ARCHIVAL SCIENCE最新文献

Zines are self-published, do-it-yourself booklets that have a long history as tools for activism in social movements. While archival studies has already explored the collection and preservation of zines as cultural artefacts, this article explores the capacity for zines to act as a form of community archive. The article examines See You at the Paradise, a zine co-created with Norfolk Island community members for a research project focused on Kingston and Arthur’s Vale Historic Area. Drawing on Michelle Caswell’s six principles of community archive discourse—participation, shared stewardship, multiplicity, activism, reflexivity, valuing affect—we analyse the extent to which zines and zine-making, as product and process, can be understood as community archive. In doing so, we propose collaborative reminiscence as a seventh principle. The article finds that zines, as community archive, work to strengthen the presence of marginalised voices in dominant historical narratives while also offering an important resource for community-building and political resistance.

Since the founding of the National Archives (1934) and the Society of American Archivists (1936), archival scholars, educators, and practitioners have discussed and debated the challenges of and future directions for graduate archival education. This exploratory qualitative case study uses semistructured interviews with 33 tenure-track and tenured faculty members from North American graduate archival programs to explore the most pressing issues facing archival education in the twenty-first century. Showing both continuity and change, findings extend and enrich the literature regarding faculty, curriculum, interdisciplinarity and collaboration, DEI, technology, and sustainability.

This article discusses the representation of NARA’s INS Records in Ancestry’s database portal. Ancestry, the world’s largest and most popular online collection of historical records relevant for people interested in family history, was able to grow into the world’s leading genealogy company through a wide range of partnership agreements with public as well as private institutions and organizations, including the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Ancestry has been able to control the online presentation of and researcher access to large volumes of records containing genealogical information, including records from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). This position gives the company considerable influence on the discovery and interpretation of these public records. The company’s focus leads to a re-contextualization of these records and collections in Ancestry’s portal environment, in which records acquire new meaning primarily as containers for selective genealogical information that can be mined by researchers. Particularly concerning is the ability of the company to provide access to millions of poorly regulated immigration records containing personally identifiable information. This raises fundamental questions about the ethical consequences of outsourcing the development of online access portals to these public records to Ancestry.com and other companies that thrive on mining millions of records containing genealogical information while making the data available through their commercial portals.

Emails, much like communicative genres such as letters that predate them, are a rich source of data for researchers, but they are replete with privacy considerations. This paper explores the resulting friction between privacy concerns and email data access. Studies of email can often be centred on understanding patterns of behaviour and/or relationships between people or groups, and, as such, embody risks of disclosing private information. This is further amplified in humanities research which is concerned with the individual, their work and the circumstances that influence them. Furthermore, previous studies have expounded upon the benefits of visualisations for researching email data, a method which has been reported both as a path to addressing known concerns, as well as, introducing new concerns in privacy. The spectrum of methodologies leave archivists and curators of email data in a quandary, unable to balance accessibility with privacy. The research presented in this paper contributes a systematic approach to examining the relationship between email visualisation research and privacy. It presents a categorisation of email visualisation attributes, and a graded scale of privacy, to be used in conjunction as a framework for interrogating existing research and their associated email collections. The paper aims to instigate the first steps in concretely situating the extent to which research can take advantage of or is challenged by privacy conscious data management.

With the continued proliferation of digitized materials, critical attention to the ideologies informing the creation of digital archives remains crucial. How are digital archives made and what are their goals? How do different participants in the process work together in collaborative teams towards shared ideals? This paper outlines the methodological and political considerations that underlie the creation of a critical digital archive of historical and born-digital materials relating to 20th-century publishing history, The Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP). Here we outline the archival practices and critical ethos that have informed the collaborative creation of MAPP by an international team of scholars, archivists, cultural institutions, students, and copyright estate holders. We address issues of selection that arise in creating a critical digital archive; feminist critical metadata practices; and our approaches to workflow and copyright; and conclude with an example of an archival document type in which the issues of feminist critical curation and copyright collide.

Mexican folklórico dance (also known as Mexican folkloric ballet) is a dance form and tradition that is rooted in the cultural diversity of Mexico and has a prominent presence in the USA. The dances, music, and costumes are all embedded with the historical and socio-cultural traditions of the communities from where they originate and are therefore crucial aspects of Mexican folklórico that should be included in the archives. Current holdings in Arizona include records on Mexican folklórico dance, but these are limited to audio recordings, visual materials, and written materials, nothing on costumes. As such, this paper argues for their inclusion in the archives by applying a participatory approach and a post-custodial strategy, which will accomplish the following: (1) By involving the community in the archiving process, more accurate records of the costumes can be created; and (2) By utilizing a post-custodial strategy, the archives collaborates with the records creators/owners (e.g., costume designers, dancers, or directors) so that the records are still able to be processed, with the original record returning to the creator/owner, while a copy remains in the archives so that others can access it. This process will ensure that the costumes are not de-contextualized by being completely removed from their communities and that they remain with those individuals who have years of experience taking care of them and know how to keep them in presentable conditions.

