52.Case Study Research. Another form of research has been the case studies written documenting events and activities important to the field and its development. These case studies are particularly valuable because they provide tools for use in teaching and for archival practitioners for purposes of comparison and, at times, emulation. Some of the case studies described here were written purposefully for the archives profession, but many were written for other purposes but nevertheless possess substantial value for the profession. Not too many years ago, the only case studies were those written by individuals involved in the case, thus lacking objectivity and often having limited value to archivists and other records professionals. Now the profession has studies of considerably improved quality, such as the Society of American Archivists series of case studies.

53.The Society of American Archivists a few years ago embarked on developing a set of case studies, focused on electronic records management, the first such effort by the profession to develop such materials. These studies include explorations of office automation within the banking and insurance industries, starting an electronic records management program within higher education, building partnerships to influence the digital communications environment and culture at a major university, and "how archives and records management programs can ensure that new and emerging technologies support public recordkeeping requirements for long-term preservation and access." These case studies also explore other issues, such as expanding the use of records for decision making within higher education, the nature of archival descriptive standards and the impact of standardization on archival institutions, and managing "voluminous and technically complex modern case records." These publications are Grant Mitchell, Approaching Electronic Records Management at the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia: A Case Study in Organizational Dynamics and Archival Initiative (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1997); Barbara Reed and Frank Upward, The APB Bank: Managing Electronic Records as an Authoritative Resource (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1998); Elaine D. Engst and H. Thomas Hickerson, Developing Collaborative Structures for Expanding the Use of University Collections in Teaching and Research (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1998); Thomas J. Galvin and Russell L. Kahn, Electronic Records Management as a Strategic Opportunity: A Case Study of The State University of New York, Office of Archives and Records Management, (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1996); Jean E. Dryden, Implementing Descriptive Standards at the United Church Central Archives: A Case Study in Automated Techniques for Archives (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1997); Anne Gilliland-Swetland, Policy and Politics: The Archival Implications of Digital Communications and Culture at the University of Michigan (Chicago: SAA, 1996); Thomas D. Norris, Prison Inmate Records in New York State: The Challenge of Modern Government Case Records (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1996); and Charles M. Dollar and Deborah S. Skaggs, Using Information Technologies to Build Strategic Collaborations: The State of Alabama as a Test Case; A Case Study in Archives Management (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1996).

54.There have been a number of cases, especially in government, featuring the importance of records and archives. The legal case concerning the preservation and accessibility of White House electronic mail produced a number of articles and fuller studies, many with implications regarding the nature of electronic records management. These include David Bearman, "The Implications of Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President for the Archival Management of Electronic Records," American Archivist 56 (Fall 1993): 674-689 and David A. Wallace, " The Public's Use of Federal Recordkeeping Statutes to Shape Federal Information Policy : A Study of the Profs Case," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1997. For views about this case outside the field, see James D. Lewis, “White House Electronic Mail and Federal Recordkeeping Law: Press ‘D’ to Delete History.” Michigan Law Review (February 1995): 794-849; Philip G. Schrag, “Working Papers as Federal Records: The Need for New Legislation to Preserve the History of National Policy.” Administrative Law Review 46 (Spring 1994): 95-140; Catherine F. Sheehan, “Opening the Government’s Electronic Mail: Public Access to National Security Council Records.” Boston College Law Review 35 (September 1994): 1145-1201; and Tom Blanton, ed., White House E-Mail (New York: New Press, 1995). This case continues to be cited as one of the most important ones demonstrating the challenges of electronic records, as well as the problems regarding access to government records.

