Firstly, thank you to the organisers of this intelligent and lively discourse held on 23 March at the Australian Technology Park, Redfern. I thoroughly enjoyed it and wanted to share some of the key issues the roundtable raised and my response to those issues. What resonated for me were the following themes.
Wikileaks challenges our profession’s authority. Who now says:
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- Who should have access to information and when?
- What information has enduring ‘value’?
- (my response) If the recordkeeping community are the ‘responsible’ stewards of 'archives' and business information - why should the general public trust that? Especially when we are saying as the responsible stewards you have to trust us to make the right decision about which information should not be released, and which information should have enduring value and be kept permanently.
- Wikileaks makes an assumption that the public knows best.
- (my response) We (the people) need to be able to trust our institutions to preserve authentic information (or is that a generational response?). Does or will this younger generation of peer review/approval/crowd sourcing – ‘we decide what is of value not you’- trust or believe that “we” (the recordkeeping community) are being ‘responsible stewards’? As Anne Picot said - we are so close to government the assumption is we are in cahoots with them.
- in this “Oprah” world of sharing at the most intimate level will they accept our GIPA and IPP restrictions which will require some information to still be ‘protected’ ?
- We can classify it but do we have the tools to access it for as long as is required?.
- (my response) Are we performing some Sisyphean[1] task with small hope of achieving anything? If so what is the alternative?
- Wikileaks questions our profession’s concept of what is an ‘archive”?
- (my response) The concept of storing everything for ever is the General Public’s idea of an ‘archive’ so they don’t need a steward to tell them how long to keep anything, or that something should be kept forever because it has enduring value - especially if it’s a matter of electronic storage. Our increasing information overload almost assures us that the majority will not bother to ‘cull’ any of their information. They don’t have time and they don’t see the need ie the risk associated with not managing it is low.
- Wikileaks shows that the content needs context- you can’t just dump stuff and expect it to make sense and be trusted.
- (my response) Our profession's role is to help contextualise and organise to aid understanding and retrieval.
- Our time based access model is broken and Selection process is not going to work
- (my response) Good conclusions but what do we do?
[1] Sisyphus - a king of Corinth whose wickedness in life was punished in the lower world where he had to roll uphill a huge stone which as soon as it had reached the top rolled down again.
Replies
I feel like a bit of a dag replying to my own reply but wanted to let everyone know that a written report on 'After WikiLeaks, is it all over for The Archives?' is now available at: http://recordkeepingroundtable.org/
All the best
Cassie
I have posted 25 photographs from this event in the Photos section of ArchivesLive!
Louise Trott
Colleagues
Podcasts from the event 'After WikiLeaks, is it all over for The Archives?', presented by The Recordkeeping Roundtable in conjunction with the NSW Branch of the Australian Society of Archivists in Sydney on March 23 are now available online here: http://recordkeepingroundtable.org/2011/03/28/after_wikileaks/
Reports on the event will be published over coming weeks in the ASA NSW Branch newsletter and in RIMPA's iQ magazine, May issue.
Cheers
Cassie
Susan
Thanks for keeping the conversation going on this important subject. Archives Live members might also be interested to see Kate Cumming's excellent summary of the night via her live tweeting: http://twitter.com/kateandthegirlz
Cheers,
@CassPF
Great twitter record! Urge everyone to read it- well done Kate.