It was Lord Kinross who first set Sara S. Hodson, the Huntington’s curator of literary manuscripts, on her path to becoming an authority on privacy issues. Lord Kinross—or Patrick Balfour, 3rd Baron Kinross, as he was officially known—had been a British author and journalist from the 1940s to the 1970s. He wrote widely on history and politics and is perhaps best known for his history of modern Turkey, Atatürk: The Rebirth of a Nation (1964).

Kinross, who died in 1976, had also been a well-connected socialite. He was among the privileged and decadent youth of 1930s British society, with friends that included prominent writers and artists of the era, many of whom he met while a student at Oxford University. Throughout his life he corresponded with the photographer Cecil Beaton and the writers Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, and Christopher Sykes, among others.

Although The Huntington recognized the overall value of the Kinross archive when it purchased it from a London bookseller in 1980, Hodson particularly coveted the correspondence files as a resource for scholarly research.

As Hodson began cataloging the material, she discovered how much intrigue the files truly held: Kinross had been a confidante to an astonishing number of people who poured their hearts out in personal letters. The wife of a famous Englishman had confided to Kinross that she was pregnant, but not with her husband’s child. Hodson knew that both the husband and wife were still alive and wondered whether they would want this information made public. Also of concern to Hodson were the myriad letters from gay men writing intimately to Kinross about their lives. Many of the subjects might likely still be living, and Hodson did not want to be responsible for disclosing information that could potentially breach

their privacy.

“I realized that no archivist could determine whether the private matters in the letters had been confided to Kinross alone or constituted more general knowledge,” says Hodson. “With no family available for consultation, I had to decide whether opening the confessional letters for research would reveal intimate information about people who would have no idea that their private letters had been housed in a research library in California.”

A relatively new curator at the time, Hodson faced a question of ethics that manuscripts curators and archivists have been increasingly confronting in their work with modern literary collections: Should an institution consider the privacy rights of a living person when opening a set of personal papers for research? If so, how should curators and archivists establish restrictions on using the material?

Hodson’s dilemma resulted in part from the increasing tendency of institutions to collect contemporary literary archives, oftentimes by authors still living. The Huntington’s first acquisition from a living writer came in 1987, when it obtained the archive of British author Kingsley Amis (who died in 1995). The Huntington now maintains about a dozen literary archives of living authors who range from the Los Angeles playwright Lucy Wang to British novelist Hilary Mantel (who requested that The Huntington seal her personal diaries during her lifetime).

There are four basic forms of invasion of privacy recognized in law, says Karen Benedict, chair of the Committee on Ethics and Professional Conduct of the Society of American Archivists (SAA): Intrusion into an individual’s seclusion or solitude, or into an individual’s private affairs; public disclosure of embarrassing private facts about an individual; publicity that places the individual in a false light in the public eye; and appropriation, for another person’s advantage, of the individual’s name or likeness. Public figures or individuals give up their privacy rights when they give or allow information about them to become a matter of public record or to be discussed in a public place.

The courts have held that the right to privacy dies with an individual (the rationale being that the dead can no longer be embarrassed). But what happens to the rights of correspondents and subjects who may show up in the papers of the individual who has died? “The privacy of so-called third parties, people who may be represented in a collection, can be the most worrisome and difficult to deal with, because they had no voice in deciding the fate of the papers, and because they are unlikely to be consulted about any potential sensitivity in the collection,” says Hodson.

For many years institutions and curators such as Hodson were left to wrestle with their own consciences in deciding whether or not to impose restrictions and seal part of an archive. Most troubling to Hodson was that in the process they might impose their own values, inadvertently censoring materials.

In 1992, responding to the growing interest in issues of privacy among its members, the SAA, North America’s oldest and largest national archival professional association, crafted a code of ethics that reads: “Archivists respect the privacy of individuals who created, or are the subjects of, documentary materials of long-term value, especially those who had no voice in the disposition of the materials. Archivists neither reveal, nor profit from, information gained through work with restricted holdings.”

This code signifies a good start, perhaps, but it doesn’t provide specific guidance for determining when and where to place restrictions.

