Female Speaker: From the Library of Congress
in Washington, D.C. Female Speaker: Hi.
So I'm going to introduce Dr. David Kirsch.
He's the Associate Professor at University
of Maryland Robert H. School of Business and he's also the director
of the digital archive of the birth of the Dot Com Era.
He's working with NDIIPP on preserving business records
and is going to talk about his recent work
in the public interest in private records.
[applause] David Kirsch: Okay.
Well, thank you, Abby [spelled phonetically], and good afternoon.
It's a pleasure.
Every time I come to the Library I'm reminded of how lucky I am to live
so close and be able to come as frequently as possible.
And to those of you in web land, come see it.
It's a marvel.   You're paying for it.
So my presentation this afternoon is --
I have entitled it "Paths Toward a Public Interest in Private Records
and the Future of Business History."
And what I'll do here is review a little bit
of where my work has taken me the last couple of years
and where I think it points us for business history.
I think we are at a critical juncture
for understanding how we design an institutional setting
for preserving business records, and we --
and the bulk of the presentation here will be evaluating several
different paths and looking at what these paths --
where these paths lead us, how we go down them, which ones are harder
or easier to follow and some of the challenges that might lie ahead.
And I'd hope this would be an interactive session,
so please feel free to interrupt at any time
and I can repeat the questions for our web audience as well.
So I did find many nice pictures of the Library on the web.
I just picked that one to get us started.
So in short, then, the outline here is to talk initially
about the challenges that we face in preserving digital business records.
And I'll talk you through sort of a high level model of how we --
how we have come to think about that problem and look at some
of the drivers that are really bringing these problems front
and center.
And then after that I'm going to focus the bulk on the presentation
on these possible solutions.
And the big picture, again, is thinking is there a way
to establish a legitimate public interest
in private business records?
And there are some privacy issues that we might stumble upon.
I'm focused in this instance not so much on the private records
of individuals but private records of organizations, private records
of businesses, recognizing that those are --
that we might have a legitimate public interest in those.
Private, private records, people's -- are people's own business.
I hope they are saving them.   Scholars will need them.
There are other pieces of the Library's work
and of the archival community's work addressing that,
but this is really just private business records,
how do we save them in this digital age?
And then I'll conclude with sort of a pledge and a plea.
So first, why should we care?
Well, you know, Calvin Coolidge has famously said, "The chief business
of the American people is business."
And my corollary to that has been, if the business
of America is business, then the business
of American history should be business history.
If we want to understand America,
we need to understand the business history of America.
And it's really important, I think, to start with this and say,
if you look around, and I invite anyone to look at the program
from the American Historical Association or the Organization
of American Historians or almost any history association
that you can think of, business does not figure very prominently
in that program.
Now, we could argue -- spend a whole afternoon arguing why that is
but in part I will suggest it's because we struggle with records.
Historians go to where the records are.
They go to the archive and say, what do you have?
What could we do?
Well, you know, we can only look for the keys under the lamppost,
and the lamppost is here and the history records are somewhere else.
So this is part of a larger problem but as, as we'll discuss,
the digital transformation has brought many of these forces
to a head, and make these issues even more important in this moment.
So I'll now give just kind of a summary model.
Some of the folks from the digital preservation community may have
already seen this, and my apologies for repeating it.
Those of you who have not seen this, I'll kind of talk through.
So this is just a very high level general model
to capture how a record, a business record,
might or might not end up being preserved.
So the probability of persistence is there on the X axis and time
from production on the Y axis.
So there are no equations, I promise, but the idea here is right
after a document is produced it has a very high probability
of being found.
I just put it in that pile on my desk
so I can go through and find it.
Over time that probability of persistence declines and the slope
of that decline is a function of the prevailing technology,
the organization in which the document or object is produced
and prevailing institutions for preservation.
So, you know, I have down there the kind of old musty paper collection,
and the thinking here being that, you know,
those institutions could either alter the slope of that line
and make it more likely to persist or less likely.
And this is, you know, this is just kind of a toy model.
Now, the thing to think about is if we put digital in there.
And initially there's no difference.
I mean, the overall model is the same,
either our institutions make the -- make it more likely for the object
to survive or they make it less likely for the object to survive.
And what we, I think, in the digital preservation unit are really focused
on are these, you know, the technology, the organizations,
and the institutions and our goal is to drive up that part.
[laughter] So that we can -- you know, there's a higher likelihood
of persistence in the long-run.   That's our goal.
Now, here's what happens when we go into the business setting
where we have a retention period.
So this, you know, a life cycle, document life cycle.
