Archival records contain important historical information. As primary sources, they allow users to get as close to the past as possible. Often they contain information that legally or ethically should remain private.
Subjects are often unaware of their representation in archival collections, which leaves archivists in the difficult position of allowing access while protecting individuals’ rights. Archivists attempt to resolve this conflict so that the interests of the repository, records creators, and researchers are supported. The balancing act is further complicated with the digital world as archivists determine the subjects’ expectations regarding online access.
The Limits of the Law
Sometimes the decision to withhold information from digital archives is clear under federal law, such as personal health information or educational records protected under the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), respectively. In addition, laws also protect against the disclosure of personally identifiable information (PII). PII includes any information maintained by an organization, including but not limited to education, financial transactions, medical history, and criminal or employment history. It also includes information that can be used to determine an individual’s identity, such as their name, social security number, date and place of birth, and other personal information linked to an individual.
The 24/7/365 Reading Room
There are legal and ethical obligations associated with the digitization of archival records. For example, the Society of American Archivists (SAA) code of ethics requires that archivists protect the privacy rights of both donors and the individuals and groups who are the subjects of archival records and deal with the ethical obligation to provide access to historical sources for research purposes.
Digital records present different legal concerns because with digitization, the materials become more available, and with broad access, any private information disclosed can reach a much wider audience and, therefore, cause more harm. In addition, the obscurity of confidential information in physical collections is troubled by digital archives, which enable precise searching across documents by a global audience; before digitization, researchers would have to travel to reading rooms and search physically within collections to find the same information.
Forget Me Not
The right to be forgotten is the right to have private information about an individual be eliminated from Internet searches and other directories under some circumstances. The specifications of this right are still being developed and argued internationally. However, as more materials become digitized and available online, materials that we thought were limited in availability—like a negative news story about an individual in a local paper published decades ago—now live online seemingly forever.
Archives become publishers of the material in digital collections, making it more likely to be held legally liable for publishing private information. Protecting private information is a challenging issue in archives since many archivists see their responsibilities of maintaining privacy and promoting access as values in conflict.
Strategies for Privacy in Archives
Consequently, archivists have employed strategies to assess sensitive information and reduce the risks of causing privacy-related harms. Archivists have replicated many processes to help ameliorate privacy risks in digitization work, including selection policies and procedures, contacting donors and subjects for permissions, and redacting sensitive information. Strategies include careful selection of materials for digital publication, the possibility of getting input from third parties mentioned in archival collections, creating policies for handling potential complaints, and tailoring access to sensitive collections. In addition, archives often include take-down policies that allow archival subjects to request the removal of online material.
For example, if archivists find records with PII, they must judge their potential value for research and decide the next steps. If the record has high potential research value, archivists will want to keep it in the collection. They can physically remove it from the collection and place it in a restricted box, or keep it with the collection and redact only the sensitive information. Redaction can be done for digital documents by software and physical documents by obscuring the information and making a copy. If the document has no research value, archivists can deaccession it and officially remove it from the collection.
Supporting Everyone’s Interest
No matter what strategies they use, archivists must balance legal mandates and ethical concerns with accessibility. They should provide as much access as is responsible, given the information the records of enduring value contain.
The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog.
Get Started
Looking for archival advising, records management, and historical research services? Click below to speak with an expert consultant.
Archives often operate in environments defined by scarcity of space, staff, time, and funding. In these conditions, every decision carries weight. Without a plan, archives risk spreading their resources too thin, responding only to immediate crises, and missing opportunities for growth and impact. Strategic planning serves as a lifeline, providing archivists with a structured approach to prioritize, allocate resources, and communicate the value of their work to stakeholders.
Archivists have long recognized patterns of limited funding that shape their institutions, yet they have consistently responded with creativity, commitment, and innovation. Even when resources are scarce, archives continue to find ways to build and maintain essential infrastructure and strengthen public engagement. Each challenge underscores the importance of archivists’ labor and provides an opportunity to advocate for the central role archives play in their communities.
Archives safeguard treasures, including objects like the founding documents of a nation and photographs of defining cultural moments. These holdings inspire a sense of connection to the past, and at the heart of that work are archivists whose expertise brings these collections to life.
No archives is an island. Especially in resource-constrained environments, collaboration through shared infrastructure provides a lifeline. Consortia models turn scarcity into opportunity by spreading costs and expertise across multiple archives. By pooling resources, institutions achieve more than they could alone.
Well-resourced institutions have developed archival best practices, including comprehensive finding aids, climate-controlled storage, and digital preservation systems. For small or resource-constrained archives, these standards can feel out of reach. The danger is that the profession’s ideals may discourage institutions from taking action, leaving records vulnerable. The solution lies in paring down practices and procedures without abandoning principles.
Many archives exist within environments of chronic underfunding. Community archives, small historical societies, or lone arrangers may work with little more than donated materials, a handful of volunteers, and minimal budgets.
However, these institutions remain vital, safeguarding the histories of communities often absent from mainstream narratives. Scarcity shapes their reality, yet it can still allow meaningful work.
Humanity produces more digital content than at any other point in history. Every click, message, and post contributes to an expanding universe of data that represents the cultural memory of our time. At the center of this transformation stand archivists, the professionals uniquely trained to ensure that memories survive in the future. However, even as the scale of the challenge grows, their voices risk being sidelined in public conversations about digital preservation.
