On Wednesday, October 28, 2020, I gave a talk (along with Dallas Pillen) for the 9th International Conference on the History of Records and Archives. This is an adaptation of my portion of the talk. You can see our slides, if you prefer.

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About the Bentley Historical Library

The mission of the Bentley among other things, is to “collect the materials for…the University of Michigan,” and for more than 80 years it has been home to the historical records of U-M.

About the University Archives

As defined in the U-M Standard Practice Guide (SPG), these “university records” are “all records, regardless of their form [emphasis added], prepared, owned, used, in the possession of, or retained by administrators, faculty acting in administrative capacities, and staff of university units in the performance of an official function.”

A History of Decentralization

It’s helpful to point out that as an organization, U-M is decentralized, and by state constitution independent in its recordkeeping practices. Even from its establishment in 1935, the Bentley recognized that not all was going to be centralized and proffered a “rather gentle definition” of what could be considered university archives. In fact, in April 1936, the newly-appointed Committee on University Archives had already come to terms with the fact that it was “manifestly impossible and undesirable to assemble all such records in one place,” a revealing statement of a precustodial mentality.

University Records, Regardless of Their Form

As it pertains to collecting university records, “regardless of their form,” as early as 1979, archivists were discussing the challenges posed by new technologies and machine readable records. During what might be characterized as a foundational period by 1997, the Bentley had received and developed a preservation strategy for its first significant collection of born-digital archives–the Macintosh personal computer of a former University President–and in 2000, initiated a web archiving program to capture snapshots of the websites of key academic and administrative units.

As the Bentley gained more experience and understanding of digital recordkeeping, In 2006, in partnership with U-M Libraries, the Bentley began providing online access to born-digital archives via DeepBlue, a digital preservation and access repository based on DSpace. In 2007, it hosted a two-day conference on the effective management of digital records, which led to the development of the Campus Case Studies portal hosted by the Society of American Archivists.

Transforming in Response to Digital Environment

And, finally, as evidence that the new digital recordkeeping environment was ultimately transformative–or at least additive–for the Bentley, in 2009-2010, facing challenges of scalability and sustainability, a Mellon-funded “E-Mail Archiving at the University of Michigan” (or “MeMail”) project yielded a significant improvement a dedicated “Technical Lead” position with sufficient time to research workflows and experiment with a wide variety of tools necessary to curate digital archives. In 2011, a new “Digital Curation” division was established with the goal of developing and implementing solutions for the long-term preservation and management of digital materials; later it became the norm for processing archivists to process collections holistically, regardless of physical, analog, or digital format. And, finally, in 2014-2016 a Mellon-funded ArchivesSpace-Archivematica-DSpace Workflow Integration project united these three Open Source Software platforms in widespread use among North American archives to allow for the more efficient creation and reuse of metadata and to streamline the ingest of digital archives.

Adapting Digital Recordkeeping Practices to This Shift

These days, as the records of essential University functions are increasingly created and managed in the cloud we are adapting our digital recordkeeping practices accordingly.

Bentley Involvement in U-M RM and the Cloud

While this paper will primarily focus on records for which the Bentley has decided to take curatorial control over, the Bentley has also been involved in larger U-M conversations about records management writ large that provide context to the Bentley’s more recent digital recordkeeping history. As early as 2010, for example, the Bentley’s Director was engaged in campus-wide conversations about records management, including records management in the cloud. In 2011, they took part in a Records Management Task Force sponsored by the director of the Bentley, the Chief Information Officer, the Office of the General Counsel, and the Director of University Audits. This year-long project identified “issues of custody, control and access,” ownership, and the need for clarity around “self-provisioned cloud storage.” As it pertains to the latter, the Task Force cautioned that the “widespread adoption of cloud-based services [was] driving a loss of control over university content.”

Bentley’s RM Program and the Cloud

In 2016, the Bentley itself began to develop a formal records management program, envisioning a new “chapter” in the history of University Archives that built on its expertise at ingest and management of digital archival records and its strong relationship with campus units, a new Assistant Records Manager, hired in 2016, would assist units in the identification of “inactive records with long-term, archival value” and provide clarity and guidance for units using cloud storage including “how to create and store records, and how to destroy unneeded information or transfer records to the archives.”

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Since then, archivists at the Bentley have attempted to adapt to the shift to cloud computing on a number of fronts throughout the various stages of this model we’ve used for managing records. It can be difficult to have an opportunity to consult with units on the first stage of that model, the creation of their own records, except in an ad hoc ways for individual projects. In recent years, however, the Bentley has begun to address the latter stages in more systematic ways, if not for all records created at the University, at least those for which the Bentley will eventually take curatorial control over.

Overall Approach

This has been an approach that continues to take an active role in appraisal and selection, selecting records based on their long-term historical value regardless of where they’re stored (e.g., in local University storage, email, removable media, the cloud, etc.). In that respect, not a lot changes simply because records these days are created or managed in cloud-based systems. It also:

  • adopts some of what could be characterized as a more distributed, postcustodial approach to records management that attempts to provide guidance for units distributing, using (or reusing), and managing their own records, including those on the cloud; and
  • develops practical strategies for transferring select records from the cloud to the Bentley.