And what happens here is that if we had a natural slope
of the line beforehand, with that retention period,
leading up to the retention period the organization is investing
in making the object more likely to survive but then they try
and rid themselves of it.
They [unintelligible], they destroy, they get rid of that data.
And so we end up being these --
history ends up being this residual claimant, you know, down here.
What are we, what are we left with?   We don't know.
And the problem gets even worse, I suggest, in the digital era.
And what we could talk a little bit about the reasons for that
but the idea is that, in effect,
the technology makes the records valuable, right?
The whole point of having all these digital records
at our disposal inside a business is to be able to use them.
So we invest all -- you know, our I.T. budgets are focused
on making those records useful.
And to that end the likelihood of persistence up until the point
of retention is, is higher.
But the concomitant output or result is
that once the documents are no longer valuable,
are no longer useful to the organization,
then the organization wants to get rid of them with,
with great -- with high probability.
And so if we overlay these two and we sort of try and take account
of scale, so that now the graph is a little different,
we recognize that in the digital age we produce many more business
records, many more business objects.
But it may be that there's actually less left for history
than in the traditional model.   So if I -- if we look --
the question is which of these two lines is higher?
Where are we higher there at the end?
And recognizing that this sort of goal
of knowledge management is zero residual.
The functioning organization, the healthy business doesn't really want
to leave anything behind.
They want to invest in their data, exploit it for the purposes
of their shareholders and then be done with it.
So that's the problem we face.
And what I -- what I did was to, actually at the invitation
of several of the digital preservation partners
who were organizing a special issue of "Library Trends,"
I wrote an article about this problem which tried
to pull together the various forces at work here.
So these are the, to my mind, what are the drivers of that --
the outcome you just saw on that slide.
So -- and I'll say a little bit about each of these
and then we can talk about some solutions.
So the first is we're in a more entrepreneurial economy
than we were 10, 20, 30, 50 years ago.
So, you know, just as a kind of point of departure,
there are more new firms founded in the United States each year
than marriages, to give you a measure
of how important is institution is.
Now, even with our high divorce rates,
business failure rates are even higher.
[laughter] So fewer -- you know, it's more turnover
in the business community but, you know, there are upwards
of 700,000 new ventures created in the United States every year.
And if you think about --
put yourself in the mind of that entrepreneur, you can imagine
that records management is not high on his or her priority list.
In fact, it's nowhere on their priority list.
What they're focused on is raising money, finding customers,
hiring staff, doing all the things that are essential
for that business to survive.
And records management is not essential
for the business to survive.
Records management is an afterthought in most instances.
And because of this high failure rate,
on average 80 percent approximately of new ventures fail
within five years, we have no mechanism for saving the records
of our entrepreneurial ventures.
And here we are becoming more and more entrepreneurial,
our economy becomes more and more reliant on
and we are obviously very interested in supporting entrepreneurship
and understanding it and helping, you know,
maybe even lower the failure rate, that would be a nice thing,
help people do better, but we don't --
we have no records from those ventures to, to study.
Now, there are ways around it and, you know,
my entrepreneurship research colleagues can give you some
of the tricks that they use, census data and, you know, surveys
and all sorts of other things.
But at a fundamental level if we wanted to write histories
of startup ventures, these ventures by
and large don't leave much behind.
Female Speaker: Do they create much, though?
That's the other side of it.
David Kirsch: The question was: Do they create much?
And I think they do.
Almost by definition you have to create some traces
to have created an organization, a venture.
Even if we, you know, the two of us were to start a new firm,
our initial e-mail back and forth about who's going to do what
and what are our initial -- who are our initial customers going to be,
those conversations would be critical.
I mean, think of, you know, Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates, you know,
their early communications.
Well, I hope Microsoft has saved some of that stuff,
but then remember that, you know, that's one in ten million.
And there are millions of firms who had similar conversations.
We don't know -- maybe if we saw those conversations we could figure
out why they failed.
But again, without records we're blind.
So that's the first kind of driving factor here.
The second one is litigiousness.
So no less than, than Warren Buffett has referred to the e-Discovery
and the electronic discovery process as a weapon of mass discovery.
You know, that this is -- that the costs to,
to business of electronic discovery and the,
the fear of litigation is absolutely front and center in the minds
of many, many executives.
So it's, it's a cost, the cost is bad.
We know that.
And some of the recent estimates suggest that about 80 --
up to 80 percent of legal costs are in litigation and up to two-thirds
of the cost of litigation are in discovery.
So, you know, you can do the math.
It means that discovery is just an enormous burden for business.
And they will do almost anything they can to reduce that cost.
So the big, the biggest problem though is the uncertainty.
