The 2019 conference of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) took a broad look at climate change and special collections. Topics covered included climatological shifts, the environmental impacts of collecting and maintaining collections, and the roles archives have played in researching and documenting climate change. This conference succeeded in advancing crucial...
The Leo Castelli Gallery launched pivotal mid-twentieth-century artistic careers, including those of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Although well-studied for its artistic impact, the Castelli archives—as well as those of other gallery artists such as Frank Stella and early collectors such as Burton and Emily Hall Tremaine—include a curious trove of artists’ financial...
Cultural heritage institutions with digital resources, ranging from digitized collections to online finding aids, have increasingly pursued creative solutions to make their collections more open and reach more users. One strategy for increasing access to digital cultural heritage resources is the addition of links or uploaded media to the Wikimedia environment. However, existing...
College preparatory (“prep”) schools have their roots in the New England region of the United States; many predate the nation's most illustrious colleges and universities. The archives at these schools contain items of importance to American history in the 1800s. However, few schools have trained archivists managing their physical collections and even fewer have created digital...
This article analyses the previously unexplored archives of the British charity, Carers UK, and its predecessor organizations, from its formation in 1965 to the present day. We argue that the archive is a valuable resource for social, political, and economic histories of care in the home, women’s work, feminist campaigns, and charitable organizations in the UK and beyond. It...
Four categories of co-creator shape web archivists
This study analyzes the use of social networks in the Arab national archives, the availability of a strategy for their use (objectives, content), and the numbers and specialization of staff managing and updating the archives’ content on social networks. It also examines which social platforms are used by archives, the number of their participants and followers, and to what extent...
Academic librarians have complex and numerous professional identities. We are researchers, teachers, artists, administrators and technologists. Many of us have advanced degrees in other fields, in which we may or may not remain active. We experience burnout and impostor syndrome, experience and confront racism in our workplaces, and are strongly affected by university politics...
This article reports on the findings of a survey issued to Canadian archivists regarding their understanding and experiences of secondary trauma. As exploratory research, the article summarizes findings of the survey and identifies emerging themes based on qualitative analysis of the open-ended questions. Emerging themes relate to the difficulty of defining what constitutes a...
Although records have traditionally been defined by their physical form, our research reveals that records documenting marginalized communities disrupt these limiting definitions by surfacing the ways that community members conceive of the agency of records. Based on focus groups we conducted with fifty-four community members at five different Southern California–based community...
Archival Futures is the most recent addition to the body of literature on archival futurism. Consisting of nine essays written by mostly academic lecturers or professors from the UK, Australia, Canada and the United States, this volume considers the impact of technology on the future of archives. Major technical concerns for the future include big data, blockchain, artificial...
For some fifty years, 8mm/Super 8 movie film was a widespread format for home movies and amateur hobbyists; yet the films and projection or telecine transfer equipment are now aging and obscure, presenting a difficulty for archivists and filmmakers. Online DIY solutions usually involve photographing the film with a DSLR and macro bellows, requiring a high degree of expertise and...
Things Great and Small: Collections Management Policies, 2nd edition, by John E. Simmons is a helpful overview and guide for crafting museum collections management policies.
For a thorough understanding of current descriptive best practices, consult Putting Descriptive Standards to Work, edited by Kris Kiesling and Christopher J. Prom, with modules written by Cory L. Nimer, Kelcy Shepherd, Katherine M. Wisser, and Aaron Rubinstein. This volume covers modules seventeen through twenty of the Trends in Archives Practice series from the Society of...
The edited volume, Feminists Among Us: Resistance and Advocacy in Library Leadership, sets out to describe the practices of feminist library leaders, as well as to interrogate why library leadership in the United States and Canada is not more explicitly feminist. The volume succeeds by articulating and employing an expansive definition of feminism and feminist leadership.
Fort Monroe, located in Hampton, Virginia, was a United States Army post until its deactivation in 2011. President Barack Obama proclaimed Fort Monroe a national monument due to its complex history, including its ties to slavery and emancipation. This paper outlines an ongoing research project designed to identify and humanize both the enslaved who helped build the fort and those...
Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures considers how materials documenting lesbian life and culture can impact identity, shape narratives, and build community. This review provides an overview of each chapter and thoughts on author Jean Bessette’s ideas about archives and archival work.
Archivists have included relationship information as a component of contextual and content description; however, they have not been called on to formalize that information. Rather, relationships have been identified and defined through informal narrative contexts, and depend on the archivist’s interpretative work and determination. Additionally, descriptive standards provide...
The Complete Guide to Personal Digital Archiving provides insight from across the profession to distill the daunting process of wrangling a digital disarray into something shareable and preservable. This book guides information professionals through instruction, outreach, and on into larger ramifications of personal digital archiving.
In recent years, the idea that the algorithms behind for-profit search engines are somehow neutral or unbiased has been heavily critiqued but for those who still hold onto a belief of objectivity and accuracy, Safiya Umoja Noble presents a clear and well-researched argument against such naiveté. These algorithms and the searches they drive are instead, Noble argues, a part of...
Topographies of Whiteness: Mapping Whiteness in Library and Information Science addresses the historical, contemporary, and continuing effects of whiteness in LIS. This review critiques the edited work as a whole and considers how LIS professionals can use individual chapters to both understand and upend systemic racism.
The issue of preserving information about nuclear waste for an extremely long period of time raises questions about ways to transmit knowledge to future generations. There is an ongoing discussion about the design of a message and the sustainability of different storage media. Information preservation in the really long term is, however, only partly a matter of technology; it is...
This article is a case study comparing three large-scale digitization projects at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) Libraries: the Culinary Union Workers Local 226 Photographs, the Nevada Digital Newspaper Project, and the Entertainment Project. The authors compare the project management, workflows, and decision-making related to the many aspects of digitizing special...
Music Preservation and Archiving Today, a collection of essays edited by Norie Guthrie and Scott Carlson documents some of the most pressing issues confronting contemporary music archivists, particularly those working with popular music and their relevant communities. This review presents a summary of the essays included and considers the breadth of questions asked and answered...
This book review analyzes two books which address archival history and practices through an international perspective.