Archiving Toolkit | Privacy and Donor Agreements
PRIVACY AND ACCESS IN ARCHIVED RECORDS
Computer and paper files that haven’t been reviewed in years raise legitimate concerns for the donor about exposing sensitive material. Too often donors anticipate the enormous task of reviewing all the documents before ethically donating them to an archives.
Here are some useful facts
- When an archives processes collections, they refolder files and describe their contents. SSNs and other sensitive personal information are routinely flagged and removed.
- Donors can request that records including membership, interpersonal conflicts, or legal concerns be flagged before the collection is made public. The materials they flag will be brought to your attention and an agreement about what to keep or close to the public will be made.
- Archival ethics balances equitable access while preventing harm by exposure. There may be issues that can only be determined on a case by case basis. It is preferable that donors and any concerned parties agree on how to proceed. A common solution to the balance is that some files are closed for a specific number of years roughly equivalent to the individual's lifetime. No archives will accept a collection that can never be opened.
- These conditions are explicitly spelled out in the Donation Agreement.
PRIVACY AND DONATION AGREEMENTS
How collection materials can be used, reproduced, or publicized is stated in the donation agreement. The donor may retain or transfer control of how the materials are published online by retaining the license to copy or publish any part of the collection.
The donation agreement is an enduring legal document between you and the archival institution. Signers of the agreement should have official standing.
After selecting an archives, begin discussions about privacy before the collection is physically sent to the archives. Specify any specific sensitive information to be flagged during processing. The donation agreement should specify the donor's right to review all materials that were flagged and to "close" private files of historic interest for a specific number of years or to withdraw it before the collection is opened to the public. Materials the archives remove for discard are called "separations;" the Gift Agreement specifies what will be done with any separations.
Jeff Stone, Administrator for Dignity NY, talks about navigating privacy concerns.
Privacy in the Digital Age
Other privacy concerns may be related to digitizing the content of files and/or making them available online or in exhibits or harvested in web crawls.
Privacy and copyright laws related to social media mean that you are able to preserve information you created and posted, but not necessarily content generated by others. This is to protect the privacy and authorship of others.
In a public or group account that you control, information created by others such as: video, audio, photographs, art or writings, it is worth considering if you have those individuals’ permission to donate files of those materials to an archives. It is reasonable to assume that if they permitted you to share it on a social media platform they would allow you to include it with historical materials you are donating to an archives.
To avoid confusion, post a Terms of Use statement on your social media account.
LGBTQ-RAN provides detailed information about these matters in Guidelines on Restricted Access to Archival Records.
Contact us with any privacy questions at archivist@lgbtqreligiousarchives.org.
Donating Your Records to an Archives