Recordkeeping metadata and archival description: a revisit

Metadata go through an evolutionary process from creation to archival preservation. During this process, some metadata are re-used (inheritance), other metadata are eliminated (extinction) and still others are updated or newly generated (mutation). Unlike other literature that focuses on metadata inheritance and mutation, this evolutionary view highlights the extinction of metadata. As such, it might raise awareness about the appraisal and selection of metadata in digital curation practice.     

法德档案工作考察散记

应法国国家档案局、德国克虏伯档案馆之邀,由北京市档案局、市外经贸委和市贸促会共同组织的北京企业档案工作交流考察团一行17人,于1999年6月底至7月初赴法德两国.在欧洲,我们所到之处洋溢着浓厚的文化和艺术氛围,其久远的档案工作发展历史,丰富的馆藏,科学有序的管理手段和方法,档案的开放与利用程度都给我们留下了深刻的印象.     

On the crest of a wave: transforming the archival future

The profession of digital archivist is crystallising, fundamentally challenging traditional archival roles. The very nature of digital records also challenges the sustainability of archival systems and collections. Records that used to stay stable for decades in an analogue world now risk being lost or damaged within moments of creation. How should archivists react to these changes? Archivists have to lift ourselves out of our analogue environment and focus more effort on forging a new path, to reposition archives, archival institutions and archival practitioners more strategically for the future. To do this, archivists must resist the temptation to think that we and we alone – as people, as archivists or as today’s archivists as opposed to yesterday’s archivists – can come up with the ultimate solution to the world’s recordkeeping problems. Archivists must keep innovating, absolutely. But we also need to be agile and flexible, remembering that anything we come up with today will be superseded at some point in the future – increasingly, in the very near future. Archivists need to forge links with archives, systems and people in order to come up with approaches to records and archives care that remain usable now and flexible well into the future.     

Education and research in archival science: General tendencies

This text is essentially based on works carried out for a research which was subsidized from 1997 to 2000 by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The goal of this study was to examine the general tendencies of education and research in archival science. First, a review of the literature published from 1985 to 1998 allowed us to establish a state of the art. Then, a survey was completed with a questionnaire which has been sent to educational institutions, national archives institutions and researchers. Answers were received from more than 70 different countries. With regards to the education program, the analysis of data shows that there have seen notable progresses. More than the growth of the number of programs, we must especially recognize the constant improvement of its contents, which is achieved in conformity with the propositions made in the literature. As for the research, it exists a community of ideas about fields and themes to be privileged even if there is an apparent division of the researchers into two groups. The first group distinguishes itself by its cohesion by unanimously recognizing a small number (nine) of priorities in research in archival science. The second group shows multiple interests which cover 30 research themes. The author conclude in saying that the development of education and research in archival science are on their way, but nothing has yet been won. It is important to accentuate the efforts to insure a durable life to education and research as pillars of the discipline. This text is an overview of a project which has been subsidized by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) from 1997 to 2000. It has been presented in September 2000 in Seville (Spain) at the 10th Symposium of the Section for Archival Education and Training of the International Council on Archives (CIA/SAE).     

档案数字化面临的风险及其防控

档案数字化建设需要投入大量的人力、物力,面临着安全保密和数字档案真实性、完整性、可读性维护等方面的风险。全面、客观认识档案数字化面临的风险,积极做好应对档案数字化风险的思想、知识、技术、人才、资金、标准、制度等方面的准备,采取有效措施做好风险防控工作,对于顺利开展档案数字化工作具有十分重要的作用。     

Production and content management implications for archival projects: a snapshot in May 2005

The British Library, under the auspices of the Joint Committee on Legal Deposit's sub‐committee for e‐journals, is conducting a pilot project to lay the groundwork for possible legislation for the legal deposit of electronic journals. One component of the project has been to understand the production environment that governs the creation of the published data, the content management systems that publishers have deployed and the ways in which publishers are able to distribute content to their partners. This work is a snapshot of a cross‐section of the UK journal‐publishing industry taken in May 2005.     

