Breaking rules for good? How archivists manage privacy in large-scale digitisation projects

Abstract

Digital archives are a popular way for archivists to provide access to their important collections, but they also create more opportunities for private information within these collections to be disseminated widely and without consent. This is especially true of collections of the recent past, which often include materials and testimonies from living individuals. This paper draws on interview data collected from 13 archivists at four institutions that created digital archives of Civil Rights Movement-era materials. Despite clear professional obligations to protect individual privacy, the author found that archivists relied on open-access policies to justify their projects and digitisation labour itself.