Off the record, restricted, and the two bags

First published 20 October 2026

Part 3 of 5 · The culture series — A listener, not a form · What an archive will actually accept · Off the record, restricted, and the two bags · Your family’s dish is a lesson · A community keeps its own archive

When you tell a story to be kept, some of it is not meant for everyone, and the words people use for that, “off the record”, “private”, “closed”, sound alike and are not alike. “Off the record” means a passage is never exported, in any copy, and a visible gap marks where it was. “Restricted” means a passage is kept, behind an access rule, with a date on which the rule lifts. And the copy that carries your name is never the copy a researcher reads: an identifiable deposit bag and a de-identified research bag are kept in separate places. This is a design, written down so you can hold any project to it, formaddie included; what formaddie keeps today is on its privacy page. Today formaddie does part of the first promise and none of the other two: saying “off the record” keeps what follows out of your chapters and your book, but the passage is still saved, Maddie still hears and answers it, and it appears in the full transcript, with no gap marker yet. Restricted passages and a separate research copy are not offered.

Three passages, three promises

Picture an invented example: a man in his eighties telling Maddie about the winter he worked at a cannery on the coast, “around 1957”. Three passages in his telling need three treatments.

The first is why he left. It involves a quarrel with a foreman whose family still lives in town: that one, he says, is off the record. In anything that leaves, the passage is absent, and in its place stands a marker reading “[section removed at narrator’s request]“. A reader can see that something was taken out, not what.

The second is his sister’s long illness. He wants it kept for the family and closed to everyone else until 2050. That is restricted: the words survive, in a separate file, with an access rule and the lift date beside it. A reader can see that a closed passage exists, and cannot open it before the date.

The third is the date itself. “Around 1957” is his own hedge, and the record keeps it as his: the year is written 1957~, where the tilde means approximate. If a program reading the transcript guesses a year, with a confidence of its own, that guess is kept as a separate, labelled statement, never passed off as his uncertainty.

The two bags come from the same telling. The deposit bag holds everything except the off-the-record passage, under his name, governed by the release he signs. The research bag holds a copy with names swapped for codes (“[cousin 1]”), places widened (“[town in northern New Brunswick]”), dates reduced, and no audio. The key that links the codes back to names goes in neither bag.

What the standards say

Canada’s research-ethics policy, TCPS 2 (2022), defines these words. Coded information is where “direct identifiers are removed from the information and replaced with a code.” Anonymized information is “irrevocably stripped of direct identifiers, a code is not kept to allow future re-linkage, and risk of re-identification of individuals from remaining indirect identifiers is low or very low.” While a key exists, the research copy is coded, and the design calls it coded. The second test is hard for a life story, which is made of indirect identifiers: a town, a trade, a year. The policy’s “next best” alternative keeps the key “accessible only to a custodian or trusted third party who is independent of the researcher,” which is why it ships in neither bag. A family’s recording is not automatically research, so this borrows the policy’s vocabulary, not its authority.

The Oral History Association’s Statement on Ethics lists what a person can ask for when they review their own telling: “the right to delete, restrict, and/or redact portions of an interview; … and the choice to keep the interview closed to the public until a set date or to decline to release it to the public in the first place.” Deleting and redacting fit the first passage above; restricting until a set date, the second. Its best practices say “Interviewers should clearly explain these options and how they would be carried out to all narrators during the pre-interview.” Its guide for participants is honest about the limit: “even if an oral history is closed to the public for a period of time, certain legal challenges—such as subpoenas or open-record requests—may make some restrictions unenforceable.” So restricted is a serious promise to try, not a guarantee, and you should hear that before you begin.

Two Library of Congress standards carry the rest. The Extended Date/Time Format says the characters ?, ~ and % “are used to mean ‘uncertain’, ‘approximate’, and ‘uncertain’ as well as ‘approximate’, respectively,” so 1957~ keeps “around” as the teller’s own word. And the PREMIS Data Dictionary says “Documentation of actions that modify an Object is critical to maintaining digital provenance, a key element of authenticity.” In this design, taking a passage out, setting a lift date, and a consent given or withdrawn are each recorded as events, so a bag can say what was done to it without saying what was removed.

This week

Before you record anything, decide the three things you would want off the record, and write them on paper. For each, say which promise you mean: gone from every copy, or kept and closed until a date you name. Then ask whoever will hold your recording four plain questions. Is an off-the-record passage deleted outright, or kept in a private copy? Who may open a restricted passage before its date, and who decides after you are gone? Does a restricted passage travel into the research copy before its date? And is the research copy called coded or anonymized, and who holds the key? Ask for the answers in writing.

the previous piece lists the formats an archive will accept, which is what these bags are made of. The next piece goes to the other end of the shelf, a story meant to be shared, told through a family dish. For what formaddie keeps today, read the privacy page.

What would you want kept but not shared, and for how long?

Where this connects

Sources

published by Jason Jeyanandan through his cognitive companion, one unit