available nowhere else. Brodeur's own account of the controversy is available on the Authors Guild website.

U.N. opens it Digital Library

The Chronicle of Higher Education online has a brief but eye-catching note that the United Nations has opened a World Digital Library. Well, when you get there, it turns out to be more like a digital archive. It's pretty cool. It has lots of map images and photo images, a few scanned pages. It is really international. But it's not a library as I understand it, and it's not the answer to Google Book Project or any other digital library project. hmmm.

And speaking of Google Books Project, the same issue of the Chronicle has an article stating that Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive project has petitioned the judge in the Google Books Project Settlement case to be part of the settlement. I don't find the update at Justia.com, but it may just be too soon for it to have been entered there.