So if I'm, if I'm a general counsel and someone comes to me and says,
hey, we were approached by this, you know, the computer history museum.
They want to save our important business records and the history
of our great firm, what do you say?
The easiest answer is no because the problem is
as a general counsel I don't know what's in those records
and I don't have the time and the resources to look at every one
so it's much easier to just say no because there can be no trace.
Our policy says we destroy it at thus and such date.
Boy, that's easy.
You know, the hard part is figuring out what we would transfer
and to whom would it be useful, da, da, da, da, da, you know.
Are our competitors going to, you know, have access to it?
Will there be some lawsuit down the road that seeks
to recover this information in some way?
So the uncertainty is the part that scares the lawyers
in addition to the real costs.   The third issue there is technology.
And I put it down at the bottom because I don't want people to think
that this is just a technology story.
Technology is part of the story, an important part of story
and we have been talking about that, but the technology is working
in concert with these other factors.
So the way I phrase it here is, again,
back up to this concept of knowledge management.
So think of, you know, technology,
in particular information technology,
is what makes our records valuable.
It makes us, you know, able to search databases and say, oh, well,
we've already -- you know, we're a law firm or a consulting firm
and it turns out we have already helped a client like this one.
We helped them from our Singapore office, you know, 18 months ago
and here is the report and here are the people who worked on it.
Oh, great, well, let's go get them and pull them in and now
that makes us more efficient, we don't have to reinvent the wheel.
The knowledge management tools that we have are what are creating value
in the records but are also driving -- you know, that's a cost.
You know, where did we -- where did the CIO come from, right?
The CIO came from, holy cow, that's a big I.T. budget.
How do we manage it?
We need someone at the C level at that executive suite
who is responsible for this.
And that responsible person is also responsible for saying
when we stop spending money for those records.
So this is what creates that cliff that we saw, right?
We hit that retention window, boom, it's done.
And then finally, I just talk a little bit
about the fiduciary obligations, and we have sort of lived through this,
you know, we might call the shareholder revolution,
the idea that all of our corporate governance
and management systems are designed to have managers focused
on creating value for common shareholders.
We can argue whether they -- how well they have done that,
particularly recently, but this was an important insight was
to say we want to limit managerial discretion, right?
We don't want managers spending shareholder funds
on their own pet projects.
We want shareholders maximizing returns to shareholders --
managers maximizing returns to shareholders.
And what that means is if a CEO was interested in having the records
of his or her firm preserved,
that would go against the interests of shareholders.
And again, that general counsel who is having to make
that risk management decision, that general counsel is going
to be told -- is going to tell the CEO rather, you know,
you probably shouldn't do that because it's not, you know --
how do shareholders benefit by --
from an archive that records your greatness?
Not so much.
And so this is kind of the -- these are the drivers of this problem.
And in the "Library Trends" article I sort
of summarized the findings thus:
"In the past business records survived inadvertently.
The digital revolution consistent with changes in the structure
of the economy, the clearest dictates
of shareholder capitalism will destroy the record of business not
by accident but on purpose by making it manageable and valuable
for a discreet but limited period of time beyond which its value
to the corporation falls below the cost to maintain it.
On that day the record of business will be erased."
And I presented this "Library Trends" paper just on its own
at a conference in Silicon Valley in the fall, I.T. history community,
and there happened to be a panel -- I was on a panel with some lawyers,
a partner Oreck and Harrington, a big San Francisco law firm,
a litigation partner, and, you know, one of the people in the audience,
actually a member of our advisory council who happened
to be attendance raised his hand and said, Professor Kirsch,
aren't you over blowing this?   Isn't it really not, you know.
What evidence do you have for this?
And the two lawyers said, no, he's absolutely right.
You know, this is exactly --
if I'm pushed and one of my clients asks me, you know,
point-blank what should I do with my records, the answer has
to be they should be destroyed.   You have to find a reason not to.
And that's where we come now to this public interest in private records
because if we go back to where we started, we had --
you know, the history of America is the history of American business.
How are we going to get the records?
We have to create some balancing test, some public interest
in these records so that --
because these are not bad people, these managers, we hope.
Some of them probably are but most of them are not.
Most of them -- and many of them may have even studied history
as undergraduates and may have great sympathy for our cause for wanting
to save these materials but have no mechanism.
There's nothing they can point to to say, "Well,
here is how we should sort these records."
These are valuable, are worth saving.
These records, not so much.
You know, up to this point we should save.
Or there's the, the current institutional context
that American setting does not provide that balancing test.
And so what I have been talking about now
for several years is trying to help figure out how we could create
that public interest in these private records.
