In Secret Kept, In Silence Sealed: Privacy in the Papers of Authors and Celebrities

Abstract

When administering collections of modern personal papers, archivists must deal with the competing ethics of promoting free and open access to the material while ensuring that the privacy of those represented in the collections is not violated. Lacking specific procedural guidelines, archivists and their repositories must devise their own policies. This paper discusses the issues involved in overseeing modern collections in which there are privacy and confidentiality issues, and it focuses on the special challenges presented by the papers of authors and other celebrities. These challenges are the result of the high level of public interest in celebrities' papers, the personal matters discussed in correspondence in these collections, the potential for issues of privacy to be intertwined with copyright, and the fact that repositories increasingly collect the archives of living authors and celebrities as the papers are being created.