Begun under Mayor William O’Dwyer, the Mayor’s Committee on Management Survey was a sprawling three-year labor that culminated in a hefty, two-volume final report with a slew of recommendations for sweeping changes to various agencies and offices of the government. The Committee ultimately presented eleven major findings, and twelve management recommendations, and many four-, five-, and six-point plans with their own numbered lists of justifying principles and inescapable underlying forces. Whether its primary purpose, “the securing of good management, which will bring in its wake those economies arising from the best use of men, materials, and time in getting the work of the City government done,” was in fact accomplished, is a topic for further research. What’s clear is that City government needed some kind of diagnostic.
Mystery Ledgers
The New York City Municipal Archives is charged with preserving records deemed to have, “continuing and significant historical, research, cultural or other important value.” Sometimes it’s easy to see this value in our collections; in a mayor’s correspondence, an original drawing of Central Park or the Brooklyn Bridge, NYPD crime scene photographs or a great-grandmother’s birth certificate. There are other cases where this value is not so plainly evident, where it must be determined in more exacting fashion and weighed against the various costs associated with maintaining the records in question. And invariably archivists must draw the line somewhere. Not every record gets kept. Doing so would quickly become absurd.