Archivist: "And in this box, we have radioactive uranium."

Chicago Pile One Scientists; Enrico Fermi is the
first man in the front row. Albert Wattenberg is
the third man in the front row. (From the Atomic Archive)

"University of Illinois physicist Albert Wattenberg didn't go to the Chicago branch of the National Archives last year looking for trouble. But when he could barely lift an 8-inch metal rod from a box containing artifacts used by nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi and his colleagues to build a nuclear pile under the University of Chicago football stadium, he new something was wrong. 'There's only one metal that heavy,' says Wattenberg, who was part of Fermi's team in the 1940s. 'It was obviously uranium.'

Wattenberg had literally put his fingers on a half-century of carelessness in preserving the beginnings of the nation's nuclear history. Thousands of artifacts contaminated by radionuclides during the testing and production of nuclear materials--laboratory notebooks, classified documents, components from experiments, and the like--were being stored along with nonradioactive material in files open to public inspection. Although the health hazards associated with these materials are small... the contamination is presenting the Department of Energy and the National Archives with a major cleanup problem." --Science, January 14, 1994, quoted on p121 in Gregory S. Hunter, Developing and Maintaining Practical Archives 

The archivist who processed that box must have been using a "More Product, Less Process" (MPLP) approach! "Hmmm... that's just a box of uranium pile artifacts. They certainly don't need item-level analysis. Next box, please!"

One-Fifth of a Five Sentence Five-Year Plan (Submitted Annually)

Seymour Cray (From: Wikipedia)

"For most routine transactions, records creation is managed through forms. Indeed, a branch of records management known as 'forms management' specializes in the creation of such documents. Forms routinize the types of information collected and the manner in which it is displayed... At higher levels of administration, the use of forms to control records creation is usually less successful... Some administrators, particularly those with reputations independent of their positions, go beyond merely creating records in very general forms or those that incidentally do not conform with 'standardized' procedures and use records creation as a way to flaunt their opposition to bureaucratic procedures. Seymour Cray, for years one of the world's most respected computer scientists and also an employee of Control Data Corporation, mocked the company's policy of creating one- and five-year plans by annually submitting a one-sentence plan, noting that this sentence was one-fifth of his five sentence five-year plan." (52) --Frank Boles, Selecting & Appraising Archives & Manuscripts

Seymour Cray was the creator of the first supercomputer. He was clearly a man to be respected by his peers at the Control Data Corporation. Just as clearly, he was a man who knew his true position in the world. One can clearly picture him, sitting at his desk, signing off on yet another one-sentence plan and forwarding it to his superiors at Control Data as he chuckles under his breath, "I wrote a one-sentence 0.2 year plan because I can write a one-sentence 0.2 year plan!" And we can envision Control Data's executives meeting to discuss what to do about that mischievous Seymour Cray. And the records managers cursing Seymour Cray because he just didn't conform to their perfect five-year plan categories. But what could they do? The man invented the supercomputer. I suppose they just had to let Seymour be Seymour.

Nixon:"Just destroy all the tapes."

Richard Nixon (From: Wikipedia)

"Richard Nixon had a one-line retort on Monday when asked about the lesson of Watergate: 'Just destroy all the tapes.' That's what he told the annual luncheon of The Associated Press when asked what his presidential successors could learn from his experience." (53) --Gregory S. Hunter, Developing and Maintaining Practical Archives, quoting Newsday, April 22, 1986

Lawrence the Librarian

Tintoretto's "The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence" (From: Wikipedia)

"Lawrence the Librarian was a church archives official in Rome. In the year A.D. 258, as part of Roman persecution of Christians, imperial guards searching for membership lists demanded surrender of the church's archives. Lawrence previously had hidden the archives and refused to divulge their location. The guards tied him to a grid iron over a charcoal fire, but Lawrence still refused to relinquish the archives, telling his tormentors, 'I am roasted enough on this side, turn me over and eat.' In subsequent years, a cult grew up around Lawrence. Numerous churches were dedicated to him and he was the subject of artwork by Rubens, Titian, Ribera, and Fra Angelico. Even today, pilgrims still visit the basilica over the tomb of this librarian who died to defend the archives in his custody." (11)
--Gregory S. Hunter, Developing and Maintaining Practical Archives