ARCHIVAL SCIENCE最新文献

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.

The UK Government Web Archive (UKGWA) has been archiving government websites since 1996 and now holds regular snapshots of over 5000 sites. Currently, this material can be accessed through browsing or a simple keyword search interface on their website and has also been catalogued in The National Archives’ online catalogue, Discovery. However, the scale of the UKGWA exposes the limits of the current search interface, and there is no facility to understand the archive in aggregate. This article seeks to go beyond the simple keyword search by exploring the data sources available, from APIs to web crawling, for computational analysis of the UKGWA. The article is accompanied by two Python Notebooks which present examples of analysis using each data source. Notebooks lower the technical barriers for the reader to explore and interpret the UKGWA as data, while surfacing the challenges around making web material computationally accessible.

Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology is now a mature machine learning tool, becoming integrated in the digitisation processes of libraries and archives, speeding up the transcription of primary sources and facilitating full text searching and analysis of historic texts at scale. However, research into how HTR is changing our information environment is scant. This paper presents a systematic literature review regarding how researchers are using one particular HTR platform, Transkribus, to indicate the domains where HTR is applied, the approach taken, and how the technology is understood. 381 papers from 2015 to 2020 were gathered from Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science, then grouped and coded into categories using quantitative and qualitative approaches. Published research that mentions Transkribus is international and rapidly growing. Transkribus features primarily in archival and library science publications, while a long tail of broad and eclectic disciplines, including history, computer science, citizen science, law and education, demonstrate the wider applicability of the tool. The most common paper categories were humanities applications (67%), technological (25%), users (5%) and tutorials (3%). This paper presents the first overarching review of HTR as featured in published research, while also elucidating how HTR is affecting the information environment.

Cloud-based productivity, collaboration, and storage tools offer increased opportunities for collaboration and potential cost-savings over locally hosted solutions and have seen widespread adoption throughout industry, government, and academia over the last decade. While these tools benefit organizations, IT departments, and day-to-day-users, they present unique challenges for records managers and archivists. As a review of the relevant literature demonstrates, issues surrounding cloud computing are not limited to the technology—although the implementation and technological issues are numerous—but also include organization management, human behavior, regulation, and records management, making the process of archiving digital information in this day and age all the more difficult. This paper explores some of the consequences of this shift and its effect on digital recordkeeping at the Bentley Historical Library, whose mission is to “collect the materials for the University of Michigan.” After providing context for this problem by discussing relevant literature, two practicing archivists will explore the impact of the move toward cloud computing as well as various productivity software and collaboration tools in use at U-M throughout the various stages of a standard lifecycle model for managing records.

This paper surveys archival traditions coexisting in Latin America and identifies key moments in the region's development of archives and archival practices. First, different record-keeping practices in pre-Hispanic communities are identified. Second, an Iberian conception of the archive is described in the case of colonial archival practices between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Third, changes resulting from independence movements and the subsequent arrival of the Latin archival tradition are documented. Fourth, the emergence of an Ibero-American archival tradition is posited, which is State-sponsored and institutional and the product of a postwar context. Lastly, the turns and shifts these traditions are experiencing due to social conflict and transformations taking place in the region since the late twentieth century are presented, associated with marginal practices and with close attention being paid to users.

There is growing awareness in archival communities that working with records that contain evidence of human pain and suffering can result in unsettling emotions for archivists. One important finding of this work, however, is the considerable variability in not only the nature of responses, but also the nature of records that provoke emotional responses. Using in-depth qualitative interviews with 20 archivists from across Canada and one from the United States, and employing grounded theory methodology, this study sought to better understand the nature of emotional responses and factors associated with distress. Archivists described a wide range of reactions including shock, intrusive thoughts, profound senses of anger, sadness and despair, and ultimately at times disrupted functioning in personal and occupational spheres. One factor that has been associated with increasing vulnerability to distress in other occupational groups is empathic engagement, which is understood to have two elements: a vicarious emotional process and a cognitive process. This article explores the impact of personal connections and the nature of empathic engagement between archivists, donors, community researchers, and the records themselves on emotional response.

Access to data is seen as a key priority today. Yet, the vast majority of digital cultural data preserved in archives is inaccessible due to privacy, copyright or technical issues. Emails and other born-digital collections are often uncatalogued, unfindable and unusable. In the case of documents that originated in paper format before being digitised, copyright can be a major obstacle to access. To solve the problem of access to digital archives, cross-disciplinary collaborations are absolutely essential. The big challenges of our time—from global warming to social inequalities—cannot be solved within a single discipline. The same applies to the challenge of “dark” archives closed to users. We cannot expect archivists or digital humanists to find a magical solution that will instantly make digital records more accessible. Instead, we need to set up collaborations across disciplines that seldom talk to each other. Based on 21 interviews with 26 archivists, librarians and other professionals in cultural institutions, we identify key obstacles to making digitised and born-digital collections more accessible to users. We outline current levels of access to a wide range of collections in various cultural organisations, including no access at all and limited access (for example, when users are required to travel on-site to consult documents). We suggest possible solutions to the problems of access—including the ethical use of Artificial Intelligence to unlock “dark” archives inaccessible to users. Finally, we propose the creation of a global user community who would participate in decisions on access to digital collections.