Keynote: Whose record is it anyway? Archives and difficult heritage: transcript

Key points

• Mapstone is Head of Records and Archives Engagement at the National Records of Scotland and Chair of the Archives and Records Association for Scotland; she speaks remotely in English.
• The Public Records Scotland Act of 2011 grew out of an inquiry into historical abuse in children's care homes, which found records of care residents were lost or destroyed.
• The ISO definition treats a record as an organisation's asset, so retention decisions follow organisational, regulatory and historical needs rather than the person in the record.
• In the Windrush case, Home Office landing cards were destroyed under retention rules and later could not prove residency, leading to deportations and incarcerations.
• She proposes treating the human subject as a co-creator and asks who should decide on creation, access, retention, destruction and preservation.
• Care survivor Chris Daly eventually found his file, which held letters and photographs showing his parents had loved him.

Chapters

1. 0:05Welcome and the speaker's aims
2. 2:43Why records matter: UN, ICA and ISO definitions
3. 5:13The Public Records Scotland Act
4. 7:28Care leavers, identity and the Shaw Report
5. 13:58Problems with the ISO definition of a record
6. 17:01The Windrush scandal and landing cards
7. 19:53Subjects as co-creators of records
8. 22:34Questions on creation, access, retention and preservation
9. 24:55Chris Daly's story and closing message

Full transcript

0:05Frau Mepstone wird uns darüber berichten, um was es eigentlich geht. Whose record is it anyway? Ich schalte nach Schottland. Guten Morgen. Vielen Dank für die Einladung dieser Konferenz. Entschuldigung. As it's now obvious, I don't speak German, so I'm going to have to conduct this presentation in English. I have attempted, where possible, to convert the slide titles to German, but I've relied on Google Translate to do that.

0:41So I apologise if they're thoroughly incorrect, but maybe they'll make you laugh as we go along. I'm extremely disappointed that I can't join you in person today in Frankfurt. However, I am very grateful for the invitation by the conference organisers. to participate in what is a hugely important conversation about dealing with difficult heritage and the challenges that poses for heritage professionals. So hi, I am Gillian Mapstone. I'm Head of Records and Archives Engagement at the National Records of Scotland here in Edinburgh, and I am also Chair of the Archives and Records Association for Scotland.

1:19So, I have an upfront disclaimer. I am an archive geek. I am a big fan of extolling the importance of archives and records to anybody who'll listen. And today, I would like to talk about some of the challenges around the way archivists and records managers fundamentally engage with records. The second thing I'd like to say upfront is I don't have any answers. I just have lots of questions. The title for this presentation this morning is shamelessly stolen from a 1990s UK comedy show, but I'm hoping to explore a really serious topic, which is whose record is it anyway, particularly relevant to the space of difficult heritage and contested record keeping.

2:03This morning, I hope to reflect on what our traditional and current understanding of the term record is and how this has shaped our experience and approach to record keeping talk a little about the scottish archiving experience and our difficult heritage and explore the limitations of the traditional approach and hopefully make the case for us to consider how we can reframe our practices and thinking to ensure that we serve all the actors and voices who i think should form a central approach to how we create manage keep and make available records and archives.

2:43I've worked in central and local government for my entire record-keeping career, as both an archivist and a records manager, so I know that records are important. I never stop talking about how important they are. And as a heritage community, we all know records and archives are important. Records and archives are our cultural memory. They underpin our democratic accountability, document the decisions of the past and inform decisions of the future. they're central to supporting justice human rights and settling disputes underpinning personal and societal learning and they're vital in a knowledge-based information society that operates fairly and efficiently but it's not just me that thinks this we know records and archives are important the united nations have endorsed a universal declaration which states just how vital significant and valuable records and archives are to the flourishing of a just and democratic world. This statement, which was adopted nearly 10 years ago in November 2011, talks of the unique

3:46and irreplaceable heritage value of records and archives and the essential role they play in development of societies. The importance of records and archives was again underlined by the ICA and others in 2020 when a joint statement on the importance of the duty to document in relation to COVID-19 was authored. This statement, endorsed by archives and record-keeping organisations around the world, was a reinforcing call to decision-makers in the public and the private sectors to recognise the value of records management and archives in documenting decisions and transactions now and for the future.

4:24at its core it focused on three fundamental principles decisions must be documented records and data should be secured in all sectors and the security preservation and access to digital content should be facilitated around the world during the global shutdown this is important stuff the international standards organization have developed iso 3300 which sets out how records and information should be properly managed. In this, they have even given us a helpful definition of what this important asset means. A record is information created or received and maintained as evidence as an asset by an organisation in pursuit of legal obligations and in the course of conducting business.

5:13And around the world, people have listened to this and taken the implications seriously, nowhere less so than in Scotland, where I am really proud to say we have the Public Records Scotland Act. The Public Records Scotland Act was introduced into law in Scotland in 2011, and for the first time enshrined in statute the requirement for named public authorities to make provision for the creation, management and preservation of their public records, Develop a corporate records management plan setting out the policies and procedures in place to achieve this commitment. Have this plan scrutinised by my boss, the Keeper of the Records of Scotland, and crucially they were all required to implement these plans. If they don't do this bit, the Keeper of the Records of Scotland can publicly name the authority in the Scottish Parliament and media as failing to meet their statutory obligations. Each year the National Records of Scotland published a report to the Scottish Parliament detailing compliance and

6:15standards across the public sector. The legislation extends to over 260 named public authorities in Scotland, including central government, local government, the National Health Service, airports, enterprise boards, museums, galleries and even the National Records of Scotland itself. But how did we get here? In the book, Archives, Record Keeping and Social Justice, the authors explore the relationship between archives, record keeping systems, record keepers, and the role archives play in social justice and the impact of record keeping and record keeping practice on social justice around the world.

6:57This research explores the wider requirement within which we create, manage and destroy information. decisions that, in some instances, should be driven by a moral imperative and not simply a business or regulatory requirement. The background to the development of the Public Records Scotland Act is a compelling example of how records generally have a serious impact beyond record creators, beyond archivists, beyond records managers, beyond public servants.

7:28records help protect our fundamental rights as human beings and that's everybody's business the background to the creation of the public records scotland act is a case study in dealing with difficult heritage and the question of whose records are these anyway the momentum to create this legislation came not from a sudden realization by the scottish ministers of the importance of record keeping. Nor was it from the need to improve government efficiency, save money or move to digital delivery, but from an investigation into historical abuse of children in state funded care homes in Scotland.

8:07It was from dealing with difficult heritage, social justice and the importance of records and archives to the humans featured in those records. It came from dealing with difficult heritage and the moral imperative to get records management and preservation of records of enduring value right. So what's all this got to do with the Public Records Scotland Act? Well, as I said, there was a very big moral imperative at the heart of it. Permit me to pose a question. This derives from the school of the now globally syndicated archive and genealogy show, Who Do You Think You Are?

8:45But this question is a bit more serious. It's this. How do you know who you are? What is it that gives you identity, a sense of belonging, or confirms your understanding of yourself in place and time? Our identities are made up of many things. A sense of family, both immediate and in the past. stories and anecdotes passed down over generations, friendships and acquaintances over a lifetime, our home life, our schooling, our employment, our engagement with the state.

9:22The community we live in, your nation, and the events that influence it. Much of what gives us our sense of identity derives from oral testimony, if you think about it, or first-hand experience. However, a lot of it derives from recorded evidence. But what if those key identity anchors no longer existed? What if family ties had vanished and were unclear, and the personal stories and histories were not available?

9:53What if the records on which such stories were based could not be found, either because they were lost in a mountain of unloved records, like in this picture, or worse still, they were deliberately abandoned or destroyed? What would you do in that situation? How would you feel? How would you know who you are? It's all sounding a bit dramatic and unlikely, Yet this was the experience for a great many care leavers across Scotland, waiting or looking for records about themselves, about their families, about their past, about their identity, which would never materialise. Gone.

10:37So, this is the moral imperative behind the development of the Public Records Scotland Act. The need to ensure the rights of all people who have an interest in the records and the archives of enduring value were recognised. The Shaw Report, featured in this slide, also known as the Historical Abuse Systemic Review, Residential Schools and Children's Quare Homes in Scotland, 1950-1995, was Scotland's public inquiry into dealing with difficult heritage and confronting the past.

11:12Led by a man called Tom Shaw, who was the former Chief Inspector of Education in Northern Ireland, he investigated the regulatory framework for residential schools and children's homes in Scotland, based on claims of abuse by those who were resident there. He uncovered a whole series of horrible problems, but crucially for us in the information world, he discovered that the records of the residents of care were routinely afforded no respect at all. The report revealed how poor record keeping led to the wrongful destruction or loss of records for many looked after children, which left many former residents unable to access their own vital records.

11:57There were no record-keeping provisions in place historically, no responsible person, no management control over the records that might connect vulnerable young people to their past. Nothing. The lack of reliable, robust record-keeping provisions for the state care sector was prohibitive to the work of the inquiry. diary. The quote on this slide is lifted directly from the resulting report and shows how poor record-keeping had impeded the discovery work and therefore accountability of justice sought.

12:32Those of us who have been sheltered from the experience of being looked after by the state cannot begin to imagine what it's like not to have a clear ownership of our past, a sense of family of community your ethnic religious and cultural roots and crucially to have a grasp of your own family medical history that might be crucial in securing your own well-being later in life if of course records cannot replace anecdotes and reminiscence but they can serve to close the gaps and correct the factual inaccuracies that inevitably exist in anecdotal accounts balanced.

13:13Records, therefore, take on a whole new level of significance and become critically important to those for whom the anecdotal route does not exist. Many vulnerable people rely on us to ensure that their records are managed and remain trustworthy. Records management and archival preservation is about people's lives. And we're talking here about potentially large numbers of people. In 2013, a study in Scotland discovered that 484,000 vulnerable people had gone through the system of childcare in the period covered by the report. That's the population of Edinburgh and an opportunity to put in a nice picture of where I'm coming from today.

13:58It was this compelling human dimension which captured the attention of politicians because this was about people. It highlighted the critical nature of records to the general well-being of our society. So you're probably wondering what is the challenging questions that I mentioned at the start of this paper? Well, I'd like to go back to the ISO definition of a record because I have a problem with this and it lies at the heart of the question of whose records is this and does that matter?

14:33From the words emboldened here, we can see exactly what frames the definition of a record. Records are the by-products of the transactions of organizations. They are the products of the organization's activity. The organization creates and owns the records, and it's the organization which will then determine what happens to the record. So, when considering my question of whose record is it anyway, the internationally recognised definition for a record makes it quite clear. These records are the records of the organisations which have created, received or maintained them. And not only that, they are considered assets of that organisation, by which it means property and ownership rights are conferred in this definition.

15:25The accepted international definition therefore places the organisation at the centre of the considerations and this has an impact on everything that happens with and to the record. Most notably the determinations regarding retention or disposal of the record are governed by these considerations of which we are all very familiar. The administrative or organisational need. The regulatory or fiscal need. And perhaps, if you're lucky, a keen archivist like me might get involved and flag up that the records have a historical value.

16:01But again, the determination of historical value reflects the value of the record in relation to the organisation who own it. Where are the people in this? So we can begin to see that the question of whose records this is really does matter it shapes how we create manage use and access records and archives and here is the outcome of this type of approach i've talked already today about the scottish experience the shaw report which highlighted the historic silence in record keeping in the looked after care environment and the disastrous impact that had on the pursuit of accountability, identity and improvement at state level. And that is before we think about the personal impact of the loss of knowledge, sense of self and justice for the individuals involved. I could fill many slides with examples of archival silences, loss and destruction from

17:01around the world, but I'd like to look closely at one of the ones featured in this montage. In 2018, there was a very high profile controversy in the UK's Home Office, which is the Department of the UK Government responsible for, amongst other things, the management of immigration, which is always a difficult topic in UK politics. Known as the Windrush Scandal, this high-profile record-keeping case centred around the retention determinations of the Home Office with regard to landing cards issued to Caribbean immigrants when they first arrived in the UK in the 1940s and 50s. The landing cards themselves contain scant information about each of the individual people travelling to live and work in the UK after appeals across the then British Empire to address labour shortages in Britain.

17:58Each card recorded the name of the person, where they came from, and their date of arrival in the UK. In 2010, these records were reviewed by civil servants in the UK Home Office, and it was determined there was no continuing business value, no administrative needs to keep records, no regulatory reason why these should be preserved. And there were so many iterations of the same information, there wasn't really any ongoing historical value assigned to them.

18:29And so, in line with their retention and disposal agreements, these records were destroyed. A number of years later, changes to UK immigration policy meant that settled citizens had to demonstrate a continuous history of residency in Britain in order to continue to remain in the UK. These landing cards were that evidence for many hundreds of people. The destruction of the records meant, in some cases, no evidence of approved immigration or continuous residency could be proved.

19:03This led to deportations, incarcerations, increased distrust and social fragmentation between government and the citizen. There is no accusation of malevolence here. The civil servants were applying their retention and disposal procedures which had been developed over time in line with managing the business and regulatory needs of the organisation, the record owner. In doing so, however, the human on the other end of the record transaction had been overlooked. There are many, many examples, from the personal to the political, where because the person featured in the record is not a determinant around the decision archivists and recordkeepers make, they are failed and overlooked, often at huge personal and societal cost.

19:53Over recent years, the archival academic community has begun to question this approach and suggest that there are many actors beyond the owning organisation who are involved in the creation of these records and their rights, responsibilities, needs and perspectives should also be included in the decision making around the records. But how do we translate that into practice? This is the challenge to the records managers, the archivists and the heritage professionals like me and the challenge is the need to understand these records belong to many people and the need to have person-centred approaches to record keeping practice. So although records are of course the by-products of transactions of a function, They exist only because of the lived experience of the human, who is both the subject of the record and therefore, along with the organisation, the co-creator of the record. But this challenges the record keeping and archival context that we operate in. Let's recognise who all the actors are

20:59in the creation of a record. I've talked today a great deal about childcare records, but this applies in any context where the record is of a document of human experience. For example, court records, health records, education records, immigration records. This image taken from the film adaptation of George Orwell's novel Animal Farm is perhaps a glib representation of the traditional record practice power structure, but it demonstrates how record keeping practice has approached this thus far.

21:34The record keeping body, record creating body, sorry, the organisation, which is also just one subject of the record and the human being about who the record is about. Traditionally, the power dynamic sees power alive with the sole defined record creator, the organisation, and the subject, the person about whom the record centres, has no voice in the decisions about that record, the decisions made in the management of the record, which is determined by the needs of the organisation. In this sense, some subjects are more equal than others however if we give the human subject the same status as the organization that is we treat them as co-creators what might be the impact on the culture and practice of records retention and archive management so let's step into the archive multiverse for a moment and consider what might look different in the record keeping world if we were to balance the rights needs and

22:34requirements of all the co-creators rather than the primacy of the organisation. Creation. Who should determine whether a record is created? Who should have knowledge of the existence of a record? How would this look different and what would it mean for records management practice? When considering content, are we in fact creating and capturing all the information which co-creators require? Are we capturing too much? When an authority is creating a record of childcare, for example, Do they engage with the child themselves to scope out what information they would wish to see retained?

23:11Access and sharing. Person-centred records often have multiple subjects and creators, and therefore multiple sets of creator rights. What is the challenge in balancing those? The interpretation of data protection legislation has seen the withholding of family information from data subjects when they've inquired to see their records. as this information relates to another living individual. Where the state has taken the position of a guardian and withheld knowledge of the existence of a sibling, for instance, but is family data not personal data?

23:47Is redacted data about your own family not also data about you? In Europe, our approach is very different to our Australian colleagues. Retention. How long should person-specific records be kept? Is there a role for a lifetime value in records about people? Currently, we have a petition progressing through the Scottish Parliament which looks exactly at this question. Destruction. Can or should the destruction be prevented by a co-creator?

24:22preservation what records have enduring value and who do they have enduring value to who should be part of determining that enduring value if a record is of no longer value to an organization should it be handed back to the person in the record if it's preserved is it open or restricted and who makes these determinants i'm not suggesting the business operational needs the regulatory value and the information security provisions and indeed the historical interests are not also important considerations at each stage of this process.

24:55However, it is clear we are currently not valuing the many co-creators in our public records, nor are we therefore meeting the needs of all the citizens that we seek to serve. I'm going to finish today with the words directly from a subject and co-creator of a public record. As I have explained, the excellent public records legislation we have in Scotland came about as a result of an inquiry into historical abuse in children's care homes. That inquiry itself came about because of a petition directly to the Scottish Parliament.

25:28The petition was raised by a number of survivors of in-care abuse, and one of them is a chap called Chris Daly. At an early age, Chris was removed from his family and placed into state care. Whilst under the care and guardianship of the state, Chris suffered terrible abuse and during that time had no connection to his own family. As an adult, Chris spent many years trying to access his public records about his time in care, the reasons for the decision to put him into care, his journey through that system, trying like we all do to understand who we are, our place in space and time. For many years he hit dead ends and brick walls. He was told no records could be found. However, after some time his local authority did find his file and it had been incorrectly managed and not properly looked after.

26:23When he got hold of his own personal records, it was a big file. And as you can see from this quote, it contained letters and cards from his parents, photographs of his extended family. And his file also revealed indeed that at one point in his young life, Chris and his brother, up till then who he didn't know existed, were in the same care facility at the same time. Chris grew up thinking his mum and dad didn't love him. This file was evidence they very much did.

26:54If anyone should challenge you about the importance of records, good records management and person-centred archiving then please think about these words, the statement by a survivor of care abuse. Examples like those I have picked out today remind us why records and archives are important, particularly in relation to difficult and contested heritage. Our job is to convince others around us that the impact of failing to consider these needs, rights and wishes of the people featured in the records we create and manage, can have catastrophic consequences for real people. Thank you.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Zugang gestalten! 2021 - "Whose record is it anyway?", Gillian Mapstone.webm by Nicolas Scheckenhofer, BB Veranstaltungstechnik & Eventmanagement (2021-11-05), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY 4.0.

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.