Shredding Documents at the UN, Does It Matter?

The answer: "it all depends".

Mr. Volcker, in the Lehrer interview last night referred to a "chron" file that was destroyed. I've no knowledge of the filing system they used at the UN, and have not read the report. But some filing basics, as done in my old agency in 1975 (figure the UN is 30 years behind times). Anything prepared for official signature in the office, whether in response to incoming correspondence or initiated within the office, had an original and multiple carbon copies prepared. (We moved to Xerox copies later.)

1 Writer drafted the document and his (remember, it's 1975) secretary typed it with the copies. Any incoming documents, attachments, etc. were stapled to the official yellow copy.
2 Writer reviewed, then initialed the official yellow copy.
3 Package went through clearance channels, with the officials initialing the yellow copy. If they didn't like it, it was sent back for rewrite and retyping. The original yellow carbon would be stapled behind the yellow carbon of the revised document.
4 The approving official signed the original. His secretary stamped his signature on all the copies and distributed them:

• original to addressee
• information copies to offices who needed to know that action had been taken and to the writer
  
• official yellow, green, and blue copies to official records. There, they would be filed as follows:
• official yellow (and attachments, etc.) in a file by subject (note that it should show all the changes made, the whole history of the document)
  
• blue in a file by addressee
• green in a file by date.

The addressee and date files (chronology) were finding aids. If you were trying to find something, you could search those files, retrieve the copy and find the subject category where you'd find the yellow copy. After a period of time, we'd destroy the addressee and date files, and move the official yellows off to the National Archives.

(The whole thing is comparable to today's PC's--the subject file equates to the system of folders and subfolders used in Windows. The date file equates to the history boxes that show the stuff you most recently worked on or URL's you accessed. )

So if Annan's chief of staff approved the destruction of blue/green files and the file systems were like my agency's, there should be no information lost, just ease of searching. ) Of course, the timing smells and the file system may have been something completely different. We'll see.

Three things are interesting:
1 The willingness of people to comment without knowing the system used
2 The fact there's no discussion of e-mail. I mean, I know the UN is not well run, but even Reagan and Ollie North got tripped up in 1987 over the IBM Profs internal e-mail system.
3 The problem historians will have in the future as filing systems dissolve under the impact of technology.