The end of collecting: Towards a new purpose for archival appraisal

In this essay, the author ruminates on the relationship between collecting and archival appraisal. He argues that collecting does not necessarily equal appraisal, although society and even archivists value it as an important function. The author stresses that the critical need is for archivists to have a clear perspective, whether highly theoretical or immensely practical, of what it is they hope to accomplish in appraising and that they need to document this process so that future researchers and archivists can understand what archival appraisal meant. As it is, archives might become more valued as important cultural symbols than for the records they actually hold. The notion of an “end” of collecting is in the sense that collecting is appraising, but appraising elevated to a professional function requiring more care, deliberate thought, and self-evaluation.     

Excluding archival silences: Oral history and historical absence

Despite our society's increasing reliance on electronic documentation, to-date archives remain, largely, material repositories of cultural memory. It is an accepted historical problematic, however, that culture is often resistant to material preservation. There exists an undeniable and profound tension between scholarly efforts to reconstruct history and interpret cultural traditions and the fragmentary, and often limited, material record. That is to say, scholarship is shaped by a sinuous negotiation around the historical silences that encompass all of material culture. Historical silences, however, can at times be marginalized (or at best excluded) by a sensitive configuration of material evidence with oral history.Excluding Archival Silences: Oral History and Historical Absence uses a historically and geographically specific example of oral history to engage in a more generalist discussion of how oral reflection, especially when shaped by material evidences, can be an especially effective tool for preserving the dynamics of culture that often remain undocumented.     

Jewish archives and archival documents: Israel and the Diaspora

Throughout 2000 years of exile, Jews amassed documentation reflecting their creativity and organization wherever they lived. Communal archives dating since the Middle Ages have survived. In addition, documentation about Jews is found in archives of rulers, governments, and cities. Conditions changed in the twentieth century due to new developments: the rise of the Jewish national movement, leading to the establishment of the State of Israel, and the destruction of thousands of communities and their cultural possessions in the Holocaust perpetrated against European Jewry by the Nazis. The centrality of Eretz Israel and Israel in Zionist ideology led to the concept that it should be the locale for Jewish archives. Thus, for example, in 1933 the archives of the World Zionist Movement were transferred from Berlin to Jerusalem. The situation became more acute after WWII: If entire or partial archives of destroyed communities survived, to whom do they belong—the states in which they were created or the Jewish people? This dilemma also faces existing communities without archival consciousness. Should everything be concentrated in Israel? In recent years, there has been a change in the paradigm of Israel–Diaspora relations. In a global transnational world, with constantly developing technical means, archives can remain in the communities that created them, provided they are maintained and made available to the public in accordance with accepted archival practice.     

Contexts built and found: a pilot study on the process of archival meaning-making

Over the last 20 years, humanities and archival scholars have theorized the ways in which archives imbue records with meaning. However, archival scholars have not sufficiently examined how users understand the meaning of the records they find. Building on the premise that how users come to make meaning from records is greatly in need of examination, this paper reports on a pilot study of four book history students and their processes of archival meaning-making. We focus in particular on behaviors of an interpretive rather than forensic nature. This article includes a discussion of the theoretical concepts and scholarly literature that shaped our goals for this paper. It then discusses the methodology and our interpretations of the research findings, before turning to a discussion of the findings’ implications and directions for future work.     

The zine anthology as archive: archival genres and practices

Jessie Lymn is a PhD Candidate at University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and a casual academic in the Information Studies programs at both UTS and Charles Sturt University. Her doctoral research focuses on the archival practices of subcultural communities and how this furthers temporal and spatial understandings of archives.

Building on Eichhorn’s concept of ‘archival genres’, this article considers the recent spate of zine anthologies published in Australia and the United States as examples of these genres. It proposes that the anthologies are archives of content, form and practice, given that they commonly reproduce entire zines as visual material, not just text, and are produced by members of zine communities. This article argues that the anthologies’ narratives, presentation and distribution preserve ideologies of zine culture and that archival genres create spaces for the preservation of practices.     