You know, we're not going to put them all on the web, we're not going
to be cavalier with these records but just
to create some balancing test so that there's some logic
for saving something that we believe may be of great historic value.
Male Speaker: David?   David Kirsch: Yes.
Male Speaker: To determine concern,
the lawyers saying that's the way I would destroy the records,
is the concern about the cost of discovery
or is it there's smoking guns in that material
that will [inaudible] headaches?
I heard from litigators from the government
that say your stuff [inaudible],
claims against the agency based on document [inaudible].
But of course you don't worry about discovery because [inaudible].
So what's the solution?
David Kirsch: Yeah, so you can make that argument and you say, well,
there's probably some exculpatory evidence in there.
Don't you want to save those records
to prove all the good things you have done
and prove you owned this intellectual property and prove
that you didn't have contact
with those nefarious evildoers and, you know, so and so.
But the -- at the margin, the cost of figuring out what to keep
and what to toss is so high and the fear of the uncertainty, right?
It's the fear of uncertainty.
If I destroyed it I know it's gone and I followed my policy
and if I get served with a subpoena the day later,
here was my policy, sorry.
So that's the -- it's that uncertainty that is driving them.
And, you know, it's -- the lawyer is a risk averse species so, you know,
I think -- and particularly in the private sector
where they are seen as a cost, right?
You know, the legal function is a cost to business, not --
But there are records that they do save
but those are defined very narrowly.
So, you know, patent applications or certain types
of records they do save, or save for a longer period of time
but those may not have any value to historians
or may not capture what we think we need
to tell the story of that business.
Any other questions at this point because then I'm going to sort
of jump into the possible solutions so.
No? Okay. I'll move forward.
So yeah, the response, do something, you know,
we got to do something about this.
And, you know, my thinking was sort of inspired by Francis Bacon,
father of the scientific method, that he wrote in the "Novum Organum"
in 1620, "It would be an unsound fancy and self-contradictory
to expect that things which have never
yet been done can be done except by means
which have never yet been tried."   So we have to try some new things.
I think that's the, that's the idea.
And so what I'm going to now talk about are four possible solutions
to this, to creating this public interest in private records.
And they each have some pluses and minuses.
If there are more solutions, please tell me.
I'd love to have more slides about this than you know, just four.
These are four are the only four I could come up with.
So the first is to think of self-interest,
so this is a little bit like the question here.
Isn't it -- couldn't it be in the firm's interest to save its records?
And I point to a paper here by a former colleague,
Velena Rendova [spelled phonetically],
who some of you have met.
She wrote a very interesting paper on the history of Alessi,
this is the Italian housewares manufacturer
that makes those really neat kind of high design, you know,
Michael Graves teapots and stuff, and she went and looked
at the Alessi archives and they are quite extensive and found
that Alessi at each step of their evolution from a kind
of commodity housewares manufacturer in the 1920s
to this very high fashioned, you know,
global brand that they are today, at each step they went back
to their records and looked at what they had done
in the past and said, what worked?   What didn't?
What can we learn?   How can we change?
And she has -- it's a very interesting paper that looks
at how the firm's extensive records are of great value
and how they use their records to, to make them a better --
you know, to inform their strategic decisions today.
Really cool.   That's what we love to see.
The problem is it's an Italian firm.
And my hunch is that were that firm headquarters in the United --
headquartered in the United States,
the lawyer would have said, destroy those records.
I don't know for sure but -- so in --
on the one hand it says it can be done and firms can benefit
from these records and we can all benefit derivatively
from the firm's benefiting from these records,
but it also says maybe not here or not yet or not now.
So the other kind of variant
of this would be what I call a collective action solution.
So the model I had in mind here, the Chemical Industry Institute
for Toxicology is a research group in North Carolina that was created
by the chemical industry to study the toxicity
of long established chemical products like formaldehyde.
Formaldehyde has been used for centuries but --
and everyone knows it's not good, that it has some --
there's some bad things associated with formaldehyde,
but it was in no single firm's interest to do the research
because any firm that made formaldehyde and did research
on it would then be held liable for the knowledge they produced.
So what the chemical industry did was get together and say, well,
let's all put in some money, let's do some research
and then let's figure out on a collective basis what the real
risks are.
Formaldehyde is bad but what are the alternatives?
How bad is it?
So in a way it allowed them through this collective action
to create knowledge that would have been problematic
for any single firm, both expensive and potentially dangerous
for any single firm to produce, but was clearly in the public interest.
So the analogy I use here for my world of new ventures is this thing
that I call the national venture archive.
