Library Dean Adriene Lim requires “professional review” to see UO Archives 02/17/2015

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Library Dean Adriene Lim requires “professional review” to see UO Archives

  02/17/2015

Looking for documents from the UO Archives? Be prepared to justify your request to UO Library Dean Adriene Lim. This restrictive language was recently added to the Archives webpage, here:

University Archive Finding Aids

Permanent University Archive public records are available for research, and are subject to state, and in some cases federal freedom of information laws. In compliance with applicable state and federal laws, including, but not limited to, FERPA and HIPAA, specific records that are legally protected, sensitive, private, or confidential are exempt (not subject to disclosure) and closed to protect individual privacy.  Access to paper records will be granted after a professional review of the records occurs based on regulations in state and federal laws. Published electronic archival records are available in the Libraries’ Scholars’ Bank Repository. Other electronic archival records also under compliance review and processing are temporarily unavailable. For access to electronic records not yet published or processed, please place requests through the UO Office of Public Records.  If you have questions about accessing University Archive records, contact Jennifer O’Neal, Corrigan Solari University Historian and Archivist. If you have questions about the policies related to availability of University Archive records, please contact Adriene Lim, Dean of Libraries.

I’ve got a request in to Dean Lim for an explanation of what information she needs to conduct this “professional review”, and what “regulations in state and federal laws” justify this sort of censorship. I’ll post her response when it arrives. Of course, if it’s based on a legal opinion from the UO General Counsel’s office, she’ll have to keep it secret…

Speaking of secret archives, the attorney who kept Nixon’s public died last week. Today’s NYT obiturary is here:

Mr. Herzstein was credited with taking the initiative in challenging the deal that Nixon had made with the General Services Administration. It empowered Nixon, who had been pardoned by President Gerald R. Ford, to take his White House papers with him to his home in California.

“It struck me as pretty insulting,” Mr. Herzstein said of the arrangement.

He insisted that the records belonged to the government, and that most of them should be publicly available under the Freedom of Information Act. Acting pro bono, he and several associates obtained a restraining order from a federal judge on behalf of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the American Political Science Association, the American Historical Association and other groups that he had enlisted to join the suit.