ARCHIVAL SCIENCE最新文献

This article explores the earliest efforts to collect oral histories from Armenian Genocide survivors and examines their status as archival collections. The most significant collections were initiated by Armenian-Americans, comprising approximately over half of all recorded testimonies. A general timeline and overview of the development of these collections is provided and scrutinized to understand the breadth of the collection’s holdings and accessibility for scholarship, and the social contexts behind their creation. The article also examines the background and trajectory of oral history use in Genocide Studies, particularly within Armenian Genocide Studies, and the value it offers to the field as preservation, digitization, and accessibility become increasingly central to contemporary research. For decades, efforts to “prove” the genocide in response to Turkish denial discouraged many scholars from using Armenian sources in order to maintain a non-biased perspective. In recent years, however, genocide denial in academia and debates around the use of oral history have diminished within academia, and a growing number of scholars have begun incorporating these sources into research topics that arguably require a protagonist’s personal experience enriching and filling in gaps that traditional sources are not able to fill. The scattered nature, recent institutionalization, limited digitization, and access policies of certain oral history collections remain both a reason for their growing use and a barrier to wider accessibility.

The rapid societal transformation that resulted from the oil boom of the 1960s and 1970s in the emirate of Abu Dhabi, and later the United Arab Emirates, impacted the ways in which historical information was recorded, transmitted, and preserved. Oral poetic and storytelling traditions were supplanted by written records, which in turn led to the formation of the nascent state’s first archival institution in 1968. A half-century later, with the establishment of New York University’s campus in Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), and the formation of an archival repository within its newly opened library, the question remained of how an archive could best document a dynamic and diverse society, especially one in which written records are still sparse. This paper will look at the development of the NYUAD Archives and Special Collections, both in light of the larger archival landscape of the UAE, as well as some of the specific collections it has acquired over the past decade. In conclusion, the author will assert that such academic archival repositories have a useful role to play in preserving and making accessible the region’s documentary heritage and will suggest some questions to explore in doing so.

With the Sahara Desert expansion, climate changes and aridity have intensified yearly in Portugal. In 1975, landscape architect Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles warned about this reality, stating “Man precedes the desert; the desert succeeds him” (quoted by heart), urging comprehension of the landscape’s social and biophysical structure limits, which hinge on the perception of each reality or ecological capacity; otherwise, the desert overcomes. This article delves into the archival experience of Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles’ work, exploring desert and landscape as the paradoxes of the hidden memory of a personal archive that is not accessible or the reflection of the creator that emerges from the archival process. Three topics are discussed: Void as a place of memory. Deserts, like archives, embody a sense of material continuity while, at the same time, they evoke an unsettling emptiness. Our standpoint transforms their essence, giving access to other times and memories only through traces and their reconstitution. Embark on a journey. While archives are plentiful with research material, the journey to navigate and uncover the meaningful connections within can resemble an expedition into the vastness of a desert where access to information occurs at each activation, influenced by social or personal factors and concerns. Nothingness becomes fullness when in context. Archives and landscapes are an expression of relationship networks, and our future is built upon the recognition of this network, the processes to access memory, but also rely on affectivity and the care we pay to them.

In Turkey, the principle of silence, kayadez, has long shaped Jewish cultural life and archival practices. While the community has remained cautious about maintaining archives and making them publicly accessible, some Jewish cultural producers have created unorthodox archival projects. Theatre has been an important realm for such efforts. Jewish theatre makers have often engaged with local and global Jewish archives in their works. More importantly, some of the ephemera associated with these productions were designed as archives in themselves. The souvenir book for Anne Frank’ın Hatıra Defteri [The Diary of Anne Frank] (dir. Albert Levi, 1958) presents a generative example of such projects. Bringing together a diverse array of historical and contemporary texts and images, from an excerpt from Frank’s diary to an acrostic poem about her, the book demonstrates how Jewish theatre makers have critically engaged with the globalized European archives of the Holocaust and produced new materials as they negotiated the politics of belonging in Turkey. In the face of historical trauma and antisemitism, the archive enabled alternative articulations of history, challenging the politics of memory in the present and enabling new visions and desires for the future. Jewish theatre makers in Turkey thus subtly articulated their own silenced yet painful experience of the Holocaust while imagining a global Jewish identity at a time when their communities and spaces had been rapidly disintegrating. Over the years, the meanings of this archival project have multiplied and shifted, offering new political promises, ambivalences, and challenges.

