ARCHIVAL SCIENCE最新文献

Narrating the preservation of a film school archive–Re-configuring the hero’s journey across the nexus of conservation and film production. In 2013, a program to secure the future of the more than 1800 films produced by students in the Victorian College of Arts’ Department of Film and Television commenced at the University of Melbourne. This is a highly significant collection, with films from 1966 to the present, that contains work by some of Australia’s pre-eminent producers, cinematographers, scriptwriters, and others. Utilising narrative frameworks theory, and particularly the victim to hero narrative, this paper explores the journey taken to preserve this archive and make it accessible to current and future students and the public. This makes explicit the value of narrative inquiry as a method for active rethinking and reframing of the project, the opportunities for democratisation and increasing plurality during the project and highlighted the need to contest the celebratory narrative of project completion to ensure that the continued risk to the hero-archive remains a central institutional concern.

In recent years, grassroots movements have gained traction and significant numbers globally. Against longer histories of resistance and protest movements’ mobilisation of documentation, mechanisation and digital technologies, this scoping literature review seeks to understand how resistance and social movements have drawn upon the participatory and easily accessible nature of social media and digital platforms to mobilise new generations of activists, create new archives, document activities and abuses, call for accountability and overwrite or challenge the narratives put forward by mainstream media outlets and state archives. We identify relevant projects, explore the activist potential and threats of the combination of digital technologies, social movements, and documentary or archival practice, before concluding by identifying open research questions in relation to digital technologies, social movements and archival practice.

There are numerous obstacles to overcome when conducting queer historical research. While has been a steady increase in work to address the (in)visibility of queer histories and perspectives in institutional heritage collections, this work is often skewed towards outputs such as exhibitions or social media posts. As a result, very little work has been done to interrogate and transform the ways that these materials are managed and made accessible (or not). This paper considers how the lack of rich and explicit descriptive metadata shapes the (in)visibility and (in)accessibility of queer records within institutional archives. It reports the findings of a series of qualitative interviews I conducted with individuals who have searched for queer materials in archival collections in Australia. These interviews explored the practical process of searching for queer records in institutional archives; how researchers identify, locate, and access these records; and the challenges of this process—both in terms of a research methodology, and an experience for queer researchers within potentially hostile or unsafe spaces.

A major issue facing society is the extent to which the usability of the digital evidence base is at risk because, in the digital era, the concept of the record has been eroded. The nature and reality of a record are no longer agreed. Addressing the challenges that the digital presents for managing records and assuring their future usability is not one that records and archives scholars and professionals can tackle alone. This article argues that this is a ‘grand challenge’ which requires a broad range of perspectives and expertise and convergence research to resolve. It discusses findings from an international multidisciplinary research network established to critically explore, through a grounded theory approach, the nature of a digital record and the implications of the digital era for the usability and functionality of the future evidence base. A series of different visions of a digital record emerged alongside a wide-ranging set of research questions that form the basis of an agenda for future collaborative (convergence) research.

This paper centers a three-year research project into community-based archives and the power of their naming practices. Expanding the idea of naming practices to further consider how the archives itself is defined and understood by the creators, donors, and communities that are represented therein, the co-authors consider the emergent focus on origin stories told about the founding of community-based archives. The lead author attends to the community/institution dichotomy to consider how such relationality insists on a both/and understanding wherein the language of the origin story is centered in relations and informs how archives continue to become. Through auto-ethnographic and intimate theorizing and analysis, the lead author offers a self-critique on naming practices and self-identification to account for the shape of the archives over time.

