ARCHIVAL SCIENCE最新文献

The Library of Congress (LOC) is an inherently political institution with immense reach. With 151.6 million visits and 520.3 million page views in 2022, its digital collections put the LOC’s repository of materials in the hands of users around the world, informing the kinds of narratives we tell about our past for purposes of the present. While more accessible, these collections are not always appropriately or transparently contextualized, creating significant barriers to access and often perpetuating biased or offensive language and attitudes. This matter stems from principles of provenance and metadata schemas, standards that govern how context is preserved and made available. As scholars working with digital information and literacy argue, the ubiquity of attributing authority to web-based information makes nuanced, accurate, and accessible context for digital collections increasingly necessary. Shortcomings in contemporary provenance and metadata practice are even sharper in the case of image and graphic narrative collections since prevailing descriptive standards were not designed with visual content in mind. These intersecting and at times contradictory concerns demonstrate both the complicated tension between provenance’s failures and its apparent necessity, and the ways it continues to affect applications of metadata. Exemplifying these complexities, we discuss two LOC case studies: the Webcomics Web Archive and Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs. Illustrating the constraints of provenance and its circulation in metadata, these collections highlight the accessibility and equity issues that particularly impact visual materials.

Every culture creates and keeps records. Archivists have a pivotal responsibility toward the relationality of the historical past to present societal structure to preserve records of evidential and historical value and ensure their accessibility. Despite cultural differences, archivists impose colonial theory onto Indigenous archival materials that result in a lack of context. Because provenance is a colonial construct, it is often challenged when applied to cultural materials. In this article, the principle of provenance is discussed and challenged, against the backdrop of Indigenous archival practice that centers relationality and reciprocity in stewardship. Highlighting the example of the Jean Chaudhuri Collection at the Arizona State University Labriola National American Data Center, archivists employed a storytelling provenance providing rich context and description about the impactful life of Indigenous activist, Jean Chaudhuri. By reimagining and employing a practical, alternative provenance method, the principle of provenance, expands to respectfully support and provide context that was lacking, resulting in improved accessibility to a collection.

Exploring the challenges and opportunities inherent in the act of “doing feminist archiving,” this paper considers how archival materials have been accumulated and used in two distinct contexts: Alternative Toronto, a digital archive in Toronto, Ontario and the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA) Archives at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture located in the Rubenstein Library at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Although very different in form, scope and capacity, these archives both demonstrate tensions between archiving the self and archiving the collective, navigating blurred distinctions between creating a record and creating an archive and incorporating feminist process as archival practice. I illustrate these tensions in order to demonstrate how traditional understandings of provenance become challenged by the vast array of social, cultural and political entanglements that influence, shape and constrain feminist archiving efforts.

This paper presents how the concept of provenance is expanded and reconceptualized from being an organizing principle to an interpreting community that describes, contextualizes, and breathes life into photographs. As social objects, photographs warrant a nonlinear, collective provenance because of their intrinsic ability to transcend time and space while bringing various entities to come together, form a community and relationships, and reflexively exercise memory work and meaning-making. Collective provenance includes various individuals who are not necessarily in the same locale or setting, but are united through a shared identity, a common past, and an imagined future in relation to the phenomenon portrayed and documented by the photographs. This study, which is based on my PhD project on archival photographs during the martial law years in the Philippines in the 1970s–80s, draws on Chris Hurley’s parallel provenance, Tom Nesmith’s societal provenance, and Jeanette Bastian’s co-creatorship of records. I use the case of one photograph taken during the 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution that ended the dictatorial rule of the Marcos, Sr. regime in the Philippines. Through oral history interviews enabled by photo-elicitation, the collective provenance interacted with the photograph, interpreted both the photograph and the event depicted, and positioned themselves in the wider and more dominant narrative of EDSA.

Provenance, as the foundational principle of archival studies, dictates that records with the same creator should be organized separately from those of a different creator. This idea of provenance, however, fails to consider different epistemologies of origin. Using an ethnographic study of the Palestinian diaspora in Southeast Michigan, this paper interrogates provenance through Palestinian epistemology and Palestinian futurism to theorize a transformative provenance that positions archival origins as both spatially and temporally unfixed. Rather than rejecting provenance, the concept is a useful departure point to consider how Western understandings of origin and custody can be broadened by other ways of knowing. In this article, I track the origins and custody of memories and stories, the main medium of records in this community, to highlight the culturally specific epistemologies involved in their preservation. I then propose a transformative provenance based on three qualities. First, intergenerational: Chain of custody belongs to both the past and the present, as stories belong to the time of a grandparent’s past exile and a grandchild’s present diaspora. Second, collective: With the spatial referent of memories being lost, ownership is shared within village kinship networks. Third, imaginative: Origins of memories exist in the past, present, and the future, as those in diaspora use memories to imagine future liberation. By grounding this analysis of Palestinian memory work within the community’s conceptualizations of knowledge organization, this paper contributes to current discourse around decolonial recordkeeping, non-Western epistemology, and the management of diaspora archives.

