An educative intervention: assisting in the self-assessment of archival practice in 12 community service organisations

There is a need for systemic improvement in the management of care records in Australia. This has been highlighted by government inquiries, media coverage and research literature relating to the significance of records for those who experience out-of-home care. The Who Am I? project – an interdisciplinary collaboration between historians, social workers and archivists – sought to address this concern and support positive change in 12 participating community service organisations (CSOs) in Victoria. To provide a framework for practice improvement, research archivists on the Who Am I? team designed the Self-Assessment Tool for Archives. Based on an action research methodology and influenced by the Records Continuum, this was an ‘educative intervention’ for the CSOs, as well as the participating archivists.     

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 But we also need to be agile and flexible, remembering that anything we come up with today will be superseded at some point in the future – increasingly, in the very near future.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.     

Online Finding Aids: Are They Practical?

ABSTRACT

This article explores the uses, practicality, and problems involved in creating online finding aids by state-funded university archivists across the nation. It examines various aspects of online finding aids such as financial considerations, its importance as a research tool, timelines, demographics, and use. The more technical side is also explored by inquiring how finding aids are created (e.g., EAD/XML, HTML), whether they have been reformatted before appearing on the web, and what archivists believe are the best methods for their creation. Finally, problems that the participants have encountered along the way are reviewed as well as how archivists dealt with them. The study involved 16 university archivists from state-supported institutions and one from a private university. The research for this article is based on the responses to a 20-question survey that was administered by the author by telephone or e-mail. The research was further supported by an examination of the recent literature that has appeared in archival journals as well as contacting archivists who are working on large online projects. The goal of this article is to assist archivists in identifying potential problems in the development of online finding aids while promoting their presence on the Internet as an important research tool.     

First Entry: Report on a Qualitative Exploratory Study of Novice User Experience with Online Finding Aids

ABSTRACT

Many of those now accessing archives through online finding aids are encountering primary materials (albeit virtually) for the first time. These users are often unfamiliar with finding aid structure, terminology, and principles. This article reports on a qualitative, exploratory study of a subset of these novice users. The study concentrated on four key components of online finding aids: terminology, navigation, display, and structure. The goal was to discover by what route users accomplished a given task, to determine what elements on the site helped or hindered them in completing the task, and to gain insight into their overall experience with a range of styles of online finding aids. Findings suggest that site structure often presupposed users' knowledge of archival principles. Therefore, what may seem to archivists and their web designers to be elegant solutions to resolute issues in online finding aids, in fact, confused or eluded novice users. However, findings suggest, as well, that participants went through a rapid self-education process while completing the study, leading them to more efficient searching and to a higher level of ease and confidence as they explored a variety of online finding aids.     

Archival appraisal practice in U.S. state archives and records management programs

The quantity of government records has grown dramatically since the rapid development of information technology starting in the mid-twentieth century. This ever-expanding body of records has challenged the limited resources of government archives. Though U.S. government archivists constantly try to identify valuable government records among the geometrically increasing total, in order to justify spending public money on their preservation, little is known about how U.S. state archives and records management programs go about the process. The study discussed in this paper is the first to empirically investigate nationwide archival appraisal practice in U.S. state archives and records management programs. The study answered two research questions: How do U.S. state archivists and records managers conceptually define archival appraisal? How do U.S. state archivists and records managers practice archival appraisal of state government records? The study used an online survey and interviews for data collection and SPSS software and NVivo8 software for data analysis. This paper discusses the research topic and concludes with recommendations for practitioners and further studies.     

基于互联网政务服务平台的文件归档与管理:记录观

档案的“记录性”是档案理论与实践的核心根源。论文首先梳理了档案学界对“记录”的认识,从记录主体、记录客体、记录方式三方面对比分析了传统环境与互联网环境下政府档案记录的特点,并总结出演变的影响因素。在此基础上,结合文件连续体理论、档案第四范式及档案多元论,对互联网政务服务背景下的档案记录观进行了理论阐释,提出政府档案记录的客体化、扁平化、多元化趋势,并从微观事务证据和宏观历史叙述两方面反思了该现象对档案学理论的影响。论文最后指出,档案记录现象的变化从根本上而言是由来源记录的发展所致,从记录观的层面对这一现象进行分析,为我们深化档案来源原则研究提供了一种参考。     

Controlling the Production of EAD Encoded Documents,Extracting Metadata and Publishing Them on the Web: Methods and Tools,France

SUMMARY

This article presents four projects geared towards providing the community of EAD users with methods and tools to control the quality of archival finding aids, to extract metadata from them in Dublin Core and qualified Dublin Core for use in OAI-PMH repositories, and to publish them on the Web along with the digital images produced by digitization of the material described. The first two projects were conducted in 2004 by the Centre Historique des Archives Nationales together with AJLSM and resulted in the writing of reports and programs. The other projects are PLEADE and Navimages, which consist of open source applications that allow the building of Web-based search and viewing applications. All these tools can be used by archivists to create a complete publishing suite.     

Metadata as a machine for feeling in Germaine Greer’s archive

ABSTRACT

What happens when a human coder meets a machine one? This article explores this question with reference to the archive of Professor Germaine Greer: Australian-born feminist, performer, scholar, and professional controversialist. It does so by staging two very different data encounters with the 70,000-word finding aid for the print journalism series, a key component of Greer’s archive. The first encounter is archivist’s creation of the finding aid; the second, archivist and literary scholar’s interpretation of this archival metadata using sentiment analysis. Interrogating these activities side-by-side opens up a productive middle ground between humanities scholars and computer technicians, between historians and archivists, between the hand made and the machine made.

This article argues that sentiment analysis offers a new and highly productive method of interrogating archival metadata, and that, as a method which privileges emotive understandings of content, it is particularly appropriate to the study of feminist archives like Greer’s. It also argues that these kinds of detailed finding aids are new datasets that reward analysis in their own right, and particularly when considered in dialogue with—rather than simply used as straightforward navigational tools for—the ‘original’ archival content.     

Contemporary Archival Diplomatics as a Method of Inquiry: Lessons Learned from Two Research Projects

This article explores the use of contemporary archival diplomatics as a method of inquiry in two recent electronic records research projects, namely,The Protection of the Integrity of Electronic Records Project (the UBC Project) and theInternational Research on the Preservation of Authentic Records in Electronic Records Systems Project (the InterPARES 1 Project). The first part of the article examines the historical and contemporary literary warrant underpinning diplomatics as a method of inquiry; the second part provides case studies of two illustrative examples of the process and results of the application of contemporary archival diplomatics in the abovementioned research projects; the third part considers the current status and possible future directions for the use of contemporary archival diplomatics as a research method and concludes with some observations about the value of multiple methods and alternative interpretive frameworks in archival research.