Three forces collide when security police files surface: the right to privacy, the right to state security, and the right to access information. In the case of the East German "Stasi" files, communists tried to destroy them, West German archivists and politicians tried to restrict them for decades, and dissidents tried to open access to them. A unique solution, pushed into law in 1990-91, has now stood the test of time. Fifteen years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the formula devised by Joachim Gauck is a tested model for balancing the conflicts between transparency, privacy, and security.

Because privacy laws heavily restrict access to student records, archivists are forced to weigh the research potential of these documents against their availability. At the center of this issue is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which protects individual student records from unauthorized third-party review. In 2003, the authors conducted a survey of one hundred Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Archives in the United States to gauge FERPA's impact on current archival appraisal and access policies for student records. Based on their survey findings, the authors suggest guidelines for instituting access policies that comply with FERPA and allow for the greatest possible access.