So you could imagine that venture capitalists
around the country receive lots of solicitations every day
from entrepreneurs looking for money,
and most of those they say no to.
The average rate of funding is something like one in 100.
So 99 of those proposals get tossed, tossed away.
There's -- if we were to collect all of the proposals that are sent,
let's say, 10, 20, 30, 50, venture capital organizations,
we would then have a record of all of the new ideas
that were being created in the country at any point in time.
Those records [inaudible] new idea be a gold mine for researchers.
And if we, if we get it from more than one source,
then the venture fund has -- you know, won't be held responsible
for somehow doing something they shouldn't have done with a proposal.
We just put them all somewhere, let them sit for a while,
and I would argue in the long run it's actually
in the entrepreneur's interest to have that business plan
or solicitation documented because what if someone comes along
after the fact and says -- you know, takes their idea.
They can say, well, look it up in the national venture archive,
I did it on such and such, you know, March 17th, 2009.
You didn't do it till April, right?
So the idea here, collective action might provide some path
to public interest.
And this is an idea we're working on now and hopefully we'll be able
to have some results there.
I'm going to skip history LLP because that's complicated.
But we could think of other creative ways for --
to create some public interest from collective action perhaps.
Solution two would be just what I call the stroke of a pen solution.
And we could think, you know,
we have a national register of historic places.
Why don't we have a national register of historic documents?
We sort of do, we're standing in it, but it's not specifically focused
on business records and we don't have the law
that that general counsel can point
to to provide the balancing interest.
So when some, someone says should we destroy these records,
at least then the general counsel could say, well, there's that law,
national register of historic documents, should we --
does this document fit into those categories?
Should we be saving it for them?
Should we call the archivist at the Library of Congress and say,
what do you think before we just press delete.
And we could think of other kind of hybrid institutional arrangements.
One thought would be to put the, the sort of disposed records
into some escrowed institution that would hold them for a period of time
until they became less damaging.
And the thought here would be it's beyond discovery.
Now, when I say the phrase "beyond discovery" in front of lawyers,
the hair stands up on the back of their head
and you can see the sweat, beads of sweat start to form
and I see them reaching, you know, for, you know, a glass of cold water
because beyond discovery is an athema [spelled phonetically]
to the legal -- to the American legal tradition.
And there are very few instances where, you know --
when you ask a litigator, discovery is my codicil, that's my tool,
that's the -- that's what I do.   I go sniff around for documents.
But again, this might be some hybrid moderate small step
that says certain types of documents
under certain circumstances would be treated differently
and cared for differently.
And one possible mechanism I thought of,
so any litigators will have heard of something called a Bates stamp.
So this is a stamp that gets --
that indicates that a record has been entered
into the official docket of a court.
So a Bates stamp means it's an official,
legal record for the court.
And so what I was thinking of is a sort of anti-Bates stamp.
You know, you stamp it and you say, it's not --
it's as if this document doesn't exist.
Might be a mechanism that would enable this escrow institution
to operate.   The problem is, of course, when --
knowledge has this attribute
that when you read it you can't erase it from your mind.
But lawyers are pretty good about figuring
out how evidence makes its way into the courtroom and I think if we were
to come up with a mechanism
that could establish this public interest, I think we might be able
to make some headway there.   Okay. That's solution two.
Any, any questions as we're going along here?
I'll keep going.
Okay. So solution three is what I call abandoned interest.
So we had self-interest, public interest,
this is abandoned interest.   And the way to think of this is kind
of turning traditional business history on its head.
In the past we normally only had the benefit of looking at the records
of firms that succeeded and survived, but it may be the case
that in this new regime, successful, surviving firms have the power
to destroy their records but failed firms do not.
And that, in effect, what we get are the records of the failures.
It's very interesting.
Scholars, I think, we could debate whether that's better
or worse for history.
As a student of failure, I'm quite happy with the records of failure.
[laughter] But we could think
about how we might revise the bankruptcy law in some way to give
at least a right of refusal to a local business archive
or library before records were disposed of.
Because as it stands now, bankruptcy has a pretty narrow way
of distributing the value of -- in a bankrupt organization
but the records are sort of this rump asset that just gets kind
of tossed out at the end, left on the street corner.
Well, why not have -- at least offer those assets
to the archival community before putting them out on the street.
And, you know, we could --
this problem is really right in view right now as we witness these kind
of public workouts, right, where AIG is basically insolvent
but we can't actually use the mechanisms of bankruptcy to,
to get them to do what we want them to do.