In recent years, the concept of “slow librarianship” has emerged as a thoughtful response to the accelerating pace and pressures placed upon library professionals. Drawing inspiration from the broader slow movement, it emphasizes care, reflection, ethics, and people-centered work over speed and efficiency.
The archival profession is characterized by dedication to public memory, cultural preservation, and service. However, beneath this noble mission lies a troubling reality: the increasing reliance on gig and contract labor.
Written documents have long occupied a privileged position in archives as the most authoritative memory source. However, this excludes vast repositories of knowledge that reside outside the written word, especially within Indigenous communities, where memory is often preserved and transmitted through oral traditions, performance, storytelling, ceremony, and embodied practices.
Archival description is often treated as a neutral or technical task: summarizing contents, assigning subject headings, and organizing metadata for retrieval. However, description is actually far from neutral. It shapes how users interpret records, which narratives are centered, and whose voices are made visible or erased.
As the archival profession reckons with the legacies of colonialism, more institutions and practitioners are turning toward Indigenous and decolonial approaches that reframe traditional archival practice. Central to this shift is recognizing cultural protocols and community-defined rules governing how knowledge is created, shared, accessed, and preserved. Cultural protocols are foundational to ethical, respectful, and reciprocal relationships between archives and Indigenous communities.
In recent decades, Indigenous communities and archivists have challenged the dominant frameworks that have long shaped archival practice. Traditionally, Western archival models have prioritized state authority, institutional control, and the presumption of neutrality. These models often fail to reflect Indigenous worldviews, community needs, or the rights of Indigenous peoples over their records and heritage.
As archival practice shifts to meet the challenges of the digital age, the ethical use of born-digital materials has become one of the most pressing concerns for archivists. These materials—emails, websites, text messages, digital photographs, spreadsheets, social media posts, and more—are created and stored digitally from their inception.
The fundamental principles of archival preservation focus on the agents of deterioration, preventive conservation, and essential preservation strategies applied in archival settings.
The monetary appraisal of archives and manuscripts is a critical yet underexplored intersection of library science and financial valuation. This article addresses the persistent knowledge gap between archival assessment and fiscal valuation and provides an overview of the monetary appraisal process in the United States. It focuses on concluding the fair market value (FMV) of noncash charitable contributions, a process governed by Internal Revenue Service (IRS) regulations and the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP). By documenting practices and terminology, the article serves as a resource for archivists navigating the complexities of donor relations and institutional stewardship. It advocates for increased fiscal literacy within the archival profession, suggesting that an integrated understanding of market dynamics and stewardship costs is essential for the care and financial substantiation of collections.
Proper archival storage is one of the most critical aspects of archival preservation. In addition to housing collections in a dedicated archival storage room, using suitable storage materials and enclosures helps protect archival collections from environmental damage, physical wear, and chemical deterioration.
One of the core challenges archivists face is determining the appropriate description level for materials in their collections. From broad collection-level overviews to granular item-level details, descriptive hierarchies play a crucial role in conveying the context and structure of archival materials.
Description is a cornerstone of archival practice, providing the means for users and archivists to understand, access, and interpret materials.
Mixed-media archives, which contain physical and digital records, present unique challenges for archival arrangement. These collections require archivists to develop strategies that address the different needs of physical and digital materials while maintaining the collection’s coherence and accessibility.
Digital records have introduced new challenges to traditional archival arrangement practices. While the principles of original order and provenance remain relevant, the nature of digital materials requires archivists to adapt these principles to new formats and technologies.
Archival arrangement organizes and structures archival materials to ensure efficient management, access, and preservation.
Redaction in archival work—obscuring or removing sensitive information from records—has become a central concern in contemporary archival ethics. As archives increasingly acquire born-digital records and digitize historical collections for online access, archivists must grapple with data privacy, access, transparency, and potential harm.
Archives have traditionally focused on preserving historical records, ensuring access, and maintaining the integrity of collections. However, in the digital age, the moral responsibilities of archivists have grown more complex.
Archives have long been viewed as bastions of memory, preservation, and historical accountability. However, archivists must confront ethical questions in an era of digital surveillance, data harvesting, and global information flows.
As archival institutions evolve from custodians of information to facilitators of memory and meaning-making, emotional engagement has become a vital, though often overlooked, dimension of archival design.
Archival reading rooms have long been the centerpiece of public access to collections. They are where researchers engage with historical documents, where discovery becomes tangible, and where the institutional identity of an archives is most visibly embodied.
Archival discovery tools, such as catalogs, finding aids, search interfaces, and digital repositories, are often the first point of contact between users and collections. These tools serve as maps and compasses, guiding users through vast and often complex holdings.
Design thinking has become a widely adopted approach in fields ranging from technology to education, prized for emphasizing empathy, experimentation, and iterative problem-solving. For archives, traditionally shaped around internal workflows and professional conventions, design thinking presents an opportunity to reimagine outreach and engagement strategies from users’ perspectives.
With shrinking resources and increasing demands, archivists cannot afford to view budgeting as an afterthought. A carefully developed budget is a strategic tool that connects an archives’ mission to its daily operations. It demonstrates accountability, supports advocacy efforts, and provides a framework for decision-making.