I've only come back into this thread to see what "perspective" has been offered by the readers of the Merion threads. I for one, left the fray because I thought the arguments were becoming pedantic and circuitous, with nothing really new being offered. Maybe I was wrong, and something did come out in the last several hundered posts that I skipped. But, I don't think so.
I put myself in the curious consumers of GCA category. I'm not a researcher, just an interested reader of GCA books, history, course design, construction and maintenance. If there are more than a dozen 'serious' researchers on this website, I would be amazed.
So, that leaves about 1485 GCA.com 'consumers' of the histories of these courses, design elements and how they evolved, and how courses are offered to us today as the result of what has come and been learned before.
So when I read:
They want to take their time and consider if and when a book should be done and by whom as they want to control what information is disseminated to the public.
I read "sanitize the facts".
Others above allude to what is really at stake in people getting to primary source documents held by clubs. They aren't getting at the elements of golf course architecture and evolution of GCA style so much as getting insight into the society of the people involved, in their time. Times change, society changes, and mores change. The scrutiny of documents such as board minutes where influential people of their times might have sat on a club board and spouted off some proclamation about some social issue, would possibly be offensive and embarrassing now. And, isn't that what some of you serious club researchers are guarding against or protecting from? You tell me, if not protecting old line mores.
I think the 800 pound gorilla in the room is the revelations that certain aspects of club's histories would demonstrate prejudice attitudes that would be embarrassing by today's standards. So, because they are a private club, and by that very definintion have set up to be "discriminating" as to who they let in, and all the other underflow of what "private" and "high society closed circles" entails, they don't want their dirty laundry scrutinized by the public in today's more modern, if not slightly enlightened mores and values. So, they hide the stuff like the crazy aunt locked in the attic.
Thus, each club may take a different approach to revealing their past through access to their archives. Some may close ranks, protect the past generations of whom they hold venerable as founders, and that is their right. Others may be OK with allowing things to come out from the archives that tell us about the previous generation's society knowing full well some of it might not be flattering, but actually those sort of clubs might revel in the fact that they have come a long way, with the mores of the times changing and take pride that they too can or do change.
It is a collective, yet priveleged thing that Merion and others that guard their histories are entitled to withhold, because they are "private".
But, as a consumer of interesting history of GCA, (which is really all the rest of us are) when clubs guard and hold things that are not in reality at the level of "State secrets" or as important as what really started the Spanish American War, you sort of make it easy to characterize the level of "exclusion" and history sanitizing, and all the negative connotations that come with witholding facts. You invite speculation, you reveal your own weakness to face and deal with history, leading to assumptions that said clubs are modern anachronisms, holding on to sanitized notions of themselves, that ironically most consumers of the material might find quaintly amusing, but not admirable.
Talk about "serious researchers", I'd like to hear what a fellow like Ken Burns would have to say about this issue of disseminating information about historical events on a most favored historian basis. I'd say he didn't sanitize the history of Baseball in his fine documentary. My guess would be that a fellow like Burns would just laugh and not take such clubs who guard archives for sentimental ideals as seriously relavant organizations committed to real history.