ARCHIVAL SCIENCE最新文献

Unlike Greeks, Arabs and Bulgarians, whose trajectories from imperial subjecthood to national states have been studied in much detail, the post-Ottoman legacies of the Armenians defy the accepted categories of "imperial" and “national.” Having neither an independent state (excluding the brief interlude of the First Republic 1918–1920) until 1991 nor a fully accepted citizenship status in the Turkish Republic, the dispersion of the surviving Ottoman-Armenians and their archives reflects this liminality that characterized their experiences throughout the twentieth century as they crisscrossed various legal categories. Serving as a guide to some of the intellectual and methodological pitfalls that underlie the study of imperial subjects in an age where national citizenship is the dominant political unit worldwide, this article highlights some of the major archival repositories that house collections of Ottoman-Armenian documents but also discusses some of the challenges associated with using or relying on them. We argue that a sound approach to a shared late Ottoman history is to critically assess the existing Armenian materials by taking them out of the—epistemological—shadow of the Armenian Genocide. Acknowledging the many difficulties that linger and hamper a more efficient and analytically engaging usage of the enormous mass of the material that Ottoman Armenians left behind, we, nonetheless, believe that they are immensely valuable and vital for a more complex, sophisticated and analytically viable reconstruction of late Ottoman lives. It is only through a consistent engagement with the various ways in which scholars have been studying the late history of Ottoman-Armenians that we can begin to sketch answers to several fundamental questions, including “Do archives have an ‘ethnic’ identity in a (post)imperial context? If so, how ‘Armenian’ are the materials under study?,” “How does the physical dispersion of Ottoman-Armenian documents account for the historians’ archival choices and consequently for the shaping of the major contours of Armenian and Turkish historiographies throughout the twentieth century?.”

The transition from an Ottoman imperial order to a post-Ottoman, nationalist, one, imposed a reality of both dispersal and entrenchment on the Jewish community in Egypt. This article analyzes the effects of this historical reality on the different kinds of archives that Jewish Egyptians have produced. It investigates the creation, description, and usage contexts of those archives with the greatest potential for research contribution about this community, highlighting the history and politics of their creation and usage, and their significance. Building on an expanded meaning of archives, it also explores the (re)creation, description, and usage contexts of Jewish heritage sites in Egypt and its diaspora, considering that some archives double as heritage sites, and some heritage sites are planned to offer archives, or can be studied as archives.

This article introduces two new approaches to email archiving within French public agencies undertaken between 2020 and 2023 at the University of Angers (France). It shows how a qualitative survey of producers’ practices and an NLP-based tool might provide the basis for new strategies for the appraisal and selection of email boxes and messages to be transferred to archives. The initial impetus was to overcome difficulties faced by French administrative records managers and archivists in locally implementing the appraisal framework known as the “Capstone” approach, which recommends gathering emails as electronic records and preserving for the long term only specific mailboxes selected in light of the function or position of the email account owner. While Capstone was adopted at the national scale in the French administration, major archival issues remain. Does an approach that focuses on the mailboxes of individuals holding strategic job positions correspond to the reality of bureaucratic work in France? And how should one define accountable criteria for identifying and appraising emails or mailboxes to be preserved on the basis of their enduring value? To address this, we combined two sociological methods, interviews and observation, and developed an interface for classifying messages using NLP. The combination of these two yielded some crucial elements to help archivists shift from the level of a single mailbox to that of a network: a better understanding of the practices of email producers, new criteria for selecting relevant mailboxes, and a new tool for archivists to appraise email archives.

Digital community archives and many digital humanities projects serve as critical infrastructure for community-based cultural knowledge, but they struggle with sustainability. Prior work has illuminated numerous sustainability factors for digital cultural knowledge infrastructures that are developed and maintained by communities, but there is relatively little empirical work on the roles of communities themselves. Based on a comparative multi-case study of four projects, we offer a conceptual framework—the Oyster Model—for understanding community engagement as a sustainability factor in community-based, digital cultural knowledge infrastructures. Sustainable infrastructures identify and engage a range of stakeholder groups—teams, partners, contributors, users, and allies—in different roles and adapt to dynamism and change among these groups. This model characterizes reciprocity as a facet of community-centered approaches to sustainability, to refine understanding of the mutually beneficial relationship between digital knowledge infrastructures and the groups that create and maintain them. This work aims to bridge a gap between the community archives literature and relevant work on the sustainability of digital humanities scholarship.

