In Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory, editors Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight compile thirteen essays, as well as three introductions by scholars that discuss how Critical Race Theory tenets can and are being used by information professionals to challenge systems that harm marginalized communities. Authors in...
Using the records that document the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition as a case study, this article discusses the messiness and unknowability of provenance. Drawing attention to how the concept of provenance can emphasize the reconstruction of a fonds when records have been moved, rearranged, and dispersed, this article draws attention to the ‘curative’ and ‘rehabilitative...
Scholarly applications of memory concepts in the archival literature broadly assume the role of memory as essential to the function of archival research and practice. While academicians in the archival field maintain the necessity of foregrounding memory as an essential concept underpinning both practical and theoretical research, it has nonetheless encountered some justified...
Since the early 1990s, archives institutions largely have approached digital archival collections with an “if we build it, they will come” mentality. But the extent and motivations of use for traditional and emerging patron groups are constantly evolving, and the factors or conditions that characterize use vary wildly in the web environment. As part of a broader study...
This article discusses authority and the codification of professional principles in the archival field by comparing Sir Hilary Jenkinson’s Manual of Archive Administration (1922) with the contents of a wiki called A (New) Manual of Archive Administration, created by the Archival Discourses research network in the lead up on the centenary of Jenkinson’s text. Instead of a...
This collection of varied case studies demonstrates the value and possibilities of participatory documentation initiatives, framing them in the context of the turn towards archives as collaborative spaces and the opportunities presented by the internet. Readers will find the volume useful as a source of creative models for community memory projects, but less so for addressing the...
Ghosts of Archive: Deconstructive Intersectionality and Praxis explores the relationship between archives and power to posit an archival praxis centered around justice. Drawing on his experiences working for South Africa's National Archives and the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Harris shows how archives have the potential for oppression and liberation, harm and healing. His work...
Student yearbooks are distinctive cultural records. For the schools and universities that produced them, yearbooks promoted a shared sense of identity and experience among students and helped create enduring loyalty to the institutions long after the students graduated. For scholars and other users, yearbooks are unique primary sources that provide insight into past eras of local...
Finding aids have long been an essential part of archivists’ work. To create a finding aid is to create a surrogate of an archival collection. Multiple levels of description are used to distill information about the unique groupings and parts of a collection and to place its content into context. Archivists make decisions about what to include in a finding aid based on their own...
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s Martha Blakeney Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) utilized Archive-It’s COVID-19 Web Archiving Special Campaign in the spring of 2020 to expanded web archiving efforts to include COVID-19 related web content from the Piedmont Triad region. It was important to SCUA to archive local web content during a historical...
This article presents an oral history description methodology, rooted in both extensible processing practices as well as cultural humility, that results in efficiently-processed but richly-described oral history interviews. The author explores three key questions. Is there a way to process oral history to the golden minimum? Is there a way to process oral history ethically, with...
This article re-examines the records and correspondence of Samuel Oldknow, a late eighteenth century textile manufacturer, within the context of the environmental humanities. Oldknow’s papers, a portion of which are held at Columbia University, are most often used by economic historians to date the beginnings of the factory wage labor system. We highlight, instead, the...
Exhibits in archives and special collections function as an important outreach tool for these specialized, sometimes formidable repositories. Exhibits increase public knowledge of available collections, promote engagement with those collections, reach new audiences, and provide opportunities to build bridges across campus units. This case study looks at a rotating exhibition...
This article introduces The Suffrage Postcard Project (SPP), a feminist digital humanities project that utilizes digital tools to explore how transatlantic suffrage postcards and feminist digital humanities practices engender new historical narratives of the suffrage movement, especially in the United States and Britain. This article uses our Omeka-based digital archive of...
The renewal of archival theory since the 1990s has drawn upon the abstract and functional qualities of records, while their material aspects have been more or less excluded from theoretical discourse. Even if an emerging interest in materiality could be noticed, its impact and conceptual implications still need to be elucidated. This essay will explore the concept of materiality...
What is the sound of silence and what is the sight of absence? The following essay situates itself along those two questions by devoting close ethnographic attention to the lives and afterlives of seven people—Delia, Renty, Jem, Alfred, Fassena, Drana, and Jack—whose reflections resonate and resound throughout the world of archives. I argue that a theory of archival power must...
The comparative case study, Documenting Rebellions: A Study of Four Lesbian and Gay Archives in Queer Times, traces the development of four prominent lesbian and gay archives as they grew out of the rights movement of the 1960s through the AIDS crisis and into the 21st century. The study is informed by both queer theory and archival theory. The volume historically contextualizes...
Archives and Special Collections as Sites of Contestation, an edited volume collecting 17 essays from practitioners across the United States and Canada, contains chapters critically evaluating how Special Collections approach instruction, digital projects, cataloging, knowledge production, and ethics.
Defining a Discipline: Archival Research and Practice in the Twenty-First Century reflects on the ways in which archival theory and practice have developed in recent decades and charts a path forward for a more engaged and empathetic profession in a new century. The eighteen essays in this collection will be of interest to archivists, librarians, and other information...
Thirteen essays in Afterlives of Indigenous Archives, assembled and edited by Ivy Schweitzer and Gordon Henry Jr., collectively respond to the call to reconsider the archive and reinstate the principles and practices of indigenous archiving. The central element of such reconsiderations is the question of power sustained via the Western tradition of print culture and knowledge...
This article centres on four Colombian NGOs who focus on victims of conflict, paying particular attention to the substantial body of material which they collect and curate related to their work, their activities, and the victims that they represent, and which thus comprise a form of unofficial, grassroots archives of the Colombian conflict. The article details the process...
Archival Values: Essays in Honor of Mark A. Greene is an archetypal Festschrift with 23 essays on each of the 11 Society of American Archivists Core Values of Archivists. This is primarily a book about archival professionalism, as Scott Cline’s framing essay offers the values as "integral to the archival endeavor
Advocacy and Awareness for Archivists is at once a practical guide and a call to action to consistently communicate the work and impact of archives at the local, regional, and national levels. As an expansion of the Archival Fundamentals Series, the book places the work of advocacy as being central to the archives profession. However, it neglects to incorporate contemporary...
This paper traces the transformation of More Product, Less Process or MPLP from a processing methodology to a principle that has supported a growing toolbox of practices. It highlights the seeds of that principle, which are rooted in Greene and Meissner’s effort to shift professional focus away from processing minutiae and toward access to and use of archival materials. Although...
The Internet has become an increasingly important forum for societal activism, as event mobilization, member organization, and some actions have moved online. These new types of activities, often facilitated by diverse social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, form an increasingly important part of contemporary social movements’ and organizations...