Rev’s article was highlighting lots of topics about the way archives work, about privacy and public access.
The first main point that i would like to analyse is the following part of the reading: “Open data initiatives, providing free access to public or nonsensitive information, are now treated as a natural part of the widening concept of basic human rights”. Data is something that nowadays is accessible to everyone thanks to technological resources, but it is important to distinguish between public and private informations: when something goes behind what we should know and it’s just related to someone’s life, for example medical records.
Also, not everything that we find in the archive might be true: archives should provide open access to the documents they keep, because it is in our interest that what we are trying to preserve is accurate, for us and for the future generations. Copies of the documents, accessible on archives’ website, can in certain circumstances become available to everyone, without the control of the archivist, and with the consequence that the documents did not remain completely unaltered.
It’s important to point out another reason for this to happen and it’s the nature of digital information to have multiple locations, that highly increase the risks, including potential data leakage. For data companies, this type of informations can be absolutely important and useful, and we must realise that is something is for free it means that we are already paying with our data and our private informations.
It is for this reasons very difficult for me to answer the question “should all archives be open access?”, i think that for academic reason it is absolutely important and they should be completely free, but at the same time i think that the cons to the open access are related to our privacy and it’s up to us to educate ourself to a conscious use of our data, knowing where are we storing them and who are we giving access to, especially in the digital era, where not paying enough attention to privacy can lead to harmful private consequences.