{"id":2117,"date":"2025-01-21T06:52:14","date_gmt":"2025-01-21T06:52:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exponentialdecay.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2117"},"modified":"2025-01-28T14:02:05","modified_gmt":"2025-01-28T14:02:05","slug":"unrealized-ideas-unintentional-secrecy-in-the-era-of-openness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exponentialdecay.co.uk\/blog\/unrealized-ideas-unintentional-secrecy-in-the-era-of-openness\/","title":{"rendered":"Unrealized ideas: Unintentional Secrecy in the Era of Openness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tyler recently<\/a> posted this quote:<\/p>\n

“History unprocessed is opportunity unrealized”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It reminds me of an unrealized article I wasn’t able to get written and into the wild, but it’s an important thought I would like to share nonetheless.<\/p>\n

Proposed for James Lowry’s ACARM Symposium in 2015<\/a>, I wanted to discuss when government is unable to adequately fund day-to-day effort, and research and development in the archive sector, leading to inefficient and potentially ineffective processing pipelines for records of archival value accessioned from government agencies and commissions.<\/p>\n

It was just an abstract, but maybe folks have thoughts about this? Have we moved on since the early to mid 2010’s? What modern metrics do we have available to us today to see the progress? What does the advent of the new US administration mean for issues like this? As well as increasing worldwide authoritarianism?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Title: Unintentional Secrecy in the Era of Openness<\/h2>\n

Abstract:<\/h3>\n

It is no coincidence that the era of openness coincides with the digital era; three-billion-two-hundred million words can be transmitted on a 16GB USB disk alone. One can pass this disk onto their siblings, their friends, their colleagues, whomever. When you consider that there are only eight-hundred-and-eighty thousand words in all of Shakespeare’s published works – this is an incredible amount of information that we’re dealing with. It’s easy to share, potentially easy to access, and it’s only a fraction of what gets created in government each year. But how effectively are we, as archives, at processing it?<\/p>\n

This paper is concerned with the unwitting development of power dynamics between the public sector and the public, as well as the imbalance of power between governments and civil servants. As we develop methodologies for confronting the challenges of digital archives, we face bigger strategic issues across the sector from the highest levels down. Austerity notwithstanding.<\/p>\n

This paper, therefore, is concerned with the potential for unintentional secrecy; ‘secrecy’ created around public records because we cannot list, describe, nor make them available fast enough. We cannot process them fast enough because of the obstacles in the public service to do as much as we can with very little resource to be able to do it. With a Butterfly effect-like dependency on initial conditions; cuts at one end of the workflow for processing records filter down into bigger effects the other end, and in this case, to the public. Collections are left unprocessed whilst research is completed on a shoestring to see the development of handle turning mechanisms for processing digital collections. Where, in 2015, we should be talking about an abundance of digital archives available to the public, we are not. From the budget handling in government, to decision making within agencies and within individual teams in those agencies, we can observe an imbalance of power between government and civil servants, and between civil servants and the people \u2013 it is a power dynamic, and something that cannot be ignored when we discuss what transparency and being open means in the middle of the first quarter of the 21st century.<\/p>\n

This is a paper seeking to look at the unknown knowns. In a central, or federalized model. What material are we not seeing that should already have been sentenced and appraised, and processed, and been made available as records of archival value? Not just for access, but to be searched for, analysed, and discovered across catalogs as well.<\/p>\n

To get hold of the information in Shakespeare’s 43 plays requires an ability to look within them. Openness is just an illusion. Stephenson’s Captain Flint may bury his treasure anywhere and it is ‘open’, but when X doesn’t mark the spot, no one can find it, let alone gain access to it. This paper is concerned with the illusion of openness, and the secrecy created through all of that which is unknown to the public, and will make suggestions, at least, to what the problem looks like, and how it could potentially be solved, but will also be bounded by pragmatic and balanced suggestions as to how we might begin to improve on where we are today.<\/p>\n

Word Count:<\/strong> 532<\/p>\n

Keywords:<\/strong> Unknown knowns, open government, public sector, openness, transparency, digital archives, digital preservation, repositories, federalized access, centralized access.<\/em><\/p>\n

Author:<\/strong> Ross Spencer, Independent Digital Preservation Researcher<\/p>\n

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It’s a difficult article to write when in the public sector, and not necessarily an easy one to see from outside those walls so it may have been somewhat of a pipe dream to write it at all.<\/p>\n

Some of the more practical thoughts in my notes may have led to my article Binary Trees: Identifying the links between born-digital records<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My writing had a long way to improve back then (it still might!) but I still reflect on this small extract today and I wonder how we’re doing a decade later?<\/p>\n

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On a related note, there’s always a balance to strike. I saw this post by Amalia S. Levi on the trade-off on physical collections thanks to digitization. It’s an interesting read.<\/p>\n

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In the rush to make more things available online, we focus on how to digitize *more* and more archival collections.<\/p>\n

Digitization, however, is always [always!] resource intensive: it takes money + people + time to digitize things, put them online, and keep them there “forever.”<\/p>\n

In the meantime,
\n1\/<\/p>\n

\u2014 Amalia S. Levi (@amaliasl.bsky.social<\/a>) January 16, 2025 at 7:06 PM<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n