Since the end the of Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Mandate in 2015, archives and archivists are now acknowledging both the role that archives played in the colonization of Canada and the urgent need to decolonize archival practices to accommodate the marginalized voices of those silenced by traditional archival theory and practice. In the case of the archives at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, these are the voices of the residential school Survivors, their families, and their home communities. These voices have the power to fill gaps in historical narratives and confront the millions of colonial records created by the government departments and religious entities that ran the schools for more than a century. That said, how do we transition from acknowledging our past role as protectors of colonialism’s documented “success” to successfully implementing decolonizing practices? This paper deconstructs colonial records and colonial “truth” to understand the plurality of provenance in archives. This is especially important as Indigenous communities develop their own archives in pursuit of Indigenous data sovereignty and the power associated with archival authority and whose provenance we choose to recognize and preserve.

In democratic contexts, the discussion of digital technology in the field of archival heritage highlights its potential benefits for expanding access to archives to the wider public. It also focuses on the legal, moral, and ethical issues raised by copyright or privacy concerns. Using the digital archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) as a case study, this article thoroughly analyses another facet of digital technology, namely its role in building and perpetuating ignorance about the past through the mass digitization of archives in authoritarian contexts. The analysis scrutinizes digitally processed archives that are accessible as carefully curated data—some digitized and some born digital—through a network of open access web-resources developed by several institutions in the IRI. The article briefly considers the broader context of access restrictions to archives and information, and of the intentional and institutionalized opacity of this field in the IRI. These digitally processed archives are evaluated through the lens of archival science theory. Several macro- and micro-aspects of the kind of knowledge that scholars can produce from these digitally processed historical sources are considered.

As the first conceptual framework for archival description on an international level, the conceptual model Records in Contexts has the potential to revolutionize the archival field. The responses from the archival community strongly suggest that Records in Contexts represents a paradigm shift. Since it has initiated discussions about the fundamentals of archival science, questions arise on how this new method harmonizes with the principle of provenance, which has long been a cornerstone of archival practice. The documentation and literature on Records in Contexts consist of contradictory statements regarding the principle of provenance. While it deliberately avoids redefining old concepts and principles, it also alludes to an enhanced and dynamic interpretation of provenance, closely aligned with the notion of context and characterized as an expansion of the principle of provenance. This article addresses this issue and analyzes how Records in Contexts addresses previous criticisms regarding the principle of provenance. It will be shown that new notions are not explicitly linked to the concepts of fonds, provenance, and original order. The paper examines the role of the principle of provenance within the conceptual model, demonstrating that the idea of expansion is a misleading characterization. It concludes by advocating for the adoption of a new perspective.

Carolyn Dinshaw describes her queer historical practice as being about looking for “an affective connection, for community, for even a touch across time” (1999, p 21). Queer engagements with records—these touches across time—are not easily or adequately accounted for in current conceptualisations of provenance. The dissonance between how we currently understand record co-creation, and the historical perspectives and recordkeeping needs of queer users, substantially and negatively impacts the visibility and accessibility of queer histories in institutional archival settings. In this paper, I articulate the proposed concept of queer as provenance. I argue that we must extend our current conceptualisation of multiple provenance beyond mere co-creatorship. With a focus on queer records and record users, I argue that we must expand our understanding to encapsulate not only the relationship between record, creator, and subject, but also the relationship between record, creator, subject, and user. Through a continuum lens, I consider how queer/ing engagements and interactions with, and responses to, queer records could and should inform our descriptive practices, and explore the potential of considering queer users as co-creators within such a dynamic. I conclude by articulating queer as provenance and consider its potential as a foundation on which transformative, reparative, and liberatory archival practices might be built.

During the decades from the 1960s to the late 1980s, the Intelligence Division of the Police of Puerto Rico secretly compiled files on individuals who supported the independence of this Caribbean archipelago from the USA. The public knowledge of the existence of these files, known in Puerto Rico as las carpetas, in 1987 prompted a judicial process that ended in 1992 with a decision that opened a period where individuals were able to claim and receive their files, without any redactions, instead of transferring the records to an archival institution. The files that were not claimed stayed under the custody of the judicial branch until 2003, when after a public debate about its disposition, the records were transferred to the Archivo General de Puerto Rico. In addition, various individuals donated their files to the University of Puerto Rico. The particularity of this case has led to a situation where records from the same provenance, using the classical definition of the concept, are dispersed in various archival institutions and in the homes of hundreds of Puerto Ricans. This paper will use the case of las carpetas, and its particularities regarding custody, to analyze contemporary re-interpretations of provenance in the context of state intelligence records.