Hodson, an admitted neophyte in privacy matters at that time, was not involved in the formulation of the code. But she has since worked to bring clarity to these issues for herself and others, and in the process she has become a noted authority, one of fewer than a dozen within her field across the country. A founding member of the SAA’s Privacy and Confidentiality Roundtable, she speaks and writes regularly on privacy and confidentiality topics, helping other archivists grappling with these issues.

A prevailing reason for the uncertainty among archivists is that the fear of breaching someone’s privacy more often constitutes an ethical concern than a legal one, says Hodson. In fact, rarely is a manuscript repository sued for invasion of privacy or for revealing private information. The more likely party to face suit is a researcher or book publisher. Nonetheless, repositories must still contend with legal ramifications.

Institutions have sought protection in various ways. The Bodleian Library in Oxford had a long-standing policy of sealing all letters by living individuals. The institution came under fire for this policy in 1993 when Eric Jacobs, the authorized biographer of Kingsley Amis, requested copies of some Amis letters housed there. Even after Amis himself requested the copies, the library declined to produce them, citing its firm policy. Ultimately, after much public hoopla, the library produced copies for Amis, who turned them over to his biographer.

“I would be stunned if an American institution sealed all records,” says Hodson. Institutions, after all, don’t want collections that they cannot use. Some libraries even refuse to take collections with any kind of seal, declaring such restricted archives a waste of shelf space.

“When curators and archivists establish restrictions on the use of personal papers, they need to remember that the fundamental purpose for the keeping of archives and manuscripts is to promote their use,” says Karen Benedict of the SAA. This obligation must be balanced with the “privacy rights of both the donors and the individuals or groups who are the subject of the material, especially those who had no voice in the creation, use, or disposition of the material.” She adds that decisions about restrictions on use should be made at the time the institution acquires the collection as an essential part of a written agreement.

The Huntington does accept archives that come with restrictions in place, understanding that most restrictions eventually expire. And Hodson and her colleagues, who generally use their own discretion in privacy matters, tend to ask donors to identify sensitive material. This position has the advantage of drawing on the donor’s intimate knowledge of the people, situations, and issues represented in the archive. Families will often want longer restrictions than curators do, says Hodson, perhaps motivated by a desire to safeguard reputations. The process is then one of negotiation in which donor and curator agree on the duration of a restriction based on how long the subjects are likely to live.

Indeed, the process often involves compromise. For example, in 1999 The Huntington acquired the papers of the author Christopher Isherwood from Don Bachardy, Isherwood’s life partner. Isherwood is best known for The Berlin Stories, about his life in Berlin in the 1930s (later adapted into the musical Cabaret). The collection includes Isherwood’s diaries for most of his adult life, some of which have been published volume by volume in expurgated form since 1996 by HarperCollins. Editor Katherine Bucknell, in consultation with Bachardy, had omitted passages that could be embarrassing to living people named in the diaries. HarperCollins’ attorneys further examined the manuscript for sensitive material. However, a surviving family member threatened legal action after the book was published, claiming it revealed certain inappropriate information. Despite his strong belief in free and open access, Bachardy reluctantly imposed a 30-year restriction on the original diaries in the Huntington’s Isherwood archive (again, based on the ages of the diaries’ subjects). The Isherwood papers otherwise are available for scholarly research and are among the most heavily used collections in the Library.

And what of the Kinross papers? As it turned out, the matter resolved itself with the passage of time and the intrusion of Hodson’s heavy workload. Huntington staff members are just finishing cataloging the collection, which will finally become available to researchers later this year.

Hodson says that since her initial experience delving into privacy issues, her views on the subject have changed somewhat; she is less willing than ever to impose restrictions and more concerned with the possibility of censorship. Still, she concedes, there are few easy answers in the delicate act of balancing the public’s right to know with an individual’s right to privacy. Meanwhile, the SAA revised and updated its code of ethics in February 2005. In the end, though, archivists must simply remember Hodson’s dictum: “It is in our hands to safeguard the privacy of those who cannot do so themselves.”

Traude Gomez-Rhine is a staff writer at The Huntington. For further reading, see Sara S. Hodson’s article in The American Archivist (vol. 67, fall/winter 2004), the semiannual journal of the Society of American Archivists.