55.A story with an international twist concerns the Swiss banks and the assets of Holocaust victims. Isabel Vincent’s Hitler’s Silent Partners: Swiss Banks, Nazi Gold, and the Pursuit of Justice (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1997) provides a thorough and human account of this issue. Vincent, a Canadian journalist, points out that the parameters of the case have been well-known for years, but she relates how a variety of factors (including the end of the Cold War and the prospects of Swiss neutrality) brought renewed attention to this horrific phase of human history. Her book well demonstrates the importance of records, with numerous references to business and government archives, and, as a consequence, it posits some important challenges to cherished ideas of records and archives management. For example, Vincent dismantles the principles of Swiss principles and laws for banking secrecy. A number of other books have been published about this topic, including Tom Bower, Nazi Gold: The Full Story of the Fifty-Year Swiss-Nazi Conspiracy to Steal Billions from Europe’s Jews and Holocaust Survivors (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1997) and Itamar Levin, The Last Deposit: Swiss Banks and Holocaust Victims’ Accounts, trans. Natasha Dornberg (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999). Levin’s study is the most recent and detailed of the accounts relating to the Swiss banks and Holocaust assets case. Levi, an Israeli journalist, provides a close review of the case from archives and other sources. While acknowledging that the extent of the assets stolen will never be accurately determined because of lost documents, Levin relates a compelling story that suggests that even ordinary records can take on extraordinary significance. Levin acknowledges that the banks had the right to destroy the dormant records, although the matter of destroying records of open accounts is still a problem. Levin also has much to say about the stonewalling of the banks, as well as the complicity of the Swiss government in covering up just what occurred with the assets of the victims. The degree of anti-Semitism and other issues are also revealed in Levin’s volume. This case reveals the importance even ordinary records can have on critical international affairs as well as issues with moral and ethical implications.

56.If nothing else, the Holocaust victims case reveals the degree of inter-relatedness of institutional records, an aspect of modern organizations discussed, but not well-studied, by many archivists. While the Swiss banking industry struggled to keep its records secret, governments were accumulating vast quantities of records about the banks’ activities. As Bower notes, eleven American government agencies had been involved in the case since 1944: “Their accumulated records between 1940 and 1962. . . amounted to incalculable millions of sheets of paper.” The federal government’s report, prepared by William Z. Slany, the Department of State’s Historian and an inventory of related records on this case held by the National Archives, prepared by James Gregory Bradsher.

57.Closely related to this story, and also possessing remarkable insights into the importance of records for accountability and personal rights, is the continuing saga of the discovery, recovery, and controversy of art and other cultural artifacts (including archives and historic manuscripts) stolen or misplaced as a result of the Second World War. A growing number of studies is appearing on this topic, including Elizabeth Simpson, ed., The Spoils of War: World War II and Its Aftermath; The Loss, Reappearance, and Recovery of Cultural Property (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, 1997), the proceedings of a 1995 conference on the topic. While some of the cases involve the loss and recovery of records, the ongoing controversy also reveals the importance of records to society. As Marlene P. Hiller, in her essay on losses in the former Soviet republics, states: “Loss of cultural treasures to this extent was new to modern European warfare. It is therefore all the more astonishing that it took so long for the academic community as well as the institutions concerned and the public to become interested in the matter. For almost four decades, dust was allowed to settle (often quite literally) on the archival documentation of these losses, as well as on at least some of the cultural objects under discussion” (p. 81). The volume includes many descriptions of losses of archives. A very popular account of the stolen art treasures and archives can be had in William H. Honan, Treasure Hunt: A New York Times Reporter Tracks the Quedlinburg Hoard (New York: Fromm International Publishing Corporation, 1997), with many references to the use of records and archives in unraveling the theft of these medieval artworks and manuscripts.