While archival user studies have largely focused on humanities (and adjacent) scholars, this paper focuses on anthropologists engaged in scientific research. Based on qualitative results from an open-ended survey, we investigate how science-based anthropologists perceive and use archives in their work. We ask: How are science-based anthropologists and archaeologists reusing archival data in their research? What difficulties or barriers do they encounter in reusing archival data in scientific contexts? What attitudes or understandings about archival research are held by science-based anthropologists and archaeologists? Our findings primarily add to the body of literature about user experience in archives and more broadly to the emerging literature on archival data reuse. Major findings include (1) barriers and gatekeeping legacies that impact archival research and the ability of researchers to reuse data and (2) mixed perceptions about archives among researchers. We also discuss suggestions made by these communities of practice, and the ways that barriers to archival data reuse may stem from a lack of knowledge about core archival and information infrastructures among researcher communities. Together, this research showcases possible (re)uses of important primary source data in archives among scientific communities but highlights that barriers to access and misperceptions create a gap in exploiting that potential. We argue for a “re-imagining” of anthropological archives as relevant to contemporary communities and scientific pursuits toward a richer scientific research environment.

Homeless services systems provide unhoused individuals access to emergency shelter, subsidized housing, and other life-sustaining resources. In this paper, we present a qualitative study that draws on the experiences of fifteen social service workers to examine how recordkeeping practices sustain homeless services systems and unite a tangled web of institutions and actors, including public housing systems, nonprofit agencies, and local governments. We address the following research questions: How is the infrastructure of homeless services sustained by recordkeeping? How are social service workers affected by increasing recordkeeping demands? In what ways do social service workers work against or ‘find the play’ in this system? To address these questions, we collected interviews and conducted artifact walkthroughs with our study participants. We analyzed the data using an infrastructural lens and found that current recordkeeping practices within homeless services systems comprise an "infrastructure of last resort" that functions logistically, prioritizing efficiency and speed. We also found that social service workers “speak back” to logistification by making the homeless services infrastructure more legible to their unhoused clients through mediation and acts of translation that help to produce better resource outcomes. Our findings show how structuring recordkeeping in ways that privilege efficiency and speed disrupts social service work and interferes with social service workers’ ability to provide care for vulnerable individuals facing life-altering and life-threatening hardships.

There is a widespread notion that archives, especially national archival institutions, represent the nation’s memory. Historically, archives have played an important role for history writing, thereby contributing to the construction of national master narratives and the strengthening of national identities. What the association between archives and memory actually means is however debated in archival literature. Taking the discussion on the relation between archives and memory as a starting point, this study examines how national archives in today’s world present themselves to the public. The source material consists of mission statements collected from 138 webpages and 18 Facebook accounts all over the world. The first research question concerns the connection between mission statements and a national master narrative, the second asks where references to national memory and national identity are most pronounced, and the third asks whether self-images of national archives can be connected to historical experiences. The analysis shows that mission statements contain many allusions to history and heritage, while references to memory and identity are less widespread than expected. Some variations between continents, and between different groups of countries are identified, although relatively small. A possible explanation is that national archives are engaged in quite a lot of international cooperation, for instance in the International Council on Archives and UNESCO. Thus, they are likely to be as much influenced by each other as by the political environment in their own countries.

Recently introduced into the archival sphere, ‘paradata’ is a conceptual framework for defining the character of information resource processing. (Davet J, Hamidzadeh B, Franks P, Bunn J (2022) Tracking the functions of AI as paradata & pursuing archival accountability. In: Archiving 2022: Final Programs and Proceedings, 7-10 June 2022. Society for imaging science and technology, Springfield, VA, USA, pp 83–88) While it need not be applied exclusively to artificial intelligence-based automated systems, paradata can be, should be, and is currently used to explicate the function of AI in the archives. The use of paradata in relation to AI can help ensure that archival ethical principles continue to be honored in an age of increasing automation. This paper summarizes the theoretical background of paradata, documentation created during recent experiments with machine learning-based AI which gestures toward the varieties of paradata already being collected by researchers, and some of the factors which condition paradata’s use. A few currently available data structures for the representation and display of paradata are evaluated, with an eye toward their suitability for different stakeholder groups. Future directions for theoretical and practical research are suggested.