ARCHIVAL SCIENCE最新文献

There are the richest collections of palm leaf manuscripts in Potala Palace of Tibet in China; they represent very precious cultural heritage with both literature and research value. The study reported in this paper has selected the original palm leaf manuscripts and the photocopies of palm leaf manuscripts in Potala Palace as investigation objects randomly. The investigation of damage status focuses on both media (palm leaves) and handwriting. Results show 11 kinds of deterioration of palm leaf manuscripts. They can be divided into three categories based on the frequency and destructiveness of deterioration: major, minor and occasional deterioration. The purpose of grading is to take targeted measures according to the degree of damage. Restoration and preservation of palm leaf manuscripts in the Potala Palace are relatively complicated because of minimal research on the restoration of palm leaf manuscripts. There are few stable and mature restoration methods that would be used for damaged manuscripts. It is very important to find out the most suitable method for seriously damaged palm leaves before making a restoration plan in order to prioritize appropriately and facilitate long-term preservation and utilization. This study analyzes and demonstrates the feasibility of the restoration techniques for the most damaged, thus laying a foundation for comprehensive practices of the preservation and restoration of the palm leaves in the Potala Palace.

Mass digitisation and the exponential growth of born-digital archives over the past two decades have resulted in an enormous volume of archives and archival data being available digitally. This has produced a valuable but under-utilised source of large-scale digital data ripe for interrogation by scholars and practitioners in the Digital Humanities. However, current digitisation approaches fall short of the requirements of digital humanists for structured, integrated, interoperable, and interrogable data. Linked Data provides a viable means of producing such data, creating machine-readable archival data suited to analysis using digital humanities research methods. While a growing body of archival scholarship and praxis has explored Linked Data, its potential to open up digitised and born-digital archives to the Digital Humanities is under-examined. This article approaches Archival Linked Data from the perspective of the Digital Humanities, extrapolating from both archival and digital humanities Linked Data scholarship to identify the benefits to digital humanists of the production and provision of access to Archival Linked Data. It will consider some of the current barriers preventing digital humanists from being able to experience the benefits of Archival Linked Data evidenced, and to fully utilise archives which have been made available digitally. The article argues for increased collaboration between the two disciplines, challenges individuals and institutions to engage with Linked Data, and suggests the incorporation of AI and low-barrier tools such as Wikidata into the Linked Data production workflow in order to scale up the production of Archival Linked Data as a means of increasing access to and utilisation of digitised and born-digital archives.

This article draws attention to the present-day transnational rise of state archives in the Greater Caribbean. It takes as a case study the Dominican Republic’s National Archives System (NAS) and National General Archives (AGN), which opened in 2008 and 2011, respectively, to signal a Caribbean neoliberal archival turn and interrogate the data politics behind these institutions’ neoliberal promises of equality, progress, and freedom. Intersecting Critical Archival Theory and Critical Caribbean Studies, the article pushes for a new critical archival theory of color that draws from scholarship centering the erasure of histories of enslavement and the hyper-masculinization of white colonial privilege. In doing so, it advocates for a decolonial practice of public archives demanding that archivists and archive users reckon with these archives’ historical role in powering anti-Black racism and structural oppression.

Although much has been written on the archival principle of provenance and the centrality of records creation to archival practices and processes, there has been little exploration of how records creation is figured and enacted across specific archival sites and spaces. This article centers records creation in two digital archives of feminist materials: Alternative Toronto and Rise Up! Feminist Digital Archive with the aim of demonstrating records creation as an imaginative and fabulatory process of meaning-making. By decentering the notion of a singular, remarkable creator in favor of a multiplicity of creating contexts and actors, Rise Up! and Alternative Toronto enable imaginative acts of records creation that play with the spatial and temporal boundaries of records, pushing them into new, oftentimes unanticipated relationships to other records, users, and intervenors. In this article, I propose that provenancial fabulation can be characterized through four dimensions: first, it plays with contradictory records contexts putting them in conversation with one another; second, it troubles the order and organization of the past; third, it extends the temporal and spatial boundaries of historical records and accounts; and fourth, it acts infrastructurally to circulate ideas, imaginaries, narratives, and relationalities. In creating and configuring digital records according to feminist understandings of archival value and historical continuity, Alternative Toronto and Rise Up! demonstrate provenancial fabulation as a structuring force in the circulation of feminist knowledges and desires.

