One physics professor at the University of Washington told me that the university throws the vast majority of the material away. Which is a huge net loss to society. Is there anything more productive that could happen to these archives? |
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I'm going to assume what I think the implied question is -- what could / should they be doing? Some groups will go to the professor before they retire, and get their help in determining what needs to be archived or otherwise cataloged / preserved. John Broome gave a talk at CODATA in 2008 talking about how they were able to get high rates of cooperation, as the scientists understood that it a matter of preserving their legacy. If the professor dies suddenly, some schools will assign someone from their department, preferably someone with whom they were collaborating, to go through their stuff to try to determine what's of value. I've also heard of PhD advisees being assigned the task. In some cases, there may be contractual obligations -- if they were the PI on federally funded grants, there may be data or other results that must be preserved, so that needs to be identified and saved. But even with all that, the majority of the stuff is going to be thrown out -- most of what they have in their office is going to be journals articles, books, and other stuff that isn't anything unique. Their notes of what they're currently working on, if they retire, they might take with them to continue working after they've stopped teaching. If they died, their notes might not be in any state for someone else to make sense of; unless there was a collaborator who can make sense of them, they're likely worthless. It might be understood in retrospect decades from now, but most libraries and archives just don't have the funding and/or space to keep everything -- you have to prioritize on what has the most value, and you either box the stuff up to make sense of later, or just pitch it. |
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Yes, there is a clear selection process that happens to decide what to keep and for what purpose. Keeping everything is not only a problem because of space requirements but also a problem in that the more you keep the more stuff someone has to look through to find the things that matter. This is often refereed to as archival appraisal. |
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The question you pose assumes that all the documents a professor has accumulated over the course of his/her career is worth permanently retaining in an archives. However, there are factors a university special collections/archives will consider when determining whether to (1) accept the archives of a professor and (2) to determine what in that professor's archives holds archival value. All archives face challenges of space and staffing constraints. Most archives don't have the luxury of empty shelving awaiting new fonds (a person's archives), and the nature of archives and archival operations makes it difficult to weed out materials (deaccession) that have already been formally acquired by an archives (archival principles such as the archival bond and the principle of provenance, and administrative hurdles such as donor agreements are some of the challenges to deaccession). Most archives don't have the staff hours necessary to process and provide access to the materials it accepts. This necessarily limits the number of faculty fonds a university archives can accept, so the archives will have to consider, amongst other factor, the relationship between the faculty member and the university and the contributions the faculty member has made to his/her field when deciding whether his/her fonds will be accepted. If the faculty member's fonds is accepted, the archives will need to conduct an archival appraisal to determine which records hold the most archival value (which records provide evidence of significant transactions, which records contain the most informational value, etc.). For some records, laws on privacy make deposit in an archives unfeasible—in most jurisdictions, legislation places additional requirements on protection of privacy in medical and student records (in the United States, for example, these areas fall under HIPAA and FERPA, respectively). Some records duplicate information found in another record in a more efficient or effective form (final versions vs. drafts, or a course syllabus that describes major assignments, rather than the description sheets for each assignment). Archival appraisal is always a balancing act between a desire to preserve the integrity of a person's fonds while recognizing an archives' inability to preserve everything and there is no international standard available to guide archivists on how to proceed. Indeed, it's an area of archival science that is fairly contentious. To think about how few of the records created by an institution end up in an archives, in most national governments, only about 5–10% of the records created by the government will make it into the country's archives. On a more personal level, think about your desk. Would you want to preserve every piece of paper that is on your desk and every file you have stored on your computer? You'd probably want to do some weeding before giving your records over to an archives. |
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This is a complicated issue that will vary by institution. At one library I worked at we were bequeathed a law professors email. All of it. He had it in a number of formats and the vast majority was of no interest. Some contained email conversations with Supreme court Justices on landmark decisions. Hard to tell. |
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The physics professor was correct. There simply isn't space to archive everything, nor (even more importantly) staff to organize, describe, and preserve it. |
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As others have said, university archives and libraries don't typically keep all of a faculty's papers, and indeed usually are selective of which faculty members they keep any records for. "Personal digital archiving", certainly not limited to faculty work, is gaining some strong interest, empowering individuals to take charge of their own work for their later use, and for the use of others that might be interested, whether family or professional. A place to start learning about personal digital archiving efforts is http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving/. |
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