More than for doing an in-depth analysis of the discourse, I performed this search because of two main goals. First, by using quantitative data, show that in fact the issues on government secrecy does not generate extensive discussion in the listserv. Indeed, the data shows that the majority of the postings related to secrecy are links or texts of news from the press or other organizations. Second, although the discourse does not see extensive, with the compiled data I was able to identify specific topics which generate some discussion in the listserv and I will compare the discourse of these discussions with the press discourse about these issues.
Figure 1 shows the distribution of hits resulting from searching the listserv archive with the topic “government secrecy.” With the exception of the category “Archivists comments,” the rest of the categories are just links to news, text of bulletins from other organizations (like “Secrecy News”) and announcement to events, like talks that covers issues of government secrecy. Only on 19 of the 69 hits, or 27 percent, there are discussions about some news related to secrecy and archives. It is important to point out that the search I performed was using the specific phrase “government secrecy.” I also performed a Boolean search (government AND secrecy) that generated over 500 hits. However, because the search engine was retrieving data that included both words in any part of the text, many of them were not really related to what my research is intended. Furthermore, randomly looking at the hits, I believe that the statistics, in terms of percentage, were not going to be significantly different.