Afterglow: Conceptions of record and evidence in archival discourse

In the last ten years, influential voices within and on the periphery of the record keeping community have succeeded in establishing the preservation of “evidence” as the governing purpose of contemporary archival theory and methods development. Afterglow offers a critique of the concept of evidence in archival discourse. Its main contention is that one can put records into evidence; one cannot set out to put evidence into records. The argument rests on the following assertions: (1) current discussions of evidence rest on a blindness to certain contradictions embedded in claims that record keeping principally involves evidence keeping, or “evidence management”; (2) a politics of temporality, under which an interplay of disciplinary knowledge claims and professional interest is discernible, helps to account for the contemporary rhetoric describing the relationship between “record” and “evidence”, and (3) the late-twentieth century legal, political, and cultural climate, along with the technological environment, explain the increasing prominence of “evidence” in these knowledge claims and professional ambitions. The essay concludes with recommendations for addressing these issues. Thanks go to Terry Cook, Visiting Professor in the Archival Studies Programme, Department of History, University of Manitoba, and co-editor of this series of essays, for his close reading and detailed comments on this essay. Particularly invaluable was his knowledge of historical and contemporary archival thinking on the notion of evidence.     

The archival nexus: rethinking the interplay of archival ideas about the nature, value, and use of records

This article traces an alternative to the evidence/memory dichotomy in archival discourse by highlighting the nexus between archival ideas about the nature, value, and use of records as viewed and imagined through the lens of an archival concept of evidence as a relation between record and event. This article then explores how “the archival nexus” provides a different framework for understanding the various meaning-making processes surrounding archives both within and outside the archival repository, and for rethinking the role of the archivist and the position of the archival discipline with regard to other disciplines that explicitly address and engage with the archive.     

Beyond chip monks and paper tigers: towards a new culture of archival format specialists

The emergence of the new format of electronic/digital records provides the opportunity for archivists to reconsider the presumed format-neutrality of professional practice. As research in electronic records has served to re-emphasise, without an understanding of the needs and forms of material, then the work of archivists can have a profound impact on the evidential value and long-term research potential of the material. This paper attempts to broaden the debate about the requirements of all archival formats, and to build a new regime of 21st-century format specialists.

Archival temples, archival prisons: Modes of power and protection

Public and privateorganizations depend, for their disciplinaryand surveillance power, on the creation andmaintenance of records. Entire societies maybe emprisoned in Foucauldian panopticism, asystem of surveillance and power-knowledge,based on and practised by registration, filing,and records. Archives resemble temples asinstitutions of surveillance and powerarchitecturally, but they also function assuch, because the panoptical archivedisciplines and controls throughknowledge-power. Inside the archives, therituals, surveillance, and discipline serve tomaintain the power of the archives and thearchivist. But the archives' power is (orshould be) the citizen's power too. Theviolation of human rights is documented in thearchives and the citizen who defends himselfappeals to the archives. People value storage as a means to keep account of thepresent for the future. In order to be useableas instruments of empowerment and liberation,archives have to be secured as storage memoryserving society's future functional memories.     

Factors influencing the integration of digital archival resources: a constructivist grounded theory approach

This paper discusses the factors influencing the integration of digital archival resources in China. The integration of digital archival resources as discussed in this article refers to the way in which information contained within dispersed digital archives within a country, or a specific area such as a province, city or county, can be successfully integrated, classified and restructured around specific topics and actual needs in order to realise optimal social sharing and utilisation of digital archival resources. There is little Chinese published research regarding what factors influence the integration of digital archival resources. This article, therefore, uses Charmaz’s Constructivist Grounded Theory approach and draws forth the theory that archivists’ cognition on the integration of digital archival resources and the context (which consists of the organisational culture of archives, archives management systems, and the laws and regulations on archives disclosure), influence the integration of digital archival resources, and these factors interact with each other. This theory can also be illustrated by the model: cognition–context–action. This research can provide some recommendations for the promotion and sustainable development of the integration of digital archival resources in China as well as other countries.