I was the Chair of the Concord
Historical Commission for three years (2003-06). In 2006 -- with the aid of two prior chairs -- I spent scores of hours
organizing the files of all years of the Commission's existence that I
could locate; a task that staff typically performs for other committees and
boards. As the Chair, I felt embarrassed that we were charged with matters historical, yet our own history could not be gleaned from our records because they were such a mess. I was also very concerned that if the archives for the Historical Commission were not in shape given our native concern with historic documentation, whose would be? And I knew that the records must be kept correctly.
My complaints and revelations about the state of the files were only met with the reality that there was no staff that was going to do the work -- it was up to the volunteers to muddle through. I took this to indicate that the Town did not consider this task to be important enough to assign sufficient resources to see that it was regularly attended to. I sought and received counsel from the Town Clerk, the Curator of Special Collections, the Director of Planning and three prior chairs before I embarked on the job.
I found records stored higgeldy-piggeldy in a combination of files, boxes, notebooks, and floppy disks. Some were stacked in a storage closet, others in a file drawer I had no key to, others were in boxes under a staff member's desk. Yet others -- those generated under only one prior Chair several years prior -- I learned late in the story were in the Town Archives stored in the vault in the Special Collections of the Concord Free Public Library.
I believe many years of files are absent because I never located them, which I reported in open meetings -- as I reported the condition of all the Commission's records. Have the missing records since been located? Organized? Filed? Integrated with the known records? Culled according to the State's retention schedule? What condition of retrievability are they kept in? Given the Commission was never given dedicated staff hours up through the time I left in 2008, I am not sanguine that the situation has improved (though I suspect that after I publish this, things may change -- which is quite a far distance to go to get a chronic administrative problem addressed!).
Consulting the Town of Concord Committee Handbook that I received in 2001 when I was first appointed to the Commission, Section VII, Appendix B states that "[a]ll ...commissions...shall appoint a clerk/secretary who shall be responsible for...serving as records custodian." Beyond taking and filing minutes, the handbook has just slightly over four lines devoted to the handling of other committee records. Is this enough information and training to do the job in this increasingly complex age of information and electronic communication? Do such practices lie inside the State's concept of adequate records management, never mind best practices?
This was but one tiny corner of the Town's records; can it be the sole exception to otherwise well-organized, retrievable records?
