ARCHIVAL SCIENCE最新文献

The disciplines of archives and archaeology are each about the power of context: they both preserve the context wherein objects and records are found and created to aid in their interpretation and take those materials as evidence of context. As context-based disciplines, archives and archaeology foreground the concept of provenance and construct meanings about objects and records from contextual relationships. Context, which is related to but also distinct from provenance, is difficult to disentangle from the latter. While sometimes conflated and used interchangeably, subtle differences distinguish the two concepts. This article explores the ways that archives and archaeology employ the concepts of provenance and context, and the messiness with which they do. Fundamentally, this exercise aims to understand where they might share common ground while enriching discussion and fostering introspection and cross-disciplinary exchange and suggest ways these fields might rethink and extend their own uses of these concepts.

This paper explores the meaning of provenance in its broader social and organisational context, ambience, through a records continuum lens, bringing a reflexive and critical perspective to records continuum thinking over the past 30 or so years. It begins by introducing key recordkeeping concepts and goes on to explore records continuum theory and the records continuum model, a four-dimensional map of the recordkeeping and archival contexts of creation, capture, organisation and pluralisation. Continuum principles of provenance and ambience are situated in the model. An analysis of how provenance is currently narrowly applied in practice leads into an exploration of the power of ambience and provenance in the continuum. The following sections on Participatory Rights in Childhood Recordkeeping in Out of Home Care in Australia and Living Archives on Country illustrate how these concepts, together with those of multiple, simultaneous and parallel provenance, can be powerful tools in transforming the subjects of records into active recordkeeping agents. The illustrative examples relate to pioneering research on co-designing extensive suites of rights for co-creators of records who were previously relegated to the status of subjects of the record, and Indigenous archival sovereignty. They enable acknowledgement, enrichment, empowerment and coexistence of multiple, even contrary, positions, and provide frameworks for participatory recordkeeping and archiving.

Archival context is a crucial concept in archival science, closely related to provenance. We explore the definitions and types of archival context, the relationship between archival context and provenance, and how archival context can be modeled. Our investigation suggests that archival context encompasses three dimensions: creation context, description context, and usage context. Provenance is further enriched through multiple perspectives and networks of interacting activity systems. We propose a Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT)-based model as a tool to systematically illustrate archival context and capture essential aspects of archival context. This model presents both a static view of archival context at the micro-level and a dynamic view at the macro-level using an event-centered approach.

This article investigates the notion of provenance, questioning traditional conceptions of the archival fonds that link this collective to limited relationships, including that of the individual, family, or organization. Drawing from work that embraces the notion of expanded views of provenance, the paper explores the theoretical and practical implications of tying the contextual boundaries of the archive to functions and activities connected to and serving as evidence of domestic spatial configurations and relationships. In doing so, the article adds to a body of work that queries key concepts used as part of systems of archival control, highlighting new conceptual and theoretical interpretations that bring dynamism, creativity, and flexibility to archival operations as they exist in analog and digital spaces.

Just as archival scholarship has increasingly engaged in conversations around care and holistic considerations of the agency of records subjects, the child welfare systems of the modern Western world have been moving towards conversations that aim to centre and celebrate the voice of the child in new and important ways. However, too often are these conversations held back by the enormity of the issue and the overhaul that would have to take place for philosophy to match with practice. In this paper, I suggest that part of the problem is that we have been trying to make these changes philosophy first, placing a new way of thinking on top of an old way of doing—an approach that will never generate change. Leaning in to using speculation to imagine what the new recordkeeping of a caring system might look like, I propose that the act of recordkeeping is the fulcrum that could make caring child welfare a reality and illustrate some of the avenues through which we might pursue instigating the systemic changes needed if we are to see the agency and perspectives of children prioritised in child welfare and protection practices.

This article introduces, defines and analyzes the concept of digital provenance. I begin by comparing provenance, data provenance and digital provenance, focusing on research literature in archival studies, digital preservation and media archeology. The remainder of the article is divided into two parts, first examining three dimensions of digital provenance and then considering how digital provenance might be of use in the four main archival functions. An understanding of digital provenance is necessary for archivists to process born digital records; but more than this, it is necessary for archivists and archival users to understand the context and content of born digital records.