This article examines the interaction between recordkeeping concepts and deontic modality in expressing obligations in selected Finnish records and information management (RIM) laws, translated into English by the authorities. It identifies which recordkeeping concepts appear in deontic contexts, their discoverability, and how their meanings differ between legal texts and terminologies. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, the study maps the frequency of relevant terms, codes legislative excerpts, and compares conceptual usage across legal and recordkeeping frameworks. Findings reveal inconsistent use of recordkeeping concepts and syntactic complexity that obscures their connection to modality expressions. The study recommends interdisciplinary collaboration in legislative drafting, development of nationally adapted yet internationally informed terminologies, machine-readable legal texts, and clearer distinctions between types of information—particularly in public authorities—to improve legal clarity, enforceability, and automation in multilingual digital systems. The study also elucidates structural and semantic factors that may hinder the interpretation and implementation of legal mandates. Although grounded in the Finnish context, the findings are transferable and offer insights for jurisdictions facing similar challenges in aligning legal language with digital recordkeeping practices.

This article maps the alternative archives of the Rum community, those that do not fully align either with national mnemonics or the minority’s dominant archival politics. I demonstrate how the Rum minority performs and enacts its archives—what I define as archival enactment—in order to claim grassroots agency in its mnemonic preservation. Despite their sociopolitical and cultural significance and their important potential for the study of archival science, the Rum minority’s archival practices have been almost entirely ignored in the scholarship. Rum enacted archives call for a methodological shift from what the archive is—which is a definitory inquiry—to what the archive does and what worlds its transference constitutes—which is a question regarding archival performativity. Drawing upon rigorous multi-sited archival and ethnographic research, I show how the Rum minority performs its archives not just as documents of the past in need of interpretation but, most importantly, in the present as part of its envisioning and enacting of alternative futures. Blurring the boundaries between everyday performance, as expressed in familial and community settings, and artistic performance, as expressed in theatre, Rum archival enactment offers a great site for developing a dialogic practice of archival research that suspends the power differential between the archive and the researcher. I thus propose a performative epistemology for studying the archive that employs performance not only as archival content but also as transference and production.

This paper reports on findings from semi-structured interviews with 29 archival practitioners who work on the creation and maintenance of finding aids related to LGBTQIA+ archival materials. The paper highlights key findings focused on how practitioners navigated the design and use of queer-specific finding aids with an emphasis on the tensions between historical terminology, various LGBTQIA+ identities, and the contemporary expectations of queer-inclusive language. Additionally, findings highlight how practitioners rely on their own personal embodied knowledge in conjunction with the knowledge of donors and queer community members to ensure ethical and affirming archival description. In particular, this emphasis on embodied knowledge highlighted a shift in ethical practice which, for many participants, departed from traditional archival praxis and required them to change their approach to the construction of finding aids. Finally, findings emphasize the importance of queer tools such as the Homosaurus and other queer reparative description initiatives, given their community-vetted nature. The paper concludes by identifying both theoretical and practical implications for the work and suggests future directions for research based on findings.

The year 2023 marked the 180th anniversary of the establishment of the Greek Community of Alexandria. Conceived along national lines, it addressed persons of Greek nationality or origin and its main pillars were the Greek school and Hospital. A national centre away from the homeland, it quickly became a significant secular pole that embraced the Greek population of the city and served as a guiding and supporting agent for smaller Greek Communities throughout Egypt. The history of the Greek Community of Alexandria and of other Communities in Egypt, within the hundred-year timeslot (1843–1950), runs parallel and in relation to other (hi)stories: the transition of Egypt from Ottoman province to British protectorate, then to independent national state; the geopolitical transformations of Greece due to the Balkan Wars, the Asia Minor expedition, and the two World Wars. This paper will present the archival records at the Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive pertaining to the Greek Communities, Societies, and Fraternities in Egypt and the challenges—of language and content—they pose to the researcher today. Focusing on the archive of the Greek Community of Alexandria, this paper will highlight a multi-faceted project at work: firstly, the efforts for the establishment of a Greek enclave and the shaping of its social, economic, and political identity. Secondly, following the retrenchment of the Hellenic element in Egypt post-1952, the transformation of the Archive (documents, photographs, press) into an enduring monument of the Greek presence in Egypt, a stage for the consolidation of a distinct Egyptiot Greek identity, and a repository for further historical re-readings.

The article describes the sorting and seizure operations of part of the diplomatic archives, mostly letters coming from the royal palace of Mari, carried out by the Babylonians after their conquest of the city in 1761 BCE. It will also present the issue of legal contracts and letters whose presence in the palace of Mari cannot be explained unless one considers that they were confiscated or intercepted documents.