It's Christmas Time in the Archives!

The songs have been being hummed and sung by Phil since early October (and occasionally other staff accidentally), so it's felt a bit like Christmas for a while, but now the decorations are up too!  I was working at the desk on Monday while Phil happily put the decorations up in the entry area.  We have the beloved President Herman B Wells as Santa and a Christmas Tree on the table.  It's very festive!













In actual archival work, the Newell and Eleanor Long Papers finding aid been approved!  I had to go back and fix a few little things.  There was a question about a course that I noted Newell Long as teaching, so I went into the course catalogs and got more information on that.  I also added a couple of missing dates.  It's exciting to see things getting wrapped up.  I'm glad that I was able to complete it and see the end result. 

Carrie and I talked to Phil about my clean-up on the Briscoe Collection this week, as well.  We talked about how I was finding letters of recommendation and if they were still covered under FERPA.  Apparently FERPA protection ends at the death of the individual, but IU counsel interprets the law as never expiring.  Therefore, grades and letters of recommendation, etc., should always be protected.  Even if we were to only do the lifetime rule, that would have to account for a life of 120 years, just to be sure, so these documents would still be young, only being 70 years old.  So if you accounted for people being 20 or 30 year old students they would only be 90 to 100 now.  Although the risk is minimal, we have to do the right thing still.  I surveyed eight boxes and most of the problem documents were in the folders with correspondence designated by the senders last name.  It was decided that these would all just be restricted.  I was concerned about the good content in these folders not being seen, though.  We're going to attempt to remedy this by giving good description about why the folders are restricted and make sure that people aren't scared away.  If the folders are ever requested they will be gone through at that time.  This saves me time now not having to go through every lettered folder in every box.  It has been very time consuming thus far.

I also encountered a similar issue with the chronological files of correspondence in the same collection.  There are about 5 boxes with these files divided by month.  I really didn't want to have to restricted these all, so I began sampling a few folders to see if there was anything of concern.  Thus far I've only found one document and it seems to be an anomaly.  I may check a bit more, then I'll finish going through and pulling folders and shifting.