Social justice impact of archives: a preliminary investigation

This article reports the first stage of a research collaboration that is elaborating the multiple relationships between archives and social justice. Specifically, it is developing narrative frameworks and diagrammatic representations to identify, understand, illustrate, and deploy the actual and potential social justice impact of archives, archivists, and archival repositories. A discussion of the broader and historical social justice landscape culminates with a working conceptualization-framework of social justice followed by an examination of the many methods and modes by which social justice can be an object of research. This is followed by an examination of the rising presence of social justice as an explicit and accelerating concern in four key English language archival journals before offering a working articulation and approach to an archival—social justice framework. A discussion of understanding and measuring impact, with specific reference to the framework of impact that we have chosen to deploy, culminates with an analysis of the social justice impact of archives as evidenced through two exemplary case studies. This is followed by a summation of key findings and a discussion of future plans to expand this research. The overall objective of these efforts is targeted toward elucidating how archives can be cast as having both positive and negative social justice consequences and demonstrating how archival work can serve social justice goals.     

Education for all in South Africa: developing a national system for quality assurance

The search for quality education is a world-wide phenomenon but it is particularly important in the developing world, where education is widely viewed as a key to individual and collective success. Traditionally, school performance has been measured by various test scores and South Africa's longstanding obsession with matriculation exam results exemplifies this focus. However, as policy makers in South Africa have been discovering since the transformation toward a democratic system of education for all began in 1994, developing a comprehensive system of quality assurance involves much more than keeping track of examination results. The purpose of this article is to describe and discuss the development of this system, using an emerging framework for the analysis and comparison of quality assurance systems.     

E-books, the latest word: proceedings from the Acquisitions Institute at Timberline Lodge

A panel which included a librarian, publisher and e-book providers presented issues confronting the growth of e-books in the academic library marketplace. The e-book market projections are a small part of the higher education book market. Frontlist titles are demanded by libraries with suppliers eager to supply such titles. However, publishers are feeling their way through various rights and contract issues as well as business models as they determine which frontlist titles to provide in electronic form. The instability of business partners has contributed to publisher delays in releasing titles as e-books. No one, (librarians, suppliers, publishers) is throwing in the towel on e-books but the position this format takes in the publishing industry and therefore in library collections in the near future is unsettled.