Masters Portfolio §A: Ethics

As an archivist, I strive to practice my craft in line with the principles and ethical code promulgated by the Society of American Archivists (SAA). These principles and tenants are numerous; SAA lists 11 principles and seven ethical points. They embrace concepts as varied as preservation of the records that embody historical memory, service to the people who want to consult those records, and diversity of both the profession and the historical record it tends.1 These principles often come into tension, reflecting the complexities of archival work: access and use versus security and preservation, privacy and trust versus accountability, et cetera. However, I believe that the principle of responsible stewardship unites them all, standing as a primary and capacious value for archivists. It reflects the importance of an ethics of care—care for the records we hold, for the people who gave them to us, for the people who want to use them, and for the people whose lives were touched by the actions and events they document.

Preservation for access to the historical record

The word “stewardship” captures and unites the two core duties that archivists work towards: preservation of and access to the historical record. According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, stewardship is “the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care.”2 For archivists, this means preserving the primary source documents that make up the historical record. It is primarily through archival records that we obtain knowledge of the past, whether distant or recent, and ensuring that these records continue to be collected and preserved for posterity is a major component of archivists’ work. Crucially, however, just as a steward is “a person employed to manage another’s property”3 and not their own, preserving materials is not an end to itself, but a means to the access and use of the historical record. The reason we keep materials is so they can be used.

There is often a low level of tension between preservation and access, as the use of physical records slowly wears them out. However, access and preservation sometimes conflict more sharply, as in records with fragile physical carriers, documents whose market value makes theft a concern, or items with mold or pest infestations that could spread to the rest of the collection. In these cases, archivists should prioritize providing alternative means of access (through digitization or microfilming of physical records, or through duplication of digital records onto a more robust carrier) over restricting access to the material, insofar as it is within the repository’s capacity to do.

Avoiding archival silences: Accountability and Diversity

Archivists have long recognized that the historical record we inherit is warped by social power. The lives and accomplishments of the rich and powerful are overrepresented and often lionized, while their misdeeds are often missing from the records, as are the lives of marginalized people.4 It is archivists’ duty to minimize these “archival silences,” holding power to account and working towards capturing a historical record that accurately reflects all of society. Especially in the context of institutional or government archives, it is crucial that archivists and records managers resist any pressure to destroy records documenting potential misconduct or wrongdoing and instead make sure such evidence is retained. In the words of SAA Council member Eira Tansey, “A lack of records associated with the powerful within the context of institutionally-mandated archives denies people an important avenue to examine the evidential actions of elected officials, CEOs, and other leaders, and hold them accountable.”5

Restraining our collecting: Responsibilities to records creators and subjects

However, in our enthusiasm to preserve the past and make it available for an imagined future, it can be easy to lose sight of the real people in the present who are affected by archivists’ decisions. SAA upholds the principles of privacy and trust because access (and even preservation) can create real harms to vulnerable people and to the donors who trusted archivists with their materials. On the more benign end, Eira Tansey has written about the ways that archivists’ attempts to collect the stories of traumatic events can commodify painful experiences and even retraumatize donors. She argues that, as archivists, we “have an ethical obligation to understand that respecting people’s privacy and right to forget their own past means accepting that we will lose parts of the historical record that others may wish we had gone to great lengths to get.”6

The general principle that access should be as broad as possible,7 while appropriate for contexts such as public records, can cause greater harms still when records were created with an expectation of privacy or limited access, especially when the creators are marginalized people. For example, consider the digitization and online availability of pioneering lesbian erotic magazine On Our Backs (1984–2004) by Reveal Digital.8 On the one hand, it is true that, as Reveal Digital contended, On Our Backs occupies “an important [place] in the feminist . . . canon and is an essential artifact of the ‘feminist sex wars.’”9 By providing online access to it, they have made a noteworthy source on lesbian history much more broadly available, allowing it to be discovered through digital searches and eliminating the access barrier of needing to travel to an institution that holds a copy.10 On the other hand, social stigma around nudity, sex, and pornography means that subjects of pornographic photographs are often in a quite vulnerable position, and publishing their images and names on the internet might lead to significant professional, financial, and social repercussions for them. It is one thing to agree to the distribution of such material in a print magazine with “a small run . . . sold in queer spaces to queer audiences.”11 It is quite another for intimate images of you to be suddenly discoverable by anyone in the world who puts your name in a search engine—especially when the images in question may have been taken “before the first web browser was released.”12 It is worth quoting in full the distress expressed at this prospect by one On Our Backs model, poet Amber Dawn:

When I heard all the issues of the magazine are being digitized, my heart sank. I meant this work to be for my community and now I am being objectified in a way that I have no control over. People can cut up my body and make it a collage. My professional and public life can be high jacked. These are uses I never intended and I still don’t want.13

In such cases, responsible stewardship means weighing the benefits to current and future users of the records against the potential dangers to the people depicted in them—that is, weighing our responsibilities to each group, or, to use the frame of an ethics of care, considering both the relationship between archivists and records users and that between archivists and records subjects.14

Archivists do have tools to help navigate such conflicts between access and privacy, chiefly the imposition of restrictions on access to material, either for a set length of time or to a certain group of people. However, we must remember that these restrictions do not hold the force of law, and that soliciting material and making it discoverable can have consequences for creators and donors. For example, consider the well-known case of Boston College’s Belfast Project, which conducted oral histories with former militants involved in the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Though the interviewers promised that the recordings would be kept sealed, the records were later subpoenaed by UK law enforcement, and Boston College was forced to turn them over, resulting in the filing of criminal charges against several participants.15

Realistic Capacity

Responsible stewardship also means tempering our zeal for preservation with an understanding of what any archivist can actually achieve, what SAA describes as “a repository’s realistic capacity for care.”16 As Greg Wiedman has pointed out, archivists are distinguished by their need to work at scale; archival practices originated as stop-gaps to provide some level of access to aggregations of records too vast for bibliographic methods to handle.17 In this context, the principle of selection is crucial. Archivists must navigate the flood of records strategically, deliberately deciding where to spend their resources on collection and description rather than accepting every aged document they are offered or creating detailed descriptions of the first fonds they come across while others molder, unappraised, unattended, and inaccessible.18 We must also consider the cost of retaining any records series we consider preserving indefinitely (whether in linear footage of shelving in a space whose temperature and humidity we pay to control, or in gigabytes of storage and CPU cycles of monitoring on computer hardware that we must pay to rent or maintain). This “total cost of stewardship”19 should be weighed against the values that inhere in a record. The strategic approach to our work implied by the principle of selection is only growing more important as digital tools drive the creation of ever more records while the number of archivists and resources available to them hold constant or decrease. Ultimately, to be responsible stewards we must accept that we cannot preserve everything, or even most things, and instead “embrace the archival sliver.”20

References

  1. Society of American Archivists, “SAA Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics,” August 6, 2020, https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics. ↩

  2. Merriam-Webster.Com Dictionary, “Stewardship,” August 24, 2025, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stewardship, emphasis my own. ↩

  3. New Oxford American Dictionary, 3rd ed, ed. Angus Stevenson and Christine A. Lindberg (Oxford University Press, 2011), under “steward.” ↩

  4. On this see Rodney G. S. Carter, “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence,” Archivaria, September 25, 2006, 215–33, https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/12541. ↩

  5. Eira Tansey, “Institutional Silences and the Digital Dark Age,” The Schedule, May 23, 2016, https://saarmrt.wordpress.com/2016/05/23/institutional-silences-and-the-digital-dark-age/. For further reflection on this topic, see Brad Houston, “Archives/RM Ethics, Co-Opting, and Digital Fireplaces,” The Schedule, December 5, 2013, https://saarmrt.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/archivesrm-ethics-co-opting-and-digital-fireplaces/. See also the discussion of how records of genocide can be used to hold the perpetrators to account in Mark A. Greene, “A Critique of Social Justice as an Archival Imperative: What Is It We’re Doing That’s All That Important?,” The American Archivist 76, no. 2 (2013): 302–34, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43490357. ↩