Using critical place research and documentary methods, this article examines the Mapuche territorial cause in Chile and exposes the deficiencies of state-produced Mapuche land titles, known as Títulos de Merced, which are required for and (mis)used as evidence by Chile’s Indigenous land restitution program. The Títulos de Merced were granted to Mapuche families during and after the military occupation of Wallmapu (Mapuche territory), as documentation of their relocation to reducciones (reservations) between 1884 and 1929. However, these approximately 3000 titles do not fully represent Mapuche land claims. Instead, they were used by the newly formed Chilean state to reduce Mapuche territory to approximately 5% of its ancestral span, leaving undocumented much of the territories that communities were effectively using before the reduction process––what Mapuche claimants refer to as tierras antiguas or ancestral lands. Despite this, CONADI, the government agency that administers the land program, defines these titles as the primary sources of documentary evidence to prove Mapuche land dispossession. Therefore, not only are the Títulos de Merced not enough, but they negatively impact Mapuche land claims by purposefully reducing, once again, Mapuche ancestral territory, this time discursively. Mapuche claimants are paradoxically forced to validate claims to their ancestral land through documents that were designed to legitimize their dispossession. By examining the insufficiency and inappropriateness of the Títulos de Merced as evidence for Mapuche territorial claims, this paper proposes the intercultural practice of documenting territorialidad—the expression of cultural, economic, and spiritual Mapuche practices over the territory—in addition to colonial demarcations of land, as a form of producing/using evidence for Mapuche land restitution claims. Suggesting the mapu (land/territory) as provenance and territorialidad as evidence, this alternative documentary practice unsettles the Títulos de Merced as the only legitimate form of evidence for Mapuche land claims and theorizes interculturalidad—the recognition of and dialogue between diverse ways of knowing coexisting within the same territory—as a framework for thinking about provenance when working with Indigenous land records.

This article aims to reconsider some key aspects of the classical concept of “provenance”. To do this, we draw on our experience working with two personal archives from the South: one from Argentine physicist and mathematician Carlos Mallmann, and the other from Italian-Argentinian sociologist Gino Germani. Unlike State archives in which preserving, organizing, identifying, and standardizing public documents are a regulated obligation, the safekeeping of documents in the case of personal records is a contingency. They must overcome multiple obstacles: interventions by their custodians, difficulties in their serialization and standardization, etc. However, we will argue that some sections of personal records, especially when their creators have played institutional roles, can function as institutional archives and even as public archives. In the case of the peripheries, this feature becomes an important patrimonial aspect, given the constitutive fragility of public archives. This fragility relates to problematic issues of statehood, such as hegemony, domination, and sovereignty. We argue that these archives are constitutively incomplete, precarious, contaminated, and hybrid, leading us to problematize some aspects of the archival ratio. The latter (surreptitiously) permeates and naturalizes the experience of the North Atlantic nation-state, universalizing a singular (and historical) form of producing hegemony as a totality. Finally, we propose some reflections and raise some questions regarding how institutionality/statehood is modulated in the archives from the peripheries, and how some aspects of the classical North Atlantic notion of “provenance” appears here “out of place”.

This article discusses issues pertaining to performing arts archives, in particular materials created by live theatre. Theatre materials cover the full range of creative and administrative activities and include a variety of formats; artists and other people involved in live theatre are also viewed as living archives. Theatre materials at times pose challenges for archivists who are not properly trained to handle them. Theatre materials also do not lend themselves to the classic interpretation of “life cycle”. This article introduces different types of materials and formats and discusses their provenance in the context of different types of organizations, individuals, cultures, and artistic practices, bringing attention to issues that are understood within the relatively small performing arts archiving community, but are still often overlooked in other environments. This article invites a holistic and multicultural perspective and argues that a strong understanding of theatre and performance is needed to properly manage, preserve, and make accessible theatre materials.