Nighthawk21’s Weblog

Wading the Archives

In university, I had the privilege to conduct primary research using the National Archives: hours and hours of wading through newly declassified World War II documents and those of the early 1950s for the Department of Immigration and the Department of External Affairs. My goal was to learn as much as possible about the post-war treatment of Ukrainian emigrants and their subsequent lobbying via KYK (Ukrainian Canadian Council) of the Canadian government and the world to aid Ukrainians intelligentsia and recognize Ukraine as a free country. Documents though available due to the Freedom to Information Act were oftentimes missing pieces or had sentences or sections blacked out. The hunt for war criminals was not my area of research at the time, but I found myself thinking often about what was not said, what was really said and what was censored. It was odd to think that most SUM (Children’s group) and zabava (dances) were monitored for activity not becoming of new citizens or landed immigrants. Someday I mean to re-write my university thesis using my older, wiser brain to siphon the piles of documents. It is a good thing that over time these are becoming available online.

Fast Forward to the Business world:

In my current job, I signed the strictest NDA of my career. Every other place of employment had a version of it (the oil company took my blood and urine samples too), but none that made me read it six times, have a friend with legal experience read it and worry incessantly about everything I type online. It is about ‘inside’ voice and ‘outside’ voice. All of that being said, part of my job that I enjoy is that I am 1/2 “Online Communications Specialist”. I post service status updates to portals, answer discuss list posts, write incident reports among other customer communications. Every single time I ‘translate’ internal documents to external documents and then handle approvals and revisions, I think about the Archive documents, wearing the gloves, and following the rules. The way I explain it to my family is: I filter and digest appropriate technical information to the customer base using Internet tools. The historian in me still sees the pages of documents which would swallow a person whole with content covered in black lines. I guess you could say that I am part Blackliner too, but in a decent, professional way. Or better yet, Blackliner/whiteliner with the latter being more on the side of the Freedom of Information Act.
nh