  6. Eira Tansey, No One Owes Their Trauma to Archivists, or, the Commodification of Contemporaneous Collecting, June 5, 2020, accessed August 22, 2025, https://eiratansey.com/2020/06/05/no-one-owes-their-trauma-to-archivists-or-the-commodification-of-contemporaneous-collecting/, emphasis in the original. ↩

  7. E.g., “Archivists should promote and provide the widest possible accessibility of materials, while respecting legal and ethical access restrictions. . . . While access may be justifiably limited in some instances, archivists still seek to foster open access and unrestricted use as broadly as possible when appropriate.” Society of American Archivists, “SAA Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics.” ↩

  8. I rely here on the work by the clear-voiced Tara Robertson, “Not All Information Wants to Be Free: The Case Study of On Our Backs,” in Applying Library Values to Emerging Technology: Decision-Making in the Age of Open Access, Maker Spaces, and the Ever-Changing Library (Publications in Librarianship #72), ed. Peter D. Fernandez and Kelly Tilton (American Library Association, 2018), http://eprints.rclis.org/32463/. ↩

  9. Quoted in Robertson, “Not All Information Wants to Be Free,” 230. ↩

  10. Travel can form a significant barrier to access and use; see Jennifer Rutner and Roger Schonfeld, Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians (Ithaka S+R, 2012), https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.22532. ↩

  11. Amber Dawn, quoted in Robertson, “Not All Information Wants to Be Free,” 227. ↩

  12. Quoted in Robertson, “Not All Information Wants to Be Free,” 227. ↩

  13. Quoted in Robertson, “Not All Information Wants to Be Free,” 227. ↩

  14. Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives,” Archivaria 81, no. Spring (2016): 23–43. For another example of when broad access is inappropriate, consider the Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels, developed to allow indigenous communities to designate culturally-sensitive materials which should only be viewed by certain people or in certain conditions. María Montenegro, “Subverting the Universality of Metadata Standards: The TK Labels as a Tool to Promote Indigenous Data Sovereignty,” Journal of Documentation 75, no. 4 (2019): 731–49, https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-08-2018-0124. ↩

  15. Marie Breen-Smyth, “Interviewing Combatants: Lessons from the Boston College Case,” Contemporary Social Science, Routledge, April 2, 2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21582041.2019.1637533; “Boston Tapes: Q&A on Secret Troubles Confessions,” Northern Ireland, BBC News, May 1, 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-27238797; Christine Anne George, “Blog Entry 5: The Belfast Project,” Society of American Archivists Issues and Advocacy Section, April 14, 2014, https://www2.archivists.org/groups/issues-and-advocacy-section/blog-entry-5-the-belfast-project. ↩

  16. Society of American Archivists, “SAA Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics.” ↩

  17. Gregory Wiedeman, “The Historical Hazards of Finding Aids,” The American Archivist 82, no. 2 (2019): 381–420, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc-82-02-20; Gregory Wiedeman, “Designing Digital Discovery and Access Systems for Archival Description,” The Code4Lib Journal, no. 55 (January 2023), https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/16963. ↩

  18. For approaches to archival collecting, see F. Gerald Ham, Selecting and Appraising Archives and Manuscripts, Archival Fundamentals Series (The Society of American Archivists, 1993). The importance of efficient allocation of resources to arrangement and description across holdings has been discussed at length by the professional movement known variably as More Product, Less Process (MPLP), minimal processing, or extensible processing. For the paper that sparked the movement, see Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner, “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing,” The American Archivist 68, no. 2 (2005): 208–63, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.68.2.c741823776k65863. For one comment in the long-running professional conversation about MPLP, see Christopher Prom, “Optimum Access? Processing in College and University Archives,” The American Archivist 73, no. 1 (2010): 146–74, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.73.1.519m6003k7110760. For an example of MPLP principles in action, see Kate Dundon et al., Guidelines for Efficient Archival Processing in the University of California Libraries, Version 4 (University of California Libraries, 2020), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4b81g01z. ↩

  19. Chela Weber et al., Total Cost of Stewardship: Responsible Collection Building in Archives and Special Collections, OCLC Research, 2021, https://doi.org/10.25333/ZBH0-A044. ↩

  20. Trevor Owens, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 9, https://doi.org/10.31229/osf.io/5cpjt. ↩

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