Review of Leading and Managing Archives and Manuscripts Programs, edited by Peter Gottlieb and David W. Carmichael, examining the main topics of leadership and management of people in archival programs, its place in the archival literature, and its potential audience.
This book is about the value of archives in all of its connotations: value as evidence, memory, culture, source for a variety of practical purposes, and, most interestingly, value as means of financial gain for corporations. Each chapter emphasizes values in a variety of contexts: from Malawi, Australia, and the United Kingdom, to India, Hong Kong and Japan. In the process of...
Professional literature and case studies demonstrate that processing metrics are valuable in advocating for resources, informing priorities, supporting grant proposals, and predicting costs for collection storage and care. This article analyzes responses to an archival processing metrics survey that gathered perspectives and practices from archivists working in a variety of...
The Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and the Society for American Archivists (SAA) joint standard, Standardized Statistical Measures and Metrics for Public Services in Archival Repositories and Special Collections Libraries, provides a shared vocabulary and set of statistical measures that help archival and...
Seedbanks, or so-called archival arks of the apocalypse, are addressing accelerating anthropocentric alterations to the environment by collecting, storing, and preserving seeds. These are specialized archival repositories that approach, frame, and use seeds as documents for agricultural and scientific research, classification and preservation work, and various other archival and...
The National Digital Stewardship Alliance surveyed practitioners in 2012 and again in 2017 to gauge, among other things, how satisfied they were with their organizations’ digital preservation function. This study seeks to understand what causes the high and rising levels of dissatisfaction that practitioners reported. We interviewed 21 digital stewards and asked them to describe...
The edited volume, Feminist Histories and Digital Media, sets out to explore the ways in which the field has grown and changed since the advent of the first reminist archival research projects 20 years ago. Intended as a signpost by the editors for future research in the field, the volume succeeds in informing, inspiring, and inciting researchers to move forward with using...
In the opening of The Future of Literary Archives: Diasporic and Diverse Collections at Risk, editor David C. Sutton is careful to note that the various chapters in the volume are related to the work of the Diasporic Literary Archives Network. As such, the book itself serves as a demonstrated result of the Network’s years of work and collaboration across international boundaries...
Building on the procedures and principles set forth in the Society of American Archivists’ Guidelines for Reappraisal and Deaccessioning, this volume of case studies edited by Laura Uglean Jackson provides ample instruction and examples from a variety of practitioners focused on these often neglected components of the archival collection management enterprise. Reappraisal and...
This article examines whether teaching with primary sources can cultivate civic engagement by investigating the competencies involved in developing student civic engagement and aligning these with outcomes from teaching with primary sources. Using three examples from Brooklyn Connections, a primary source-based education outreach program that offers a free standards-based and...
Pushing the Margins: Women of Color and Intersectionality in LIS Pushing the Margins consists of seventeen essays centered around the question: “what does it mean to be a woman of color in librarianship?” The responses reframe the discussion of the goals of librarianship to focus on inclusion and social justice within the profession. The volume is informed by the theory of...
Ethical Questions in Name Authority Control is a new and thoughtful addition to the metadata and cataloging field of study and practice. Consisting of eighteen essays written by a number of libraries, archives, and information scholars, this edited volume investigates and responds to a number of ethical questions regarding name authority control.These include topics such as the...
The term “project management” brings to mind images of executive boardrooms or software teams, but projects on a large and small scale happen every day within a library. While many library science programs equip students with technical expertise, not many programs specifically offer project management training. Drawing upon over twenty years of working in public, special, and...
Stacy T. Kowalczyk wrote Digital Curation for Libraries and Archives as an introductory textbook for students in information, library, and archival science, as well as for working librarians, archivists, and information professionals. It provides a good balance of theory and practice. It succeeds as a textbook but could be challenging for working professionals without a strong...
Laura A. Millar’s A Matter of Facts: The Value of Evidence in an Information Age sets out to convince the general public of the value of evidence and why it matters by presenting several stories about evidence through the lens of recordkeeping. Millar frames the book around how do we trust information, especially in this post-truth world, and examines it through three main...
Reference Librarianship & Justice: History, Practice & Praxis exemplifies its call for an emphasis on social justice and shared ways of knowing in reference librarianship by incorporating contributors with diverse experiences with reference librarianship, as well as maintaining an inclusive definition of reference librarianship and a flexible organizational structure. The authors...
The goal of this research project is to establish a foundational competency framework for Canadian archivists. This was achieved by performing a qualitative analysis of established frameworks and generating a foundational competency framework from that analysis. The framework reflects current skills and knowledge requirements. The competency framework is meant to capture all...
Records created about archival materials—including deeds of gift, collection-related correspondence, and other accession documentation—play an important role, particularly when it comes to providing access and maintaining partnerships with other recordkeepers. This case study will describe a project to review the accession documentation of all collections within Augusta...
A collection of essays written by members of the Archives of the Sciences Working Group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Science in the Archives: Pasts, Presents, Futures leads the reader on an exploration of the history of data preservation, data management, and information organization in the sciences. This review examines the themes connecting the essays...
Jentery Sayers’s edited volume moves forward long-standing debates within the Digital Humanities. This collection of essays increase the reader’s general understanding of what the digital humanities are and will leave the reader with more questions around who the digital humanities are. Many of these essays work against expected disciplinary norms and assumptions and the reader...
Learner-Centered Pedagogy: Principles and Practice combines theory and application to explain why “who we are as people matters” in regards to learning. Although the text is written for instructional librarians teaching information literacy, the scenarios are easily adapted to a special collections context, making this a key text for any archivist, especially those with...
Sustainable Thinking: Ensuring Your Library’s Future in an Uncertain World explores strategies for how public libraries can become more sustainable organizations in a time of social and environmental disruptions. Sustainability, viewed through the lens of triple bottom line accounting, can be accomplished by understanding and prioritizing the needs of the communities that...
Currently, web archives are challenging for users to discover and use. Many archives and libraries are actively collecting web archives, but description in this area has been dominated by bibliographic approaches, which do not connect web archives to existing description or contextual information, and have often resulted in format-based silos. This is primarily because web...
In 2018 Exploring Rockingham’s Past (ERP) launched. ERP is an online repository created to house local records from the Rockingham County, Virginia circuit court. Just a little over a year before its launch, Clerk of the Court, Chaz Haywood entreated facility and graduate students within the history department of James Madison University to help develop community access to the...
Archivists who work directly with unique collections, as well as librarians and other professionals who coordinate digitization, generally agree that access should be prioritized. However, each group has its own goals, standards, and timelines that may conflict with those of their colleagues. The push to maximize access to collections may, in some cases, go so far as to influence...