The basic prerequisite for records, archives and information to be open to the public one day is that their own status must be public. Selected examples from the United States, France and Germany demonstrate a trend in the development of the relationship of advanced democratic societies to records of mostly official origin, especially the top representatives of public political power (presidents, government ministers and secretaries, chancellors). Civil society increasingly shows an interest in access to records that testify to the actions of their top representatives. States are gradually enforcing the interpretation of “their” records as public and not private. However, these representatives still demonstrate a strong feeling that society is not quite entitled to these records. The USA, France and Germany all deal with this matter in different ways. A top politician, especially in the performance of his role or entrusted office, is not a private citizen. Therefore, there should be much stricter and more thorough public scrutiny, and a requirement for transparency. Controversial records, perceived to be on the border between public and private status, should always be treated as public. Top political and public officials have much less “right to be forgotten” than ordinary citizens and thus it is their “duty to be remembered”.

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) was published in 2007. By posing a right to self-determination, the UNDRIP opens a path to redefining Indigenous peoples’ place in the international community. This paper considers how public archives in Canada can address the implementation of the UNDRIP and engage with Indigenous peoples to find new pathways to reanimate and promote the cultures and identities of Indigenous peoples.

In the last twenty years, anthropologists, archivists, and historians have dedicated increased attention to the study of archives as objects of research themselves. In so doing, scholars have predominantly examined the emergence and transformations of archives during the early modern age, focusing mostly on political and diplomatic depositories. They have tended to neglect financial archives, which is unfortunate, as—alongside judicial archives—they were probably the largest documentary repositories of the pre-modern world and those that first faced the problem of managing huge masses of documentation. This article discusses the formation and development of the Kingdom of Sicily’s financial archives in the later Middle Ages, arguing that this repository evolved into a collecting archive by the early fifteenth-century, when it preserved not only the records and accounts produced by the central financial administration, but also those from a number of territorial officers and magistracies. This archival turn, I suggest, originated from the fact that the Crown of Aragon’s rulers constantly needed increased incomes to fund bureaucracies and warfare and exercise patronage, and thus needed financial information organized, at hand, and under their control. After briefly discussing the emergence of the financial archive in the thirteenth-century, this essay traces the Crown’s attempts to create a stable repository for storing financial records and accounts and its continuous struggles to prevent documentation from being scattered and dispersed. Finally, it examines the successful strategy that King Alfonso V of Aragon (1416–58), called the Magnanimous, pursued to organize financial documentation and concentrate records and accounts produced by financial administration into a stable building. The essay pays particular attention to the material aspects of preserving records, e.g., the restoration of buildings, construction of chests, and preparation of secure locks that were integral to the emergence of collecting archives for financial documents in the later Middle Ages.

Records designated as classified at the time of their creation form a very significant part of public records produced by state and public administration bodies in a broad sense. At the same time, they represent a significant part of historical source production a part of which should be permanently preserved in the relevant public archives. Their information content and informative value for future historical science is in many cases highly qualitatively superior. However, the phenomenon of classified records, including at least minimum possible access to them is also of fundamental relevance to contemporary society and the maintaining of a functioning quality democracy. Very often, however, what is missing is a deeper debate over records classification as such. For example, how do intelligence services manage their records? Are they being arbitrarily destroyed? Do they remain classified unnecessarily and for too long? The legal systems of most countries, including those with advanced democratic systems, now exert minimum real pressure on the declassification of once classified material. The following comparative study addresses the phenomenon of records classification and their declassification in some developed democracies with advanced archival systems; it also focuses on some of the features of the system’s post-1945 historical development, particularly in the United States of America, the United Kingdom, partly also in France, Germany, Sweden, and adds a look at the situation in the Czech Republic representing one of the post-communist countries in Central Europe. The study uses the specific examples of the USA and the United Kingdom to demonstrate in what respects archives and historians can act as an important factor in the process of management and declassification of classified records, and how they can also be an important element of democracy in this sense.

Using data collected through semi-structured interviews with disabled archival users, this article foregrounds disabled people's relationships with time, specifically to pasts and representations thereof in archival material. It illustrates the ways in which disabled people use their knowledge of how disability is understood—in archives and in society—to anticipate their erasure in archival material. First, focusing on the past, this data illustrates the prevalence of disability stereotypes, tropes, and limited perspectives within the records that document disabled people. Second, in witnessing such representations (or lack thereof), disabled researchers described how they are affectively impacted in the present moment: witnessing the violence of the past is emotionally difficult for many disabled people researching their histories. Third, using past experiences of archival erasure, interviewees described coming to expect and anticipate future absences—anticipation as an affective mode helped them prepare to encounter forms of erasure, to protect themselves against possible harms, and to hope for something different, all of which reflects their experiences of how disability is understood in society. This data reflect the way anticipation is a central facet of crip time—the multiple ways that disabled people experience time, pace, and temporal moments—to show how disabled people feel through multiple temporal landscapes and approach historical and archival representation.