58.There are other case studies about records, archives, and their value and use in organizations and society. Shelley Davis, Unbridled Power: Inside the Secret Culture of the IRS (New York: Harper, 1997) is a highly personalized account by the former IRS historian of mammoth recordkeeping problems at the Internal Revenue Service, where records management had broken down and there was no archives program at all. Bruce P. Montgomery, "Nixon's Legal Legacy: White House Papers and the Constitution," American Archivist 56 (Fall 1993): 586-613 provides an interesting account of the history of these records, a history continuing to unfold. For a more sensationalistic account of this case, see Seymour M. Hersh, “Nixon’s Last Cover-Up: The Tapes He Wants the Archives to Suppress,” New Yorker (December 14, 1992): 76-95. For a case demonstrating how cooperative efforts can resolve complicated access issues about controversial public records, see Diane S. Nixon, "Providing Access to Controversial Public Records: The Case of the Robert F. Kennedy Assassination Investigation Files," Public Historian 11 (Summer 1989): 29-44. David A. Wallace, "Archivists, Recordkeeping, and the Declassification of Records: What We Can Learn from Contemporary Histories," American Archivist 56 (Fall 1993): 794-814 provides a readable analysis of the challenges posed by declassification of government records by examining recent studies in which the authors have tried to use FOIA and other means to gain access to such records. A useful volume, written primarily by researchers and public policy advocates, describing cases of government records access is Athan G. Theoharis, ed., A Culture of Secrecy: The Government Versus the People’s Right to Know (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998). Unlike many of the books dealing with secrecy and access, this volume focuses directly on records. These essays reveal an “antipathy toward public disclosure and accountability [that] continues to determine federal records practices” (p. 13). Essays are included on the FBI’s resistance to FOIA, the CIA’s secrecy, and the National Security Agency, along with specific cases such as getting access to the FBI file on John Lennon, the FBI’s Supreme Court sex files, the continuing litigation over the Nixon tapes, the PROFS case, the difficulties in producing the documentary series the Foreign Relations of the United States, and the work of the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board. The Theoharis volume is generally oriented to researchers seeking access to government records, but it also provides a view suggesting that secrecy is covering up many actions that should not have been carried out.

59.A very different orientation to government secrecy and records access is found in Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Actually a fairly routine history of U.S. government secrecy, Moynihan argues that secrecy is the result of escalating legislation making it too routine (when in doubt, stamp it secret). He also believes that efforts to be secretive often are far worse than the activities being hidden. Moynihan argues for openness, the most notable aspect of this work. His views about what is being hidden are either naïve or themselves reflective of a perspective of a government official. A much older volume -- Stanton Wheeler, ed., On Record: Files and Dossiers in American Life (New York: Sage, 1968) – reveals that the kinds of problems portrayed in the Theoharis volume do not represent new concerns at all.

60.There is, in fact, an increasing array of studies from a variety of disciplines with insights on records, recordkeeping systems, archives, and related topics, many of these presented as quite useful case studies. A number of these studies relate to issues of privacy and access in records, such as Timothy Garton Ash, The File: A Personal History, (New York: Random House, 1997), a very personal view on the opening of the Stasi files in the former East Germany, and E. Wayne Carp, Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), an important study of the manner in adoption and social service agencies have changed in regards to recordkeeping and access to these records. Family Matters provides a view on the evolving nature of privacy and adoption recordkeeping systems. Carp focuses on American adoption practice from the mid-nineteenth century when the first state adoption laws began to be enacted through the rise of professional social work and up to the present. Carp demonstrates that the origins and continuing impetus for keeping adoption records secret was the desire to keep out the public (those not directly concerned with the adoption), while secrecy slowly expanded to keep out natural parents and eventually even those being adopted. The importance of Carp’s study is that he carefully relates the changing notions of secrecy to broader societal changes, such as the growth of suburbia and a “family-centered culture” and shifting political and ethical views. The records professional will be interested in the careful description of the evolving adoption case file and keeping of related records, from bare-bones files reflecting an overriding interest in placing children to elaborate case notes as social workers professionalized. Carp even relates how recordkeeping became a source of contention between professional and amateur adoption people. Carp’s book is an excellent example of why archivists and other records professionals need to read outside of their field, finding particular insights into the nature of records and the systems creating and maintaining them. Ash’s The File is another example of such a book, adding an interesting personal view of the meaning of the new accessibility to these records. Ash, an English historian, writes about the file on him created by the Stasi, the East German secret service, as he traveled in East and West Germany for research on Berlin during the Nazi era. Comprising some three hundred pages, he discovers both insightful and remarkably naive comments about him and his activities. In one sense, the file is an addendum to his own diary, another record chronicling his activities of two decades before. Ash also discovers, however, the unsettling amount of information about him generated by people he once thought of as friends and colleagues. The book is an intriguing discussion of the power of records and the power of access to records, for Ash spends much of his book on wrestling with whether he should be writing this book at all (since the opening of such once highly protected secret files is “without precedent”).

