The Ethics of Archiving - an Anthropological Perspective

The first ethical issue I want to raise is one of editorial control, something which has already been discussed ad nauseam in the postmodern debates about authorial authority. So that is the second issue I want to raise, and one which will come up again in my talk: does material collected by social scientists become something rather different - historical data - once it is archived? The third issue I want to raise and the major ethical concern in this case was that undertakings of confidentiality should be honoured.