The article “Should All Archives Be Open Access?” by Rev was really insightful and intriguing. Until now, most of our discussions have approached the subject from the standpoint that archives should be publicly accessible. I therefore greatly appreciate this article’s more nuanced approach to the issue, as the article also looks at the disadvantages and problems that arise with open access of archives. As also mentioned in the article, the contemporary issues around open access of information are relatively new, as information used to be more difficult to access as it was stored in libraries or other archives. This withheld information from a large part of the population. Nowadays information can be found with just a few clicks, as the internet holds great amounts of data. This completely changes everything.
A primary theme of the article is the relevance of providing free access to “documents with political, historical, or cultural significance for either the relevant community or individual citizen concerned.” One example of this not being met, is information being hidden from citizens after a regime has been overthrown. It stands to reason that all facts relevant to the conflict should be made publicly available so that people are able to establish their own views. But regularly, this information is kept secret under the pretext that private information, such as medical data, is contained in such documents. In instances such as this, it is important to strive for better open access.
However, another important point of the article is that there are some cases that information should be kept confidential. There are a lot of grey areas and it can be very difficult to find the right balance. Rev describes this as: ‘Archives are expected to engage in a never-ending balancing act between responsibility to the public, which has the right to know, and to private individuals, who have the right to be protected.’ An example given, are the victims of the Srebrenica massacre. Only relatives should be able to consult certain documents, out of respects to the situation.
Besides the question what information should be public and what private, there is also the question of how trustworthy archives are. It has always been difficult to keep original documents unchanged, but this has only become more difficult in our digitized era. As information online is downloaded, copied and altered easily many times, it is hard to remain trustworthy. And besides the preservation of documents, archives are also responsible and should be able to be trusted for handling and protecting our private information in these documents.
Overall the topic of what information should be private and what should be open remains difficult. But the main guideline that information should be public and easily available to everyone, unless it contains confidential personal and private data.