Information about a person changes over time, not always for the better. Old records persist while new ones accumulate; older records sometimes become more accurate because the surrounding context has clarified, sometimes less accurate because the world has moved on. Any assessment is therefore a snapshot taken at a moment, with the understanding that the moment will not last.
The temporal dimension matters in several specific ways. A record from many years ago may have been made under different rules, with different fields, by different methods of capture. Its content is not directly comparable to a current record on the same person. A reader who reads the old and the new together must allow for the difference.
A record that was once obscure may now be readily findable. Digitisation has changed what an ordinary search returns; a name in a dusty register has become a name in an indexed database. The principle (that the record was always public) is the same; the practical visibility is not.
A record that was once findable may now be effectively removed (through right-to-be-forgotten processes, through database closures, through editorial decisions by the platforms that hosted it). The removal may be complete from one perspective and not from another; an archived copy may persist in a place the principal search misses.
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The desk's assessments are dated. The reader knows when the work was done. The assessment is not a permanent statement of fact but a contemporary description, and the work of keeping is, in part, the work of refreshing the description as time moves the picture.
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