ARCHIVAL SCIENCE最新文献

The archival memory of the Caribbean is built on the documentary legacies of colonialism. From slave registers to plantation deeds, the shelves of Caribbean Archives are filled with the records of colonial conquest, enslavement and suppression. Yet within these former Caribbean colonies—now small independent nations—is the evidence of human triumph over adversity, pride in self-sufficiency and a fierce and persistence dedication to political and social independence. That evidence is manifest through political movements, oral narratives, heroic legends and through alternate, different readings of the colonial records. These alternate readings are among the issues considered in this essay as it addresses the rethinking of a history that foregrounds the marginalized and highlights a dignity that has been suppressed. A case study of a website from the small island-nation of St. Kitts and Nevis demonstrates how the web is proving its agility in responding to complex understandings of history by enabling the uniting of both tangible and intangible community knowledge and heritage as it also eases access to official archival collections.

This article presents survey results examining the design and implementation of recordkeeping systems for organizations supporting conflict-affected individuals displaced from their homes, lands, and property (HLP). The study highlights the potential of digital systems to overcome limitations of legacy HLP recordkeeping, but also addresses the risks associated with technology in vulnerable contexts. Emphasizing the connection between records and personal identity, the authors advocate for recordkeeping systems that consider the needs, rights, and dignity of displaced people. Drawing on participatory and rights-based approaches, a framework for supporting HLP claims through system design is proposed. The findings offer insights into tailoring such an approach for conflict-affected contexts, stressing the importance of technological upgrades and careful design considerations to prevent harm. The article aims to contribute to the development of effective recordkeeping systems for displaced populations, calling for further research and collaboration in this field.

This article describes a study to understand how galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) in the United States are undertaking reparative description efforts. The study involved interviews with representatives from nineteen institutions that had published or presented on their implementation of reparative description between 2017 and 2020. The authors inquired about the nature of reparative description efforts at the institution, how the work was initiated and conducted, and the interviewees’ thoughts about its long-term sustainability at the organization. This article highlights findings from these interviews and the trends that emerged. One of the most significant discoveries was the difficulty GLAM workers reported in assessing the impact of reparative description work, an issue that many interviewees believed could negatively affect the trajectory and progress of the work in the future. Informed by the study’s findings, the authors developed a tool to assist institutions in evaluating and benchmarking their initiatives. The Maturity Model for Reparative Description (MMRD), describes and classifies reparative description work across eight evaluative categories. The authors offer the MMRD as a flexible model for institutions to adopt and adapt as a framework for assessing their reparative description work, measuring the progress of their initiatives, and planning and projecting areas of strategic growth.

There is no clear guidance or standards for US campus archivists on how to best describe records that contain information on sexual violence. While there are well-established standards for archival description, decisions for how to best describe sensitive material are mostly left for individual archival institutions to decide. The lack of agreed-upon professional guidelines could make description decisions difficult in an environment like a college campus where attention on the topic may be taboo. However, as many campus archives’ mission statements unequivocally state, college and university archives are repositories of campus history and wider societal issues. This puts campus archives and archivists directly in the center of responsibility to document histories that are part of enduring difficult realities. Through a systematic investigation of US campus archival finding aids, this study explores how the problem of sexual violence is represented in campus archives’ holdings. Findings indicate that while campus archives do collect records on sexual violence, records related to the topic may belong to collections that are not associated with campus history, records on campus sexual assault are not always consistently described in campus archives, and discoverability of relevant records can be problematic. Study results suggest that further research on the topic and development of resources on best practices are needed to support campus archivists in this work.

Set in Algeria, France, and the Arabian Peninsula in the early twelfth and the late twentieth centuries, L’Invention du désert is about an author who reexamines his life and his craft while writing a history of the Almoravid dynasty that ruled Andalusia and a large portion of the Maghreb from 1056 to 1152 CE. Accordingly, the novel is made of two basic narrative strands. The first focuses on the private musings and reminiscences of the narrator, moving forwards and backwards in space and time and going all the way to his childhood. The second narrative strand recounts the life, rise to power, and downfall of Mohamed ibn Toumert, the religious scholar and zealot whose followers brought down the Almoravids and founded the Almohad dynasty that lasted from 1152 to 1269 CE. The two major story-lines that constitute the novel are brought together by the narrator’s reflection on history and archiving for the purpose of problematizing the way Algerian history is conceived and used to address two major social and political concerns confronting Algerians: religious fundamentalism and national identity. The purpose of this article is to examine how Djaout uses the desert both as a topography and a metaphor to challenge the logocentrism of religious fundamentalism and narrow and essentialist definitions of Algerianess. The paper at the same time shows how the understanding and critique of historical logocentrism that are advanced in L’Invention du désert parallel Jacques Derrida’s philosophy put forward in Of Grammatology (Derrida in Of grammatology, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1976) and other early works. Because the manuscripts, critical of Islam as practiced under Almoravid rule, Ibn Toumert carries with him function as archives, the paper also engages with some of the themes Derrida developed later in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Derrida in Archive fever: a Freudian impression, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996).

