The Academic Enclosure of American Archivist

Abstract

American Archivist is the oldest journal of the US archival profession. In its first several decades of publication, a wide variety existed among the institutional affiliations of American Archivist contributors. Since the 1990s, articles authored by archivists within higher education have almost completely eclipsed articles authored by archivists from other sectors, particularly government archivists. This “academic enclosure” of American Archivist has significant ramifications for the quality and richness of our professional discourse. This is the first article to track institutional affiliations of American Archivist research article authors across nearly the entirety of the journal's publication history. The author examined the institutional affiliation of a data set of 1,799 articles printed in American Archivist from the journal's inception in 1938 through 2019. This article contextualizes the trends in institutional affiliations by reviewing the editorial policies of the journal over its eighty-year run.