Confronting an ethical matter in College and University Archives : a shift to lesser access protocols regarding digitized theses as a case study

english

2022

volume 5, issue 2

accessibility   college archives   ETDs (electronic theses and dissertations)   ethics   institutional repositories

Narodna in univerzitetna knjižnica
(Obvezni izvod spletne publikacije)

Ethical issues abound within the archival science landscape, accessibility matters not the least among them. These issues are further compounded by the evolving nature of records themselves, morphing from analog to digital forms or their being born-digital records. In this paper, the author will recall and reflect upon her experience of confronting an ethical quandary very early in her tenure at her present employer, a publicly-funded university. The ethical quandary in question was one related to theses written and delivered as graduation requirements across graduate programs in the university; upon deposit, they were deemed part of the College Archives. The theses’ accessibility was dramatically reduced after legacy and current theses were digitized (and later, born-digital) and due to a major pivot regarding their storage infrastructure and retrieval protocols. This extreme shift towards access reduction is one that the writer believes to be unethical in a publicly-funded institutional archives domain given the more access rather than less paradigm within the profession and which digitization typically promises.

11.12.2023