ARCHIVAL SCIENCE最新文献

This study explores the accessibility of archives for people with disabilities in Oman. This research seeks to discuss the state of physical and digital accessibility within archival institutions in Oman. Using a qualitative exploratory approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 23 participants who were archivists, cultural institution managers, and representatives of organizations that advocate on behalf of people with disabilities. Thematic analysis of the data reveals major findings into the area of accessibility challenges in Oman. The results clearly show that though the archives in Oman provide some physical facilities, such as ramps, Braille signs, and special parking lots, the digital accessibility has major gaps. Most of the digital archives cannot be accessed by visually or hearing challenged people because there is a lack of screen reader compatibility and adapted interfaces. This study also finds a lack of awareness and training among archivists as one of the contributors to these barriers. Furthermore, the protection of accessibility by the legal frameworks is evidently far from the implementation practice. Improvements have been made through signing the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities by Oman, up to holding a disability conference in 2023. However, digitization of archival content and inclusion of assistive technologies require more action. Finally, the study concludes with recommendations, highlighting measures that ensure complete digital solutions, improved infrastructure, inclusive policy frameworks, and training programs so as to enhance the accessibility of archival materials to people with disabilities in Oman.

In this article, a bird’s-eye view on archives is advocated as a third perspective, alongside the approaches of reading against and along the archival grain. Here, the archival grain—metaphorically speaking—is analyzed in numbers. A bird’s-eye perspective helps us to reconstruct an archive’s pieces and production, trace deviating numbers in document flows, and leads us to a further understanding of archives. In a case study, the archive of the Dutch Ministry of Colonies is at the center of investigation. The study provides insights into the relationships between different parts of the archive and the overall document flow of the organization. It examines the origins of the numerous written pages within this archive and the pulse of their day-to-day production. Peaks and troughs in document production appear on a yearly, monthly or even daily basis. The analysis reveals a significant paperwork explosion occurring roughly between 1851 and 1883, alongside deviating numbers in document flows, such as a dramatic drop in the total number of pages in 1869. Why did these events occur? On a more detailed level, peaks in the daily production of specific files are traced. While some of these thicker files might be labeled as ‘archival events,’ most result from the administrative deposits of large case files.

This study examines the integration of computer vision technologies, specifically the YOLOv9 algorithm, into the management of historical visual archives, focusing on facial recognition to improve the organization, classification, and accessibility of extensive collections of photographs and videos. A curated dataset of 1,638 images of prominent cinema figures was expanded to 3939 images through data augmentation, and the YOLOv9 model was trained using preprocessing, annotation, and Google Colab’s GPU. The model demonstrated robust performance, achieving precision of 91.8%, recall of 85.2%, mAP50 of 93.4%, and mAP50-95 of 62.6%, showcasing its capability to handle large datasets with high accuracy. These findings highlight the transformative potential of computer vision in archival management, enabling more accessible and searchable visual materials. By extending its application to both static images and video content, this study contributes to archival science through the innovative use of advanced facial recognition techniques, offering a dynamic solution for modern archival systems.

The current landscape for provenance researchers, cultural heritage crime analysts, and law enforcement working in the culture sector is characterised by the siloing of data across dozens of databases, resulting in fragmented and incomplete resources that must be manually correlated and validated to provide insights into cultural heritage crime. The European Union-funded Research, Intelligence, and Technology for Heritage and Market Security (RITHMS) project is developing a platform to assist law enforcement agencies across Europe in tackling the illicit trafficking of cultural goods by aggregating open, specialised, and police data from a range of sources. This article outlines one of the initial phases of data collection, which has developed 30 tailored web scrapers for the collection of data from existing databases of stolen, missing, protected, and unprovenanced cultural goods. This has resulted in the largest known non-police dataset of these and associated data objects addressing the real-world challenge of data siloes in heritage crime and provenance research. This article details the multi-step process of data collection and pre-processing that has produced the novel consolidated dataset. The mechanism for knowledge discovery developed during this project has immediate applications and has resulted in actionable intelligence for the investigation of cultural goods crimes, highlighting the value of consolidated data as a resource. This research also offers a cursory analysis of the resulting dataset, demonstrating how mining of this resource can enable new scientific insights and offer promising opportunities for intelligence-led policing of cultural heritage crimes.

An archive in Mbembe’s (in: Hamilton C et al. (eds) Refiguring the archive. Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp 19–26, 2002) interrogation of the institution is necessarily defined by two elements: “the building itself and the documents stored there” (2002:19). In this paper I argue that Tifinagh writing in the form or rock inscriptions in the Algerian Sahara constitutes a materially different kind of desert archive that nonetheless fulfils the role of “instituting imaginary” that Mbembe attributes to the archive. Tifinagh is a relative of the ancient Libyco-Berber script, and is used by Kel Ahaggar Tuareg, an Amazigh (Berber) people, as a yet unbroken writing practice that has existed for centuries. Consulted by French colonial actors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Tifinagh archive contributed to the European invention of its Tuareg authors as “close others” whom they placed on a racial hierarchy above Arabs. In the post-independence era of Arab nation building in North Africa, governments attempted to suppressed expressions of Amazigh culture and identity, and relegated Tifinagh to the domain of folklore. In the popular revindication of Amazigh identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries activists such as those of the Agraw Imazighen or the Berber Academy consulted the Tifinagh archive to resuscitate an alphabet that had disappeared from use in North Africa in late antiquity. Ultimately, although this desert archive presents a materiality that is at odds with Mbembe’s notion of the archive, it nonetheless accomplishes many of the functions he attributes to the archive.

