ARCHIVAL SCIENCE最新文献

Following the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia, millions of refugees have fled Ukraine for safety in neighbouring countries, including Poland. This movement of people has been facilitated by, and has produced, documentation that will have significant afterlives as evidence and memory. The records refugees have carried with them, the records they have made during flight, and the records created in their encounters with states and communities beyond their homeland, will be important in the prosecution of war crimes, the reconstruction of events, the reconstitution of communities and the protection of rights and entitlements. This article sets out the findings of a pilot study into the documentary experiences of Ukrainian refugees in Poland. Interviews conducted by and with Ukrainian refugees consider the removal of records, the documentation of the refugee experience, the documentary requirements of border crossings, and the informational requirements of life beyond the border. Although drawing on a limited study population, the research surfaces some significant issues related to the preservation of memory and culture, exclusionary and hostile government information systems, and research ethics. This article could help to inform archival solidarity with Ukraine; it underscores the need for trauma-informed archival research and practice; and finally suggests the need for a person-centered approach to this work.

Over the last three decades, US government agencies have published hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of PowerPoint files on the web. Hundreds of thousands of these files have been captured and preserved in web archives. With that noted, it remains difficult to find and interact with these files. This paper analyzes a public dataset of 1,000 PowerPoints from US government websites in the Library of Congress web archives to explore the properties of these kinds of files. This publicly available dataset published in 2019 includes a random sample of a thousand files from the more than 300,000 files that purport a PowerPoint media type in the Library of Congress web archives. The study focuses on characterizing the nature of these publications, the extent to which embedded metadata in these documents could be used to improve access to them and exploring what properties of these files are likely to be important to future users. Exploring these data provides a means to begin to understand the value and nature of PowerPoint files as a format of government publishing and government records.

The Thessaloniki Port Archives, whose collections were recently catalogued, cover the history of the waterfront from the 1920s to the present day. Among their various collections, the Minutes Books of the Port Authority for the 1920s–1940s are a unique repository that sheds light on unknown chapters in the history of local Jews who found a living in dock works. While the Jewish Salonikian historiography identifies the early 1920s as the period in which local Jews were in fact excluded from the port labor market, the Minutes Books tell a very different story; a reality of continued presence until the German Occupation of World War II. Studying the dock activities contributes to the ongoing discussion on Greek Jewry in terms of memory, metanarrative, and archiving, and by using the postmodern lens on the archiving process, this research will also be able to offer new perspectives on the economic history of Salonikian Jews in the challenging times of the interwar years, and in World War II as well.

Accountability, human rights and social justice are inextricably linked. Rights cannot be defended and upheld, and inequalities cannot be highlighted and challenged in the absence of accountability. In recent decades, recordkeepers have increasingly emphasised the role of archives and records in facilitating accountability, upholding rights and exposing instances of social injustice. This paper assesses the twenty-first-century recordkeeping literature as it relates to the ethical issues of accountability, human rights and social justice in public sector recordkeeping. While there is some consensus on the role of recordkeeping with regard to accountability and human rights, there is less agreement regarding social justice, which remains a contested and poorly defined concept in the literature. The debates around accountability, human rights and social justice impact on perceptions of the role of the archivist and have led to a strong trend towards more activist interpretations, with increasing calls for greater inclusion and the development of participatory recordkeeping models. Despite this trend, implementation remains a challenge, and the gap between theory and practice needs to be continually addressed.

Alongside established heritage institutions, family historians are central figures in the ecosystem of digital heritage, both as contributors to and users of digitized historical sources. With that in mind, this research aims for a wide examination of family historians' engagement with the broader selection of available digital platforms, providing knowledge about how and why they choose to use one platform over another. This knowledge is important for the future development of sustainable digital platforms in the heritage sector. With a large variety of digitized source providers, many with free access platforms, Denmark and Danish family historians make an excellent case for this study. Through both a questionnaire and focus group interviews, using a grounded theory approach, this study has developed a model of engagement with digital platforms, referred to as a buffet model. This model illustrates how family historians pick and choose from a selection of digital platforms throughout their search and management of information as well as their community interaction. Moreover, through the lens of the Serious Leisure Perspective we find that family history is often a life-long leisure activity and family historians’ usage of digital platforms support this finding.

The scientific exchange correspondence of the Dundo Museum Biology Laboratory (Angola), included in the archive of António de Barros Machado (1912–2002) and Dora Lustig (1907–1986), constitutes a valuable repository of information for the history of contemporary science, particularly in the field of natural sciences—botany, entomology, mammals, ornithology, primates, reptiles, termites, zoogeography, zoology—and of biology. This paper describes the application of the Records in Contexts model to the correspondence collection, with the aim of representing two realities: its production context and the relationships between scientists. The exploration of the model sought to understand its fundamentals and, simultaneously, model the information, starting by identifying the entities, attributes and relations needed for the collection representation scheme. This study resulted in a modelling exercise of the relations between 11 correspondents and the director of the Dundo Museum Biology Laboratory, Barros Machado, regarding the work on the museum collections which culminated in the publication of scientific articles in Publicações Culturais da Companhia de Diamantes de Angola [Cultural Publications of the Diamond Company of Angola]. In the future, it is proposed to apply the same scheme to the description of the remaining scientists in the epistolary collection.

In the 1950s, the Soviet Union expanded the range of its fisheries operations into international water traditionally fished by American vessels. In the USA, government officials and fisheries experts alike expressed concerns that the Soviets were overfishing Atlantic stocks, or even potentially engaging in off-shore espionage. Despite these fears, members of the US fisheries management community reached out and engaged with their Soviet counterparts directly. This initial communication led to a series of collaborations between US and Soviet scientific agencies aimed at developing a deeper understanding of marine ecosystems and improving the sustainability of international fisheries. The joint US–USSR research efforts beginning in the 1960s laid the foundation for continued cooperative studies through the 1980s and into the post-Soviet era. This paper uses historical records from the US National Archives and data products currently available on the web to examine the legacy of this Cold War cooperative research program. These materials demonstrate how American and Soviet scientists collaborated to generate and describe data on fisheries. It also considers how they negotiated recordkeeping and data management activities across radically different governmental structures, while also navigating the transition to digital recordkeeping and data exchange. This case offers perspective on the preservation of at-risk ecological records and the continued value of these data in our contemporary world.