I'll talk now for a little bit about a mechanism,
what's called a private workout, and we have a partner
in our partnership, Sherwood Partners based in Silicon Valley,
that is responsible for liquidating failed venture-backed
high-tech startups.   And what this means is that they --
and I'll describe this in some detail.
So you can ask, well, what happens
to venture backed firms that don't succeed?
And the answer is this, what's called the assignment
for the benefit of creditors.
The venture capitalists take the firm away from the entrepreneurs
who founded it and lost all the money and give it
to this specialty workout firm, this specialty consulting firm,
in this case, Sherwood Partners, and the --
and Sherwood Partners then stands in the shoes of the Board of Directors,
actually owns the firm, and is responsible for liquidating it.
It's a private bankruptcy.
And it helps the venture capitalists because it allows them
to maintain control, it keeps them from having to admit that they were,
you know, on the Board of Directors of a firm that went into bankruptcy.
That's actually a little sort of tick box
on the SEC questionnaire for an IPO.
So there are various, there are various reasons why it helps the
venture community.
They get to focus on what they really want to focus on,
which is the next company, not the last one.
This firm therefore sees -- is kind of in a very privileged position.
They get to see hundreds of these workouts and they get then
to own all these records.
So if we can make an arrangement with Sherwood Partners,
then we could have a kind of natural spigot of records,
of digital records into our, into our archives.
So basically there are two firms that --
in Silicon Valley that really specialize in this workout business.
Sherwood has handled several hundred of them.
There's a seven year statute of limitations so one
of the issues is we'd have to hold their --
take the records and then hold them for a while.
They'd have to be dark while the -- during this retention period.
[inaudible] for Sherwood at the end
of the retention period they destroy them.
For us at the end of the retention period we light them up.
That's the good news.
Yeah. So Sherwood has already worked with a lot of these firms
from the early Dot Com Era that I studied, but unfortunately,
business is picking up again in their world so this was
from December "Business Week," Marty Pinchinson,
our partner there was in the big article.
But Silicon Valley is famous for its awesome startup machine
but the place is just as brutally efficient at winding
down those companies when things turn south.
So -- and Marty is going to be here next week, hopefully we'll be able
to establish the outlines of a structure
by which we could receive some of those records.
And this is kind of what I did last summer, you know,
for my summer vacation phase of the talk.
I actually went to their warehouse and started looking through some
of these records to try and do some initial appraisal.
And so I call it an archive, they call it a warehouse.
And there were these many thousands of boxes in there.
Female Speaker: [inaudible] David Kirsch: Yeah.
Well, you know, in Mountain View,
California it doesn't matter so much.
It's -- Male Speaker: [inaudible] David Kirsch: Yeah.
So they have a big mix.
And actually they're -- the question was about digital
as well as paper records.
They have a lot of digital records that they didn't even realize were
of interest, so their collecting policies have already changed
as a result of these conversations and we're trying to help them,
and this is really what Marty Pinchinson wants us to provide,
the archival community, he wants a list of what you want
and let's flag it with a big red [inaudible].
You know, the scarlet A, for preservation and then
that will help us not recognize all the stuff we don't want to save.
So, you know, if you -- you know, that's a lot of boxes to look
through and I did not look through all of them.
But we found some things that we know we don't want, right?
This is accounts receivable.   Checks. Just checks.
Nobody wants to look through that.   It's, it's organized, it's a mess.
This was a box that caught my attention,
but I don't if people here [inaudible].
The first voiceover I.T. companies that was based in northern Virginia,
failed about a year ago and Sherwood was the liquidation agent
for that process.
So you see CEO office on the side of the box.
The business historian grabs that right away.
Turns out actually CEOs don't have much of interest in their office.
They want to push it all out, you know.
Anything that's in their office that is sort of their responsibility
so they want others to be responsible.
So the records in that box actually have to do with the CEO,
her philanthropic activity and nothing to do with the business.
But it was tantalizing all the same.
Then there are a bunch of records we can't read.
You know, so it's old versions of QuickBooks, [inaudible], you know,
weird formats, zip drives.
I don't know if you guys have zip drives, I don't anymore.
So kind of some format issues and things
that we can kind of sink our teeth into.
And then finally there's some records we truly do want
and I may ask Abby to hand this out.
So this is confidential information which I can't put
up on the web but you can hand it out.
These are actually [break in audio] being passed
around are the records [break in audio] of Sherwood liquidations,
and it shows the companies, the date that they acquired the company,
the fee agreement that they received and then how they were performing.
So -- and I'll ask you not to scan this and put it on the web.
The idea being these are the kinds of records
that would help us figure out, well, how it was [unintelligible],
you know, what was the residual value in these firms.
How much was Sherwood able
to extract during the liquidation process,
and then link the numbers here to the records that survive.
So this is -- I'm hopeful that this is [break in audio] one,
one area where we can make some progress [break in audio].
Going through their warehouse I found,
you know, Mo, Larry, and Curly.
I guess, you know, every, every technology company must have,
you know, [break in audio].
And then the other thing that they were -- they needed me to do,
interestingly, was to help them give some appraisal.
And so their warehouse was overflowing last fall
as all these new failed companies kept coming in the door
and so I went out there with a big black pen and have to, you know,
archive about 2,000 boxes [break in audio] destroyed
because we had no place to store them,
and I kind of had to earn my chops.   You know, I had to prove to them
that I was willing to, you know, let a few go.
And we -- I wrote save on a bunch, too,
and those are in a separate little piece of the warehouse.
We can talk more about that.
You know, this was a kind of traditional appraisal process.
I met with several archivists, talked about the kinds of records
that [break in audio] we would want to preserve
and the things we could afford to lose and, you know,
this is what we had to do.
Okay. I think that's the third solution.
The fourth one is this -- America is too hard.
Let's just try somewhere else.
You know, if, if the American legal setting
and the American business environment and so contentious
and all 300 million of us yelling at each other,
it's time to go some place where it's a little less fraught.
And so some place where a less litigious environment
and where the [break in audio] may have more sway.
So, for instance, in France.
The history of French industry is part of the radiance of France,
it's part of their [break in audio].
A matter of national pride so we can make arguments
in that setting that we can't make here.
[break in audio] business, the business of America is business but,
you know, don't expect us to, you know, actually do anything for that.
That's, that's sort of a private interest, not a public interest.
And so I have been talking in particular with the professor
at the Rockman [spelled phonetically] School of Business
in [break in audio] who has started a Canadian Business Hall of Fame.
Actually he didn't start it, it's been around for a while
but what he's trying to do is turn
that into a digital business archive.
And with each new inductee, they try to get some new records
into their archive for business history.
Again, Canada is a place where the national --
they don't want to be just the 51st state, they want to be Canada:
Our business, our interests.
Now, it's not a great place to study the technology industries
or innovate some of the kinds of things
that we have been focusing on here.
Although the founder of RIM, Research in Motion,
was the most recent inductee
and obviously a very important technology company.
I'm sure all of us can pull out our Blackberry.
Then the other person I spoke to was a fellow from Finland,
Monty Lockhill [spelled phonetically] runs the Central
Archives for Finnish Business Records.
And what was interesting here is they actually have this public law
that says it's -- you know, save these records.
And they have a budget, about 70 percent
of which comes from central government.
They get some from the host city
and then they charge a very small fee for, for, you know,
160 Euros per shelf meter, and I believe that's a one-time fee.
So it's, you know, not a lot.
And I talked to him about some of the issues that --
problems we have had and he said, yes, there are problems
with digital records for sure, but he pointed to this sort
of strong government records landscape so that the idea --
in Finland there's already an acceptance of and support
for the government being involved in preserving the records
of Finland and the Finnish people.
And that landscape, in his mind, is a foundation upon
which to build that public interest.
And so I think that may have some lessons
for our community here, articulating.
I think the American people do want strong records preservation
and do appreciate the service that our institutions provide.
But we may need to do a better job of communicating that benefit
and that may be part of the challenge to build the foundation
on which the larger public interest is established.
And, you know, he talked a little bit about some
of the problems they have, various privacy issues.
Periods are sealed for --
records are sealed for various periods of time.
And interestingly, when I asked him about e-mail, he said,
oh, that's a huge problem.
I'd love to, you know, come to a workshop.
Tell me how to figure out, you know, what to do with the e-mail we get.
So e-mail is a problem for everybody.
Anyway, so those are the four basic pathways.
And, you know, my -- the pledge and the plea is
to do something but, you know, do no harm.
I don't want the situation to be worse
after we have tilled this soil.
You know, the worst case would be for the ABA to get wind
of all this foment [spelled phonetically] and interest and come
out with some even more draconian model rule for what happens
to records or, you know, move the pendulum even further against us.
All right, so we want to do no harm.
And to that end, all the work that I have been trying to do is
to demonstrate that there's no risk to --
that we can be responsible stewards of private records
and not place the interests of the record holders at risk.
So that wraps up the presentation.   We have a few minutes for questions.
What do you think?   Which ones do you like?
Which ones do you say no way, never happen, not in this America?
[laughter] Yes?
Female Speaker: I just wanted to observe [inaudible] business records
but for now, especially with the [inaudible]
to [inaudible] is now no longer available.
These records are published, they are available [inaudible].
David Kirsch: Yes.
Female Speaker: And we have [inaudible].
David Kirsch: Yeah, don't have the yellow pages even to go to, yeah.
Yeah. Female Speaker: Right.   Well, Reference USA [inaudible].
David Kirsch: Right.
Female Speaker: [inaudible] might now be available.
You know, and it's very convenient.
Of course, it constantly changes just
And that makes it worse.   David Kirsch: Yeah.
So the question was about the record of business and the threat,
you know, that we no longer have published directories
that get produced on an annual, quarterly, what have you basis
so now those records are just served out of a database to a subscription,
to a subscriber and --   Female Speaker: [inaudible]
So we have a problem [inaudible] technical problems of serving
when you show the different formats, so that's a problem we have.
David Kirsch: Sure.
Female Speaker: [inaudible] required to no longer serve [inaudible].
David Kirsch: Well, and I think -- I do think that the copyright office,
I don't know if anyone is here from the copyright office
but you have a big -- you wield a big stick
and there are things you can do but, but --
Female Speaker: [inaudible] David Kirsch: Yeah.
It's ample work to do, let's say.   Yeah. Go ahead.
Male Speaker: One particular thing to me is
that you're enabling the building of construction of history
through data mining, and that could be of great value
to have records available which can be [inaudible] techniques.
[Break in audio] [inaudible] are substituting the ability
to data mine and analyze a large part [inaudible].
David Kirsch: Yes.
So the question was kind of was about data mining and the value
of collecting these new sort of amalgams of data and querying them
and exploring them in new ways.
And I think the example I use is I wrote my first book on the history
of the electric car and I did it by going year by year through a journal
and then year by year through the next journal and then year by year
through the next journal and if you think about it,
you can only read maybe 20,000 pages, pieces of information,
and the challenge for the historian is knowing
which 20,000 pages to read.   And -- or 20,000 digital objects.
So when we have that, that, you know, a two or three
or five million object database from a particular company we need
to figure out -- you know, we need search tools,
we need user environments that allow that scholar to find the 10,000
that they need and leave the other 4,990,000,000 behind.
Male Speaker: It's also finding correlations [inaudible].
Finding the correlation [inaudible].
Is medical research where they're going back and data mining
to tell the difference between effectiveness [inaudible].
And so the working correlations rather
than some simple facts [inaudible].
And this would enable that kind of correlation [inaudible].
David Kirsch: Yeah.
So what we're talking about is a kind of melding of historical
and social science where we're doing social science
in particular types of historical settings.
And I think that actually is very promising and where I would
like to see historians and social scientists working together
but that may be my bias so -- yeah.   Oh, I'm sorry.
Male Speaker: No, go ahead.   I was just curious [inaudible].
David Kirsch: I think if we had --
some of these collections that we have defined, you know,
this national venture archive, for instance, I think we could --
I think there would be great interest in assembling that.
I think these records of these workouts, I think, you know,
we obviously have to prove the value,
to prove that we can do something good with them
and answer interesting questions but I think we won't know until we try.
And we know that we're not saving them now.
I see 101, is that -- oh, yeah.
Male Speaker: [inaudible] finding legislative solutions to [inaudible]
but you can see the current [inaudible] in Congress
who are addressing like that [inaudible].
David Kirsch: Well, you know, the question is
about the legislative environment
for implementing some of these reforms.
That's -- I kind of leave that, that's above my pay grade, right,
in the sense that I can tell people why I think it's important.
I can tell people the benefits I think
that we would recognize as a society.
You know, I'm sort of in favor of this truth
and reconciliation commission for the, you know,
the whatever bad things happened under the previous administration.
I feel like if we, you know, but my colleagues might say what
about holding people accountable?   Make them pay.
Send them to jail.
The historian doesn't really care about who goes to jail.
The historian cares about what -- did we get the record straight?
So in that sense I'm -- my -- you know, I'd say let the people
who screwed up AIG walk as long as we get their records.
Let Lehman Brothers, you know, I don't care.
You know, I'm -- you know, what did the President say the other day?
Don't govern from anger, right?   So I don't -- I'm not angry,
just give us the records and I'll be fine.
[laughter] And maybe there's some common interest around that
that could be mobilized, but that's -- I think I'll leave that to our,
our leaders to, to figure out how we do that
and how we communicate this opportunity in a political way,
because I don't think this is about politics, this is really
about the idea of America.
So maybe that's a good place to stop on the idea of America.
Thank you very much.
[applause] Female Speaker: This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.   Visit us at LOC.gov.