Archival descriptive practices have traditionally obfuscated the existence of or excluded entirely the experiences of LGBTQIA+ people. The development of reparative archival description practices compels archivists to reassess how best to elevate the voices of queer creators and subjects within their collections. In addition, the development of LGBTQIA+ community-generated...
In Residencies Revisited, editors Preethi Gorecki and Arielle Petrovich compile essays and narratives from current and former diversity resident librarians, residency scholars, and other residency stakeholders to discuss challenges, opportunities, success, and the future of residency programs. The opportunities that diversity residency programs provide for recent graduates have...
This book review examines Museum Archives: Practice, Issues, Advocacy edited by Rachel Chatalbash, Susan Hernandez, and Megan Schwenke and published by the Society of American Archivists (SAA) in 2022. This volume is the first holistic work concerning museum archives since the publication of the second edition of Museum Archives: An Introduction in 2004, also by SAA. Museum...
This review situates Disputed Archival Heritage, ed. James Lowry, the 2023 winner of the Waldo Gifford Leland Award of the Society of American Archivists, within the wider context of Anglophone North American archivists
Questioning the archival imperative of access, this research article discussed how descriptive metadata can be used to contextualize and problematize digitized archival photographs, which are often inadequately described in the digital environment. Beginning with literature review of atrocity photos and their use and digitization to discuss the risks inherent to disseminating...
In Fundraising for Impact, Kathryn K. Matthew uses soundbites from more than 100 interviews she conducted with practitioners from libraries, archives and museums from around the world to share ways they increased their funding. This work emphasizes frameworks that help reveal an institution's value and the impact of community, partnerships, investing and fundraising.
Literary production has always been tied to specific developments in technology. This has become all the more apparent since the advent of personal computing and our digital media age. How might an awareness of technology’s impact then affect the future of literary creation, critique, and preservation? For Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage...
In 2021, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Data Library and Archives (DLA), a part of the MBLWHOI (Marine Biological Laboratory Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) Library, received a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Recordings at Risk (RAR) program to catalog, digitize, preserve, and make available historic films and videos of...
How does it feel to create a record? What personal impact does it have to represent yourself in a record after being misrepresented in records created about you by someone else? Employing a participatory action research (PAR) research design alongside two community archives, this article answers these questions through empirical interview and focus group data collected from...
As archivists surface and reckon with harmful theory and practice, how can we awaken to transcend past legacies? This article introduces and reflects on the concept of “archival debt,” defined as resources owed to address problematic legacy issues in an archival repository resulting from past practices, policies, and strategies that prioritized the protection and validation of...
BeReal, an “anti-Instagram” photo-sharing app, not only challenges the performative culture of social media but also revolutionizes the very concept of ‘archives.’ By employing the technical walkthrough method grounded in software studies, this research found that BeReal can be conceptualized as an anarchive that consists of diverse storytellers, decentralized micro-narratives...
In Archival Accessioning, editor Audra Eagle Yun and eleven authors compile essays on modern theories and practices to accessioning collections in archival settings. Authors in this anthology share knowledge and assert scenarios supporting their arguments, while also providing resources as guides for professionals who tackle the challenges of accessioning records and collections.
Archives and Human Rights edited by Jens Boel, Perrine Canavaggio, and Antonio González Quintana utilizes seventeen case studies to examine the role archives and archivists can play in international justice after human rights violations. The cases include but are not limited to; Rwanda, Spain, and Cambodia.
The book Archives in the Digital Age: Preservation and the Right to be Forgotten (2021) attempts to broadly describe the current state of digital archiving practices, the methods and strategies, influences of digital humanities and big data, preservation, and the concept of the Right to be forgotten. While this book promises to delve into the right to be forgotten, it is not...
Making Your Tools Work for You by Max Eckard introduces readers to the concept of systems and data integration. Eckard walks readers through how to approach system integration and highlights various tools and techniques to make an integration project successful. The book hits its climax with specific case studies that any reader would find valuable.
A thoughtful meditation on the profession, Scott Cline’s Archival Virtue is timely and much needed. The text reframes discussions regarding justice, equity, diversity, access, and a better archives for all as a part of a greater quest for morality and virtue among ourselves and as a core of archives as a profession in the 21st century.
This article presents the case study of the Jewish Mobile Oral History Project of the McCall Library at the University of South Alabama as an example of a participatory archival practice. With goals to build a collection centered on a minority experience, to engage with community members, and to foster inter-communal dialogue, the project highlights affect as one vital...
“…we, Black people everywhere and anywhere we are, still produce in, into, and through the wake an insistence on existing: we insist Black being into the wake.” – Christina Sharpe, In the Wake (2016) In this paper, I introduce Christina Sharpe’s conceptualizations of wake and wake work, as they pertain to archiving the experiences of Blackness to better understand how the archive...
In 2019, the Society of American Archivists’ Privacy and Confidentiality Steering Committee surveyed SAA members with the goal of identifying current practices and concerns across the field regarding archival access restrictions. Survey results yielded rich and sometimes contradicting information about how archivists approach access restrictions in theory and practice. The...
Heritage experts working in Qatar contend that international museum standards do not allow them to engage with local understandings of history and heritage, thereby acknowledging the disconnect between museums and Qatari collective memory. This article posits that due to the relative absence of relatable representations in international-facing museums, Qataris, building upon a...
During the 2020-2021 academic year, which was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers had limited access to physical repositories for historical research. Both the limitation of in-person archival access and the growth of digitization led to a greater use and reliance on digitized primary source materials. This preliminary study examines the approaches undergraduate and...
In Deconstructing Service in Libraries: Intersections of Identities and Expectations, Veronica Arellano Douglas and Joanna Gadsby bring together nineteen essays from the perspectives of library workers of differing race, ethnicity, gender identity, and job title to discuss service and what it means in their respective roles. Arellano Douglas and Gadsby’s edited volume offers...
The Social Movement Archive, written by Jen Hoyer and Nora Almeida, utilizes fifteen interviews--as well as reproductions of visual records--to highlight the necessity of archivists and archives to reconsider what is preserved and by whom. The movements highlighted are wide ranging and include (but are not limited to): women's liberation, disability rights, housing justice, Black...
In Urgent Archives, Michele Caswell provides a tough love blueprint that allows archivists, in whatever place they are situated, to take individual and collective liberatory action by extricating archival theory and practice from the constraints of the oppressive systems in which it is rooted and for which it has been a tool. While Urgent Archives is aimed at liberatory memory...
While its encyclopedic organization does hinder the book’s overall accessibility, Uncertain Archives presents some useful theoretical frameworks for archivists working with digitized and born-digital collections. In its entirety, the book provides a complex analysis of present and possible future impacts of big data across many aspects of human life and organization. It raises...