61.Many other books, similar to the Ash and Carp volumes, are appearing. A particularly powerful study about records management is Stanton A. Glantz, John Slade, Lisa A. Bero, Peter Hanauer, and Deborah E. Barnes, The Cigarette Papers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), demonstrating how the management of records in these companies was corrupted to support concealing information from the public and government about the health effects of cigarette smoking. The volume provides interesting insights into an industry where lawyers gained control not only of records but the research process. The volume also suggests many interesting additional issues, as it is composed of records stolen from the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corporation. The records, with other links to Web sites about the tobacco case, can also be used at http://www.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco. Angus MacKenzie, Secrets: The CIA’s War at Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) provides a closer view at the evolution of secrecy surrounding the CIA records, with particular insights into how public policy has failed to alleviate the problems of access to its records and a higher accountability for the agency. MacKenzie’s Secrets tracks how the CIA has become more involved in domestic affairs than in foreign intelligence issues since the National Security Act of 1947. The book is an unsettling analysis of the growth of secrecy, even as the Cold War has concluded.

62.There are many studies reconsidering how records are created, used, and maintained within organizations, drawing on many other disciplines to consider such matters. There are some assessments of the social aspects of information and records that should be reassuring as well as helpful for records professionals. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000) is an important reading for records professionals. I predict that it will be widely-read by corporate and government leaders both because of its accessibility in explaining complex issues but also because it deals with matters increasingly facing organizations today. The book commences with a discussion of the limits of information, the problems with the over-abundance of information, and the standard, overly enthusiastic predictions about information technology and the value of information. “Today,” they write, “it’s the myth of information that is overpowering richer explanations” (p. 32). This should seem very familiar to archivists and records professionals as they face trying to relate the importance of records to the constantly shifting sands of information captivating the attention of corporate and government leaders. Brown and Duguid emphasize that we need to understand social networks using information in order to comprehend how information might or should be used. The book contains a highly readable discussion of knowledge management as well as a re-worked version of "The Social Life of Documents," First Monday 1 (1996) an essay all records professionals should read. In their book, incorporating a re-worked version of this essay, they write, “Documents not only serve to make information but also to warrant it – to give it validity” (p. 187) and “So documents do not merely carry information, they help make it, structure it, and validate it” (p. 189). This is a remarkably important bridge for records professionals to use in crossing back and forth to the various information disciplines, and, as well, it will be a book widely read by others who might begin to rethink their view toward records. If we can break down the stereotypes about records as clots in organizational arteries of communication and decision-making, records professionals will be able to highlight the more important values of records for purposes such as accountability and organizational memory.

63.Other examples of such studies with implications for understanding organizational recordkeeping include Aaron V. Cicourel, The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice (New York: John Wiley, 1968); Martha S. Feldman and James G. March, “Information in Organizations as Signal and Symbol,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 26 (1981): 171-186; Martha S. Feldman, Order without Design: Information Production and Policy Making (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989); Christian Heath and Paul Luff, “Documents and Professional Practice: ‘Bad’ Organizational Reasons for ‘Good’ Clinical Records,” Proceedings of the ACM 1996 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Boston, MA 1996), 354-363; Herbert Kaufman, The Forest Ranger: A Study in Administrative Behavior, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1960); Richard A. Lanham, “The Implications of Electronic Information for the Sociology of Knowledge.” Leonardo 27 (1994): 155-63; William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Phyllis M. Ngin, "Organizational Analyses of Computer User Acceptance Among Nurses," Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1993; C. J. Pettinari, Task, Talk, and Text in the Operating Room: A Study in Medical Discourse (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1998); Sim B. Sitkin and R. Bies, eds. The Legalistic Organization (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994); Dorothy Smith, “The Social Construction of Documentary Reality," Sociological Inquiry, 44, (1974): 257-268; Lucy Suchman, “Office Procedure as Practical Action: Models of Work and System Design,” ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems 1/4 (1983): 320-328; G. Symon, K. Long, and J. Ellis, “The Coordination of Work Activities: Cooperation and Conflict in a Hospital Context,” Computer Cooperative Work, 5 (1996): 1-31; Kenneth Woodward, Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn't, and Why (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990); and JoAnne Yates and Wanda J. Orlikowski, "Genres of Organizational Communication: A Structurational Approach to Studying Communication and Media," Academy of Management Review 17, no. 2 (1992): 299-326. Writings such as these reflect the fact that many different disciplines, from history and sociology to management and the health sciences, are conducting research revealing how organizations use records. It will be necessary, in using these studies, to understand that individuals from other fields often conduct such studies with little or no understanding of the work of archivists and other records professionals. The article by Yates and Orlikowski, for example, is quite revealing, but one must still understand that their concept of communication genre is not that far removed from how archivists have viewed the notions of form and function of records.