Archival and cultural heritage institutions should take control of our personal digital past in our current global ecological crisis. To develop this argument, this position paper moves beyond the disciplinary lines present in studies of preservation and introduces the concept of personal digital heritage. The concept takes an ecomaterial perspective to contextualise long-term preservation practices, specifies the context of where these practice-based considerations take place, and documents what informs them. This approach allows for a more holistic approach to grasp the ecological implications of personal preservation practices. So far, approaches that should safeguard our current personal digital heritage have been informed by an archival desire embedded in technological solutionism. This article extends social justice principles put forth in critical archival studies, connects these to ecological justice principles present in environmental media studies, and explicitly relates this to the personal. To show a way forward based on this combination, we introduce three guiding statements connected to three questions that lead archival professionals towards an ecologically just archival ecosystem encompassing Big Tech, archival and cultural heritage institutions, and individuals: (1) Take it down: asks where our archive is and considers reconfiguring institutional archival processes an act of ecological care and resistance to Big Tech; (2) Take it slow: asks whose heritage we are preserving and urges us to move from efficiency to sufficiency. (3) Take it back: asks who cares for our heritage and argues for archival and cultural heritage institutions to engage with public infrastructures and initiatives that limit Big Tech influence.

Many online archives, particularly those aggregates collectively built by multiple archival organizations, face financial challenges once their initial grant funding is depleted. This paper examines the financial sustainability of such online archives through the lens of the free-rider problem, a concept from public goods economics. The study introduces relevant economic theories, reviews sustainability literature in the cultural heritage sector, and assesses current revenue generation strategies employed by thirteen sustainable public goods. Drawing from these analyses, this paper proposes actionable strategies for addressing the free-rider problem and sustaining collectively built online archives as public goods.

This paper aims to understand how Chinese international students are represented in university archives and the elements that can impact representation problems. We adopted radical empathy as a guiding principle to explore how 124 Chinese students at the University of Illinois (enrolled from 1904 to 1920) were represented in the university’s archival collections. Based on a qualitative inquiry, we found that inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and inappropriateness (three “I”s) in both original archival materials and archives-supplied access tools are the major representation issues of Chinese students that can negatively impact discovery and user engagement. These issues are grounded in a complex, holistic “ecosystem” of interplaying agents (e.g., students as information producers and archivists who mediate access), structural conditions, and documentation processes. Representation is affected by challenging conditions such as the complexities of recording Chinese names in English across different sources and the lack of resources for archival institutions to create more culturally sensitive access tools. We argue that reflecting on subtle marginalization, systemic issues, and the power of names and encouraging a slow praxis of radical empathy is critical to understanding representation issues and developing thoughtful remediation strategies. This study is one of the earliest projects to apply radical empathy to examining representation issues of Asian communities in English archival collections. The three “I”s and the elements that contribute to their presence constitute an original framework that can guide efforts to address representation problems of Chinese communities and other marginalized groups.

In recent years, health and government information systems have made gender variance more visible and countable in the records. However, being counted has created novel forms of vulnerability for transgender and gender-diverse populations. This paper explores the complexity of records in exposing vulnerabilities of marginalization, illustrating how recordkeeping practices may contribute to erasure and stigma and reproduce systems of social disenfranchisement. The paper introduces the concept of ‘hostile recordkeeping practices’ as a critical analytical lens to articulate observations of marginalization in recordkeeping environments, to discuss indicators of bias, and to develop mechanisms for surfacing issues of trauma, violence, stigma, and repair. Using examples from the published literature, the paper discusses the importance of understanding social interactions which exacerbate marginalization within recordkeeping practices. Based on a case study, the paper argues that the dangers trans and gender-diverse individuals routinely encounter in recordkeeping practices necessitate additional analytical inquiry into hostile recordkeeping practices. The case study contributes to discussions of ethics of care for records for marginalized populations and includes interactional considerations, ethical considerations and historical contexts embedded in recordkeeping systems. The paper closes with an argument for the need to adapt existing recordkeeping practices to safeguard against hostile uses, systemic bias and structural violence. Future archival and medical discourses alike need to engage with the situation(s) of creation, the acts of recording, and, most importantly, personal agency in the negotiations of allowable uses for the records for marginalized populations.

Archival boxes are both practical and conceptual objects, and systems and practices are built around their logic. In this paper, I start by examining uses of literal boxes in very mundane and day-to-day archival works. I go on to discuss how these objects embody an aesthetics of spatial order, historicization, and sanitization. I offer a critique of the box logic as the center of the archival order, and the very basic point of divergence from what communities need, in ways that are both technical and critical. And I compare these archival boxes to seemingly “messy” community practices beyond the boxes. Toward the end, I also provide my own preliminary answer to what we archival researchers and practitioners can do to break out of physical and metaphorical boxes, especially in archival processing. To me, dignity by design is like everyday resistance: it is not only about ethics, slogans, and high goals, but needs to engage these very mundane practices, objects, and systems, and to reimagine them through critique if not art. After all, dignity boils down to these accumulated unassuming moments.