| Chapter : | Introduction |
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shop. They show up at our mark-ups and conferences and never miss an opportunity. They get in the door early and make deals before Treasury even knows an issue is on the radar screen…If Treasury wants to be taken seriously, this has got to change.5
This series of memos is chock full of information that would be difficult to elicit in an interview, but that sheds light on the interactions of Congress and the agencies of the bureaucracy. For virtually every archive we have visited, there are similar examples of frank and informative documentary evidence.
This does not mean that donors are not concerned about potentially embarrassing materials in the papers. But, in the interest of maintaining the integrity of the collection, archivists develop strategies to put donors’ minds at ease. Mark Greene, the director of the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming, explained,
In my experience, if there is material in a collection that the member [of Congress] (or his/her chief of staff) believes is sensitive as far as the member him/herself is concerned, the inclination is not usually to sanitize it but to negotiate access restrictions on it—at least, that is what every repository seeks to have happen in such instances…members who are particularly sensitive about access to their papers simply do not donate any of them to a repository, but instead either keep them in storage or destroy them after leaving office.6
In fact, for anyone who was concerned about embarrassing materials, disposing of an entire collection would be the wisest (lowest-cost) choice, rather than investing the massive time and effort that would be involved in going through a collection page by page. Carl Van Ness, an archivist at the George Smathers Library at the University of Florida, summed it up nicely: “I would say that ‘sanitization’ of political collections is more of a myth than a reality.”7
Going forward, it is increasingly less likely that new collections will be sanitized for two reasons. First, the advent of computers and e-mail has tremendously increased the size of collections, making the systematic