64.Some records professionals have tried to evaluate the nature of recordkeeping within organizational settings. Piers Cain and Anne Thurston, Personnel Records: A Strategic Resource for Public Sector Management (with Case Studies from Uganda, Ghana and Zimbabwe) (Tonbrdige Kent, Britain: Commonwealth Secretariat, 1998) is one of the best organizational studies with an affinity for understanding records, drawing on the work of the International Records Management Trust. Records professionals will find this a valuable study with its emphasis on the need to have good paper records management before automation is used. The emphasis is on “developing” nations: “developing countries are entering the ‘information age’ from a starting point of extreme vulnerability. Not only do they face huge obstacles in affording and obtaining access to the new technologies, but in many cases their existing paper record systems – the foundation of their current national information infrastructures – are in a very poor state or even collapsed. Automating a chaotic situation is likely to create yet more chaos” (p. 13). Still, there are lessons here far exceeding the issues faced by developing nations. The charts or problems and solutions (pp. 31-34) and the schematics for business process analysis for “obtaining reliable records sources for a personnel database” (pp. 38-43) are worth some reflection by records professionals anywhere.

65.There are also an increasing number of studies in which the use or value of archival records is elevated to the fore. The controversy concerning the exhibition commemorating the end of the Second World War at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum examined an exhibit re-interpreting the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan based on the increasing availability of declassified records. A number of publications have provided glimpses into the controversy and the use of the records, such as Philip Nobile, ed., Judgment at the Smithsonian. (New York: Marlowe and Co., 1995); Martin Harwit, An Exhibit Denied: Lobbying the History of Enola Gay (New York: Copernicus/Springer-Verlag, 1997); and Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996). For a recent essay commenting on this controversy from an archival perspective, see Elizabeth Yakel, “Museums, Management, Media, and Memory: Lessons from the Enola Gay Exhibit,” Libraries & Culture, forthcoming. The best single source is Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz, eds., Hiroshima’s Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy (Stony Creek, Conn.: The Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998), a massive compendium (nearly 600 pages) of writing and original documents – from all perspectives about the controversial Smithsonian exhibition commemorating the end of the Second World War. There is a great deal of information about the importance of records in providing the best views on the decision to drop the Atomic bombs. The editors have reproduced some of the key documents generated in the 1940’s regarding the use of the weapons and the subsequent justification.

66.Considerations of the importance of records are likely to turn up in many studies and from many disciplines. Michael Palumbo, The Waldheim Files: Myth and Reality (London: Faber and Faber, 1988) provides a glimpse into how records documented Waldheim's service in the German Army during the Second World War, challenging his interpretation of his service. Some of these studies reflect on the increasing concerns about elements of recordkeeping, such as personal privacy brought about by the increasing uses of information technology. Janna Malamud Smith, Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Inc., 1997) includes, for example, a poignant chapter on the issues of privacy generated by the author serving as the executer of her father’s, Bernard Malamud, estate (including his literary papers). That it is important to understand how the media thinks about archives and records can be seen in Barbie Zelizer, Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), a study demonstrating how news reporters and their memories of this event became the official archive about it, rather than the records and other evidence compiled about it.