Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Reappraisal And Deaccessioning In Archives And Special Collections, Audra E. Yun

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Building on the procedures and principles set forth in the Society of American Archivists’ Guidelines for Reappraisal and Deaccessioning, this volume of case studies edited by Laura Uglean Jackson provides ample instruction and examples from a variety of practitioners focused on these often neglected components of the archival collection management enterprise. Reappraisal and Deaccessioning in Archives and Special Collections is the first book dedicated entirely to deaccessioning, and the first compilation of reappraisal and deaccessioning case studies “demonstrating the utility and applicability” of the SAA guidelines. This book is a solid resource for practitioners unsure of how to pilot …

Out Of The Archives And Into The Streets: Teaching With Primary Sources To Cultivate Civic Engagement, Jen Hoyer

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This article examines whether teaching with primary sources can cultivate civic engagement by investigating the competencies involved in developing student civic engagement and aligning these with outcomes from teaching with primary sources. Using three examples from Brooklyn Connections, a primary source-based education outreach program that offers a free standards-based and curriculum-aligned school partnership program for grades four through twelve, this case study illustrates the potential for using primary sources to cultivate skills, knowledge, and student agency. Through assessment of these examples in teaching with primary sources using protocols developed for evaluation of programs that focus on developing civic engagement, the …

Review Of Pushing The Margins: Women Of Color And Intersectionality In Lis, Carla N. Cain

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Pushing the Margins: Women of Color and Intersectionality in LIS

Pushing the Margins consists of seventeen essