(Alan S. Divack is Senior Project Manager for Archives and Knowledge
Management at the Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program. He was a
guest at the recent Philanthropy New York forum, "How Will Your Foundation's Story Be Told in 100 Years: Why
Archives Matter," which was chronicled in a blog post here.)
Transparency
Talk (TT): You mentioned at the forum that electronic data presents new
challenges and opportunities for archival preservation, including the challenge
of capturing data generated with changing hardware and software. How have these
changes affected the functionality of archives in relation to the transparency
of information for researchers?
“I think that foundations, as public trusts, are under an obligation (still undefined) to make their information public. The 990s alone just don’t cut it.”
Alan
Divack (AD): The changes affect every aspect of records preservation and use of
the material. I think that impact on
transparency depends on these other fundamental issues. In order to keep
electronic records available over time, institutions have three basic options: 1)
the hardware and software platforms necessary for their use must be preserved;
2) the records must be converted to a more generic format more likely to be
useable in the future (migration); or 3) systems must be developed that will
enable future hardware and software systems to imitate the functionality of the
original systems (emulation). Of these, 2 and 3 are the most promising, but
each requires substantial planning and investments. If these investments are
not made, the records will not be usable in the future and they become
completely opaque to researchers.
TT: Based on
your work to create the Global Archives at the Ford Foundation
International Fellowships Program,
how can archives enable foundations to further their international human rights
work? What documents or data are most important for facilitating a successful
archival system in this area, and what are the risks involved with preserving
and providing access to this information?
AD:
I would actually flip this around and encourage foundations interested in human
rights work to consider funding archival programs. A lot of human rights work
depends on accurate documentation of offenses. When states or non-state actors
commit offenses, it is often up to the non-governmental organization (NGO)
sector to document what has happened, and then to preserve this documentation
so that it can be used for both mobilization and individual redress. The Ford
Foundation has worked with many grantees, particularly in Latin America, on
this and I think that there is room for such programs in other regions as well.
TT: According to
a new study by The Commonwealth Fund, “The Archives of U.S. Foundations: An Endangered
Species,” 80 percent of
foundations with archives are not keeping important e-mail messages, and more
than half are not preserving Web site information. As a specialist in
digitization and electronic records, what value can be gained by archiving
e-mail and Web site data and what is lost by deleting it?
AD:
I think that the full record format in most organizations is actually e-mail
plus attachment. A report or memo may be saved in electronic format, but it
leaves a lot of questions. Why was it written? For whom? How was it received? I
once cataloged a hard-copy report recommending a new line of work for a
foundation. It turns out the recommendations were set aside, but it was
impossible to determine this from the documentary record. I only found this out
later from talking to some of those involved. A thread of e-mails can provide a
tremendous amount of information about the documents that they convey. E-mails
tend to be less formal and controlled than other organizational records and
therefore present particular challenges, more for cultural than technological
reasons. While they are certainly valuable for internal use, organizations may
want to be more cautious about their use by the research public. One possible
approach is to restrict their use to on-site in research archives, rather than
making them available with other electronic resources over the Internet.
Web
content is sort of the flip side in that the challenges are more technical than
cultural. Because most of it is vetted
and designed for public consumption, Web content presents few
access/confidentiality problems. The problems with Web content arise because it
is changed rapidly and because of the networked nature of the document. What a
user sees on a Web page may come from several different sources, and the result
may be unusable unless all of the sources are transferred to the archives and
linked appropriately. One resource worth exploring is Internet Archive, which tries to archive Web sites and would probably
not only be happy to archive a foundation’s Web content, but would also do it
better.
TT: According to
John Craig, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of The
Commonwealth Fund, most institutions do not archive declined proposals. Can
foundations or researchers gain knowledge from these proposals, and should they
be preserved?
AD:
I think that for the most part, foundations are making the right decision on
this. In my experience, most large foundations fund very few unsolicited
proposals. However, they often get large
numbers. I don’t see the long-term value in preserving inquiries that are often
tangential to a foundation’s work. In general, proposals and partners are
actively solicited by program staff in their fields. These proposals are the
end-product of long conversations and interactions, and are very different from
most received by a foundation. There are two exceptions to this: responses to
Requests-For-Proposals, which are likely to be related to specific foundation
initiatives, and cases where foundations actually do fund a large proportion of
unsolicited proposals.
TT: Can you give
us an example, or tell a story, about how foundation archives have been used to
improve philanthropic work in the U.S. or abroad?
Just
as, due to the complexities of social change, it can be difficult to attribute
specific instances of change to foundation programs, it is difficult to cite
uses of foundation archives with specific impact. However, I can refer to a
number of research projects from my time at the Ford Foundation where the use
of the archives may have helped change how the foundation approached its
programming: an evaluation of programs in international relations, which
included significant archival research, led to a reorientation of the
foundation’s international programs. In a similar field, but with a narrower
geographic focus, I believe that a highly critical report questioning the
impacts of the foundation’s programs on dialogues between India and Pakistan
led the foundation to redirect its resources there. More broadly, on the topic
of evaluation and reflection, few foundations have the resources or the
attention span to reflect on the long-term impact of their programs. By making
their records available to the research public, there are scholars who will do
that for them and contribute to knowledge in the fields that foundations
continue to care about.
TT: Do you think
that archives help foundations to tell their own stories versus having others
tell their stories for them?
AD:
It is not an either/or but rather a both. When I worked at the Ford Foundation
archives, I think a majority of our research use was for foundation staff. Although communications staff were major
users (telling the story), the largest group were program staff. There was
little institutional memory, and this was a niche that the archives occupied. With
broad availability of a robust intra-net within the foundation, this has
changed. Most program staff information needs are for relatively recent
information (let’s say the past decade) and enough of this is available
electronically from the intranet, rather than from the archives, to meet these
needs.
TT: What are the
best access policies to balance the needs of both researchers and foundations?
AD:
There is no single best policy. I think that foundations, as public trusts, are
under an obligation (still undefined) to make their information public. The
990s alone just don’t cut it. However, I
think that just because information or records should be made available, they
do not have to be made available immediately and without restriction. In fact,
if there are no restrictions and the presumption is that all records should be
open to researchers at once, I think that records creators are less likely to
create, capture, and maintain the kinds of information that will be of use to
researchers, even in the near future. Access policies should balance the needs
of the public and researchers to know in the medium term with the necessity of
organizations to conduct business and make decisions in the short term.
One
way in which I think electronic records will complicate this going forward is
the extent to which they might be made universally available over the internet.
The access challenges may be more cultural than technological. Institutions had
a certain degree of comfort with historical records being used in analog form
in a controlled setting. The open frontier of the internet is something else
entirely.
-- Alan Divack