When Good Archivists Go Bad: The Role of Ethics and Values in Everyday Archival Decision-Making

Authors

  • Sarah Davy New Zealand Film Archive Ngā Kaitiaki O Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.26686/arch.11158

Keywords:

Archival Ethics, Archival Practice, Professional Values

Abstract

This article investigates the ways in which ethics and values inform the ability of the archivist to reach good professional outcomes given an environment of dwindling resources, the need to work faster and the increasing demand from users for digital access to the collections. The author examines some case studies of archivists whose bad decisions have entered the public domain and gives observations on the ethics and values in the workplace. The article concludes with a decision-making framework and notes the importance of preventative self-care to enable the archivist to deal with situations where they are tempted to disregard critical thinking.

Metadata reused from the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa under a CC BY 4.0 license.

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Author Biography

Sarah Davy, New Zealand Film Archive Ngā Kaitiaki O Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua

Sarah Davy is the director of the Collect Division at the New Zealand Film Archive Ngā Kaitiaki O Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua. She leads and supports the team responsible for acquisitions, research, cataloguing, the Archive database, the viewing library, the Jonathan Dennis research library, and the work of arranging collection access to the production community. She has over twenty years’ experience as a moving image archivist in New Zealand and the UK. Her fields of special interest include moving image archival education and advocacy; the work of film artist Len Lye; and the life of NZ-born cookery writer Bee Nilson.

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Published

2013-10-01

Issue

2013: October

Section

Articles