GARBAGE IN, MISCHIEF OUT

Delivered recently to an audience of information scientists and librarians, Dick Buchanan's paper has implications no less for archivists. For two questions are at issue. First, given the acknowledged presence of both factual error and patent conjecture in official records concerning private individuals in our own time, what percentage of the files left in copperplate script from earlier ages conceal comparable unreliability? Secondly, if as Richard Buchanan urges, the record of past transgressions be expunged from official files for the living, what will be the consequences for historians of such de mortuis deletions? For librarians as information middlemen, there remains the disturbing possibility that they will increasingly be invoked as intermediaries between the individual as client and the authority as funding agency.