Under the assumption that appraisal entails selection of records to be archives in line with the concept of values in archives and what each society values, this article investigates the situation of appraisal in the Thai public sector, where records are not always readily transferred from government agencies to the National Archives of Thailand. The research attempts to identify gaps and seeks to conceive a suitable appraisal system through documentary research (e.g., legislation, manuals, policies and related literature), interviews, and public hearings. The data collected for this research, which was conducted along with dissemination of knowledge on archival appraisal as advocacy for archival appraisal in Thailand, suggest that there is a need to combine records and archives values with existing values in society to make public organization executives and policy makers drive archives into the public agenda. More importantly, it is necessary to build communities and networks that support archival appraisal among information professionals and records creators and across related areas of expertise, such as digital curators and IT specialists.

In this article, we ask how traces of political violence in the Atacama Desert and in the Sonoran Desert are created and how they are (or are not) transformed into archives. The political violence we study is of different types and takes place in different periods: state violence under the civil–military dictatorship (1973-1990) in the Atacama; violence as a product of migratory policies (from 1994 to the present) of the US–Mexican border in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona; and, mass death and disappearance as the product of successive governments’ “war on drugs” (from 2006 to the present) in Sonora, Mexico. This article is based on our academic ethnographic work and volunteering with grassroots organizations. In these three arid spaces, we met different groups: family members and activists searching for political prisoners disappeared in the 1970s by the Pinochet regime; activists searching for migrants, dead or alive, lost in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona; and families digging in the earth, unearthing clandestine graves and hoping one day to find the remains of their loved ones. We argue that these different search practices create traces when these groups uncover what the perpetrators wanted to hide. These processes that create traces, then create archives when the situated and lived experience of searching and tracing is translated into artifacts that can be detached from their context and acquire multiple uses outside their place of production.

The consequences of poorly processed reports of child abuse and neglect, along with governance challenges in child protection systems, are well-documented. Recent research, inquiries and royal commissions emphasise the need for child-centered and participatory practices that support the rights and dignity of children and their families. However, the challenges of quality case recording in child protection systems and contexts remain unclear. This paper reports on the findings from a pilot study that interviewed (n = 22) and surveyed (n = 56) social work students and social work curriculum developers from Australian Universities and practitioners currently working in the Australian child protection service system. By capturing participants' professional insights, we aim to understand the embedded barriers to transforming child-centered systems by focusing on strengths and possibilities in current practices rather than reiterating deficiencies in recordkeeping. This paper reveals insights into how professionals working in the child protection system understand and are supported in child-centered case note recording and recordkeeping practices. It also identifies the possibilities for the crucial role that interdisciplinary collaboration and alignment between social work and recordkeeping informatics can play in transforming and supporting recordkeeping approaches and practices that prioritise and uphold the rights and dignity of the child.

This article explores the value of archives in increasing the representation of disabled people in social policy, and research narratives, as well as building an identity of the Disabled People’s Movement beyond traditional activism, and the inclusion of young people and marginalised groups within archives. To achieve this, it is vital that archival studies and archival science engage with the conceptual understanding of disability and the different needs of disabled people, beyond the traditional focus on the medical model, to an understanding of the Social and Rights Models. This understanding will help to unify approaches to disability within the archive from both an archival science and humanities perspective to make sure that polices and approaches facilitate the participation and recognition of the wide experiences of disability. This will require re-evaluation of approaches to policy issues such as safeguarding and vulnerability, social media use and whose voice is worthy of preservation. Engagement with the broader field of disability studies in theory and practice offers a way for the field of archive science to address these issues.

Many memory institutions hold heritage items belonging to Indigenous peoples. There are current efforts to share knowledge about these heritage items with their communities; one way this is done is through digital access. This paper examines The Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures (GRASAC), a network of researchers, museum professionals, and community members who maintain a digital platform that aggregates museum and archival research on Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Huron-Wendat cultures into a centralized database. The database, known as the GRASAC Knowledge Sharing System (GKS), is at a point of infrastructural growth, moving from a password protected system to one that is open to the public. Rooted in qualitative research from semi-structured interviews with the creators, maintainers, and users of the database, we examine the frictions in this expanding knowledge infrastructure (KI), and how they are eased over time. We find the friction within GRASAC resides in three main categories: collaborative friction, data friction, and our novel contribution: systemic friction.