Reclaiming Indigenous Research in Higher Education challenges basic assumptions of Western methodologies by demonstrating the value of Indigenous approaches to social scientific research. Contributors argue that Western institutions have long marginalized Indigenous perspectives in higher education, overlooking or outright dismissing the unique experiences of Indigenous students...
In Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices, Catherine Russell explores the impact of Walter Benjamin’s ideas on filmmakers who use archival film footage in their works. With thorough and compelling analysis, Archiveology is a thought-provoking read for any archivist interested in the transformative power of archival material.
Archival staff in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (RBSC) at Princeton University Library lacked a fully-equipped digital processing workstation to capture, transfer, and secure born-digital and digitized archival content for long-term preservation and access. Staff recently conducted a survey that included information about the digital...
Review of Anthony Cocciolo's Moving Image and Sound Collections for Archivists.
Book review of Classroom Action: Human Rights, Critical Activism, and Community-Based Education by Ajay Heble, ed. Classroom Action poses questions that can and should be of interest to archivists and special collections librarians, particularly those interested in social justice education, radical teaching practices, and community partnerships.
McNabb introduces the definitions, histories, and cultures of nonbinary individuals and provides scholars, archivists, librarians, and teachers with an array of resources to research the history and contemporary experiences of nonbinary people. Although the text privileges gender variance in Western nations and could have included more on gender theory, McNabb offers a strong...
In work for his 1979 book The Death Camp Treblinka, Alexander Donat began the process of locating survivors of the camp and recording their histories. In a telling testament to the lethality of this place, he could identify only sixty-eight survivors. Analysis of Donat’s early findings—emerging six years prior to the publication of any major academic monograph on the subject...
This review of Participatory Heritage, edited by Henriette Roued-Cunliffe and Andrea Copeland, focuses on the book's relevance to the archives field. It highlights some of the chapters that will be most relevant to archivists, provides overviews and highlights of each of the book's three sections, discusses some of the main themes that come up throughout the book, and mentions a...
The Silence of the Archive by David Thomas, Simon Fowler, and Valerie Johnson promises to investigate the causes of archival silence, and to find solutions for dealing with these silences. The topic is timely and important at a time when distrust of power is high, and there exists a concomitant expectation of finding truth in the archives. The book is reticent in its...
Displaced Archives, edited by James Lowry, addresses the concept of archives that have been removed due to war, conflict, or other international strife.
Phillips's book provides a unique look at the history of local history archives and methods of administering local history archives in public libraries, including management practices, how to process archival collections, and caring for archival collections. The bulk of the text pertains to processing archival collections. Its intended audience is public library staff with little...
This article is primarily a case study of the Nuremberg Trials Project at the Harvard Law School Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It begins with an historical note about the war crimes trials and their documentary record, including the fate of the several tons of trial documents that were distributed in 1949. The second part of the article is a description of the Harvard Law...
Seeking to revitalize a special collections program at a Tier 1 aspirant university, the author introduced a variety of contemporary and innovative management strategies along with new outreach opportunities to demonstrate its value toward fulfilling the university's strategic plan. The revitalization efforts included creating a manuscript and rare book collection development...
While a small, but growing number of institutions offer access to born-digital collections, there is scant literature documenting researcher interaction with these materials. This paper addresses this gap through documenting and analyzing researcher interactions to portions of born-digital collections at New York University (NYU) Libraries, with the cooperation of NYU’s Fales...
In 2013, Kent State University’s Department of Special Collections and Archives launched the Black Campus Movement (BCM) Collection Development project to acknowledge the imperfection of past collection development practices that resulted in a scarcity of documentation from historically underrepresented communities. The department ventured to strengthen its holdings by acquiring...
Book review of Curators by Lance Grande.
With global perspectives from librarians and archivists who promote innovative methods to improve services to LGBTQ populations, Queer Library Alliance serves as an excellent primer and resource for critical thinking about how information professionals can best serve queer communities.
The literature of a professional community provides insights into what members of that community value and underscores key professional issues. Periodic analyses of professional literature are an important way for these communities to identify trends that deserve further exploration. This article introduces the use of corpus analysis tools such as Voyant Tools and discusses their...
The Records and Archives Division of the Office of the Missouri Secretary of State (hereafter MSA) received two National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) grants for the purpose of establishing an electronic records program at the Missouri State Archives. The first grant covered planning, staff training and a consultant who determined that minor modifications...
The Library of Congress subject headings have been examined in the past for their classification of subjects relating to race, gender, and sexuality. Overlooked is subject headings that relate to disabilities. In the course of creating records for the archival and object material that form the P.T. Barnum Digital Collection, the project discovered the imperfections of the Library...
The growing number of case studies on the ethical issues faced in cultural heritage digitization calls for a discussion of this generally neglected dimension of digitization. The importance of the ethical dimension is also supported by implicit and explicit assumptions that well-established approaches to ethics in archives, libraries, and museums do not work with digitization...
Our digital memories are threatened by archival hubris, technical misdirection, and simplistic application of rules to protect privacy rights. The obsession with the technical challenge of digital preservation has blinded much of the archival community to the challenges, created by the digital transition, to the other core principles of archival science - namely, appraisal (what...
For the past several decades, information communication technologies (ICTs) have been changing the way we create, share, and keep our records and data. How are we adapting? Today, individuals and organizations are increasingly creating, sharing, and storing information of all kinds in the cloud, some of them with the same expectations of privacy, access, intellectual rights, and...
The rapid development of information and communication technologies pose significant challenges to archival theory and practice. The analysis of the dominant information operators of the archival institutions in the respective paradigms of archival history shows that today’s internet-based services can replicate all the main functions of the archival institutions, at least at the...
The University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) Libraries is in its third year of implementing the open-source archival collection management application ArchivesSpace, and is sharing UNLV-developed code that extends ArchivesSpace’s built-in functions. The case study demonstrates how adopting and building upon community-created code and developing original local code is improving...