“In Secret Kept, In Silence Sealed,” Review

• Hodson, Sara. "In Secret Kept, In Silence Sealed: Privacy in the Papers of Authors and Celebrities," American Archivist 67 (2004): 194-211.

Keeping the private papers of living individuals can often be a difficult task because much of the content of their correspondence may be extremely private and sensitive. When keeping these types of papers, archivists run the risk of compromising the individual's privacy rights through allowing patrons to intrude into the person's private affairs or expose embarrassing facts about the person. However, the situation does not necessarily go away at the creator's death. Other individuals are often mentioned in private papers, or there are letters in the collection that they have written. In this article, Hodson recounts the difficulties that attend archivists who are trying to balance privacy rights and access for the papers that belonged to various types of celebrities.

Hodson notes four reasons why handling these types of papers are more difficult than handling traditional historical collections. First, they are by nature high profile, because their creators were high profile. Second, because they are private papers, they deal with individuals instead of events. Third, copyright issues often come to the fore when dealing with these papers. Fourth, because of the nature of competition for these types of unique papers, archivists are forced to try to obtain the papers while the creators are still living. Hodson notes that there are no good answers for how to deal with the situations. She recommends being familiar with privacy issues and setting guidelines within which an archives can try, as much as possible, to protect a creator's privacy. I just wish Howard Gottlieb had given us the answer before he passed away.