After more than a decade of usage, social media have become a virtual environment where meaningful content is created and kept, highlighting its potential to become part of personal digital archives. This study investigates users’ attitudes and preservation practices related to digital memories created on social media. Survey findings highlighted how users seem to consider these items as meaningful digital traces to document important events of their lives, and a potential inherent part of their personal archives. However, results show how this attitude does not seem to be supported by adequate preservation strategies. After analysing social media platforms’ policies in relation to users’ preservation practices, we advocate for raising more awareness among both users and service providers regarding the risks posed by the ephemerality of the digital world and the need for specific provisions that go beyond the short-term retention of data and look to the future and potential use of what appears to be considered an inherent part of individuals’ personal archives.

In the past ten years, a growing number of digital projects have emerged within archives, and they have placed a focus on using Linked Data to facilitate connections to be made between music related materials across the World Wide Web. Projects such as Linked Jazz exemplify the possibilities that can be achieved between researchers, digital experts and archivists. Recent developments for Irish traditional music at the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) in Dublin, Ireland mean that the genre can also now be described using an extensive ontology, LITMUS (Linked Irish Traditional Music). In 2019, we engaged this ontology within a digital project entitled Connections in Sound, exploring the challenges and possibilities for Linked Data based on audio collections of Irish traditional music from the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. The project adapted an experimental approach to enriching metadata from audio materials of Irish traditional music, song and dance at the AFC by creating and working with proof-of-concept resources. Using the project entitled Connections in Sound as a case study, this paper will demonstrate the challenges, opportunities and particularities related to engaging a range of fieldwork and transcribed metadata as Linked Data. This paper suggests that the work of experimenting with certain types of non-commercial digital audio material for use in datasets and digital infrastructures informs ways to represent diversity of musical traditions in the archive and across the World Wide Web.

Digital “returns” or “knowledge sharing”—the sharing of digital copies of archival collections with descendant Native and Indigenous communities—has become a key mode of broadening archival access while embracing community-driven curatorship and stewardship models. Yet, little is known about how the products of such programs—namely in the form of digital surrogates—are actually discovered, accessed, used, and circulated “on the ground” in Indigenous community contexts. This paper discusses a project that draws on qualitative interviews and ethnographic methods to fill this gap. I explore the uses and impacts of digitized collections from diverse community-based perspectives, taking the American Philosophical Society’s Digital Knowledge Sharing partnerships as a case study. Through semi-structured interviews with 36 participants and three site visits, the project documents Native community perspectives on the uses, meanings, and circulation of digitized collections in their home communities. I share major findings in eight categories: (1) Barriers to use and access; (2) Circulation of digital surrogate sharing; (3) Formats of digital copies (4) Use in wide-ranging community contexts (5) Benefits of digitization (6) Limits to digital affordances (7) Risks involved in digitization; and (8) Best Practices for archives going forward. This project provides insights for the broader professional communities in libraries, archives, and museums in order to develop best practices and policies for generating relevant and culturally sensitive digitization and digital sharing projects.

Through documenting, preserving, and making local heritage accessible, digital cataloguing offers community archives significant potential benefits. But undertaking digital cataloguing in this context is not without challenges. Community archives depend on intermittent funding, have restricted access to digital connectivity and devices, and rely on elderly volunteers who often lack the digital skills required. Following Thomas and colleagues’ digital inclusion framework, which considers the capacity for accessing, affording, and having the digital abilities to ‘use online technologies effectively’ (Thomas J, Barraket J, Wilson C K, Holcombe-James I, Kennedy J, Rennie E, Ewing S, MacDonald T (2020) Measuring Australia’s digital divide: the Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2020. RMIT and Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, for Telstra, p 8), community archives can be considered digitally excluded. Through an ethnographic study of one community archive’s use of Victorian Collections, an Australian digital cataloguing platform, this article examines the impact of digital exclusion on digital cataloguing outcomes via metrics of quantity and quality. These indicate limited cataloguing outcomes, with community collections obscured, rather than revealed. But these metrics disregard the opportunities for enhancing individual and archival digital inclusion that learning how, and continuing, to digitally catalogue present. By tracing one elderly volunteer’s journey from digitally excluded non-user to capable cataloguer, I show how digital cataloguing offered an opportunity for enhancing this individual’s digital inclusion, simultaneously improving that of the archive. In considering these unintended opportunities, this article contributes to our understanding of how digital exclusion impacts the digitisation of cultural heritage, and offers scope for determining how the process and practice of digital cataloguing itself can present opportunities for inclusion at the individual and archival level.