This article investigates the systemic vulnerabilities of Zimbabwe’s records and archives management systems through a historical analysis of archival destruction spanning the colonial era to the present. For a context, this article refers to the destruction of public archives by the British South Africa Company (BSAC) in 1922, the loss of BSAC records during the Nazi bombings in London in 1941, and the damage to archives in Kwekwe (2021) and Harare (2024). Using records management theories, including life cycle and continuum models, the article employs a qualitative methodology that analyses both primary and secondary sources. In doing so, it reveals how the absence of effective policies, inadequate infrastructure, and insufficient collaboration between records-creating agencies and archival institutions has profoundly contributed to the loss of archives and records, not only in Zimbabwe but across Africa, since the colonial period.

In the broad context of social justice, diversity, community engagement, and inclusivity, the ability to effectively communicate with many types of users seems to be crucial to all information professionals, and archivists are no exception. In order to achieve this goal, it is necessary for contemporary archival education institutions to shift their educational paradigm from system-oriented to user-oriented and to place strong emphasis on developing students’ soft skills. The main aim of our study is to investigate the possibility of applying persona creation methods to an archival curriculum. We adopt the case study approach to deliver a qualitative descriptive analysis of our experiences in using persona creation methods as a part of the archival curriculum at the University of the National Education Commission in Kraków. Besides persona creation methods, we applied a survey and a participatory observation method to collect data on students’ and faculty’s reflections on the course. As a result, we present the projects of some of the students—persona models along with experience maps—and we analyse the main challenges and benefits of using persona creation methods in archival education, including whether it is a valuable teaching technique for enhancing students’ sensitivity to the issues of archive users.

This study examines the implementation of digital records management requirements in three Omani government institutions—the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, and the National Records & Archives Authority. Through qualitative analysis of interviews and documents, the research assessed the current state of adoption of digital records management, identified essential requirements like policies, human resources, technical infrastructure, and financial resources, and explored the challenges and best practices experienced by the organizations. The findings revealed that while the institutions are at different stages of implementing digital records management, common challenges include a lack of comprehensive policies and standards, a shortage of skilled staff, inadequate technological infrastructure, and limited funding. Key success factors highlighted were strong leadership support, staff training, agency collaboration, and adherence to international best practices. The study offers practical recommendations to improve digital records management capabilities in Omani government entities and support the national digital records management project. It contributes empirical insights to the limited research on digital records management implementation in the Arab region.

The paleographic study of a sample of Mamluk period documents aims to determine the script used by judges for documentation and to resolve the dispute among Arab researchers, whose opinions have varied without providing scientific evidence to support any claim. The study adopts the inductive method to analyze handwritten signatures and extract their characteristics, followed by the deductive method to compare the results with the information recorded in al-Qalqashandī’s book, which holds significant paleographic and diplomatic value. The study reveals that the script used by judges was al-tawqīʿ and that it adhered to a strict system governing documentation practice in the Mamluk state.

This paper focuses on the displacement of archives during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). Numerous archives were seized and transported between the German principalities and across Europe during this period. Despite the fact that this upheaval occurred during wartime, very few archives were destroyed. In fact, as this article aims to show, enemy archives were often regarded as highly valuable goods, treated with care, and used for many different purposes. Analysing contemporary transport lists and archival inventories sheds light on the various ways historical actors used seized documents and ascribed value and meaning to them. This article highlights four major uses: Firstly, deeds and records were essential to establish  the dominion and administration of newly conquered territories. Secondly, seized documents were used as sources of political information. Thirdly, they were printed in political pamphlets as evidence in battles of propaganda. And finally, looted documents were sold for their material value or collected as antiquarian and cultural goods. Examining the uses of archives displaced in war, thus, serves as a mirror of contemporary cultural practices of archives and documents in general. At the same time, the war itself and the ensuing displacement influenced archival practice and document use and perception.

In response to the growing awareness regarding the potential for emotional trauma in both archivists and members of the public (donors, users, and community members) who interact with records of human suffering and atrocity, there has been a call for the implementation of trauma-informed practices in archival organizations. Several prominent researchers and theorists have suggested policy and practice elements that would support trauma-informed archives based on principles of transparency, empathy and respect; survivor-centered approaches; and creating a culture of caring. While these contributions have been critical to a shifting paradigm of archival practice, to date there is no tool to measure the degree to which organizations have enacted such approaches. A quantitative approach to measuring practices could complement existing qualitative scholarship, documenting progress in this area and supporting research to evaluate whether these practices, if implemented, lead to better outcomes. This study describes the development and evaluation of the Trauma-Informed Archival Practices Scale which contains items derived from the scholarly literature and previous research of the developers. The tool was distributed to archival institutions across Canada, and a factor analysis was conducted with the resulting sample of 167 organizations. The total scale and four subscales related to users, donors, community members, and staff demonstrated adequate reliability and theoretical congruence. The resulting tool may thus be a useful addition to current approaches to research on traumatic aspects of archives and models for ameliorating potential impacts on researchers, donors and archivists.