Guidance on Cloud Use from RM Perspective

By 2019, in their “Records Policy and Procedures Manual,” they began to formally articulate the aforementioned guidance on cloud use from a records management perspective. They suggested, for example, that University units use the move towards a cloud-based collaboration service as a kind of “trigger” for the identification of inactive records and a determination of their final disposition, not unlike the advice they would give to units moving to a new building or experiencing a change in leadership, and that “if you need to save space and decide to move towards a cloud-based collaboration service or an electronic recordkeeping system, we suggest spending the time you would have devoted to scanning on organizing and reviewing records to identify those [inactive] records that can be discarded or transferred to the University Archives.” They also noted that while cloud storage services can be great for real-time collaboration, they are not appropriate for inactive records with long-term, archival value the way that archives like the Bentley are.

Cloud as Medium for Transfer of Records to Bentley

As a medium for how records are transferred to the Bentley, archivists there have likewise developed strategies for transferring data out of these platforms (e.g., using Google Takeout for G Suite). These are not without their drawbacks, like the fact that “cloud services may or may not comply with laws, regulations or other policies for sensitive or legally protected information.” They’re also generally slower than other methods for larger transfers. Moreover, “some significant properties (e.g., last modified times) of files may be overwritten when they are downloaded from the cloud.” Finally, in general, digital information in the cloud is not always captured in ways that are familiar to archivists. “Working with cloud transfers,” write Bentley archivists in their internal “Technical Transfer Guidelines,” can thus require “an additional layer of management.”

None of these obstacles is insurmountable, of course. Archivists at the Bentley have developed strategies for addressing them and have even adopted some of these cloud-based services into their internal workflows.

Cloud-Based Services in Bentley Internal Workflows

Box (with some added steps to verify the integrity and authenticity of what was transferred), for example, is used in a transactional way for some of the most critical and sensitive records the Bentley collects. It is also used to provide individual researchers streaming access to digitized audiovisual material, some of which is copyrighted. That said, Bentley archivists have been intentional about not using cloud solutions when they are not appropriate. For example, the Bentley’s Curation Team recently ensured that material they curate in long-term preservation storage no longer be moved to Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud storage, and that content previously moved to AWS be restored to on-premise MiStorage provided by U-M ITS, precisely because this policy of tiering had the unfortunate effect of putting all of our “eggs,” as our colleague put it bluntly, in one Amazon-branded “basket.”

Issues With Which Archivists are Grappling

While archivists at the Bentley have taken steps in recent years to respond and adapt as best possible to this shift to cloud computing at U-M. They are currently grappling with any number of questions beyond the technical, including:

  • How effective is their current “snapshot” approach for capturing the significant properties (or characteristics) of university records? Bentley archivists have opted for a “snapshot” approach–essentially the static capture of a dynamic resource at a given point in time–to transferring inactive university records of enduring value from the cloud to the Bentley. This is not unlike Bentley archivists’ approach to “capturing,” on a set schedule, other dynamic types of records like websites and social media before compiling those snapshots into a more formal archive. When users make use of a tool like Google Takeout “to export… data to a downloadable archive file” what they actually get is a snapshot of some of that data as it existed on the day it was exported, and in a similar but usually not identical form. Archivists are aware that this may not always be sufficient. Significant properties of those records may be lost. While Bentley archivists do try to ensure that the records that we download in this way are explicitly gathered or curated by donating units,some of the “story” behind these records, the collaborative aspects of applications like Google Docs that point to human relationships and interaction–like version history, suggestions, and comments–do not always make it into the exported PDF. Even if they were able to capture those aspects, the Bentley is ill-equipped to provide access to them in any meaningful way.
  • Related to the above, what is being captured: evidence or process (or even something else)? There is a juridical legacy in archives in which archival thinking is based primarily on archives as evidence. While this is shifting and transforming in the profession and at the Bentley a key assumption of the “evidence” paradigm is that archives are made up finite, static entities that can be pointed to, when needed, to support some assertion. However, due to this shift to the cloud and the dynamic nature of tools optimized for real-time collaboration, the “by-products of such interaction are no longer finite entities, but processes that are always changing,” calling the evidential value of records into question, even for those institutions like the Bentley with well-established born-digital recordkeeping and digital preservation policies and procedures.
  • How “custodial” should the Bentley’s approach be, particularly when these platforms are optimized for active records and primary use, while archives are optimized for inactive records and secondary use? Much of the above focused on the Bentley’s arguably custodial practices for collecting cloud-based records, especially the technology they employ for doing so. However, the issues surrounding cloud computing are not limited to the technology, but also include organization management, human behavior, regulation, and records management. The Bentley is adopting some practices of a more distributed, postcustodial approach to records management that attempts to provide guidance for units creating and managing their records, which is complicated by the aforementioned non-technological challenges. The University’s constitutional status also complicates the policy environment. U-M is not “subject to the State of Michigan’s records retention schedule,” so that there are no State mandates on public records or records management practices. Policies aiming to control such behavior have not been successful–and in any case archives like the Bentley do not have the authority to set or enforce such policies. ITS has provided ample documentation on what kinds of data are appropriate for what platforms, but little guidance on how best to manage cloud-based business processes or functions and the data that support them in the shorter- and longer-term. The Bentley has had the most success in providing guidance for units creating and managing their records specifically for records that will eventually be transferred to the archives.

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