Archivists: a question!
Oct. 4th, 2011 05:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceHome now. Still failing at the writey thing, so poking in a desultory fashion at the packy thing instead.
So: do financial papers (agents' payment advices, royalty statements, letters to the Revenue, like that) count as Archive to be kept, or personal information to be shredded? I have some of these dating back decades. And while I can imagine some putative future scholar being grateful for the insights that these data provide into the working writer's life at the latter end of the twentieth century, just as the profession went into turmoil - well, there are a thousand thousand other writers and they're probably all of more interest to future scholars than I am. I don't know; does one preserve such things for the sake of posterity, or shred 'em for the sake of security and privacy and general tidiness, not to leave a mess behind one?
So: do financial papers (agents' payment advices, royalty statements, letters to the Revenue, like that) count as Archive to be kept, or personal information to be shredded? I have some of these dating back decades. And while I can imagine some putative future scholar being grateful for the insights that these data provide into the working writer's life at the latter end of the twentieth century, just as the profession went into turmoil - well, there are a thousand thousand other writers and they're probably all of more interest to future scholars than I am. I don't know; does one preserve such things for the sake of posterity, or shred 'em for the sake of security and privacy and general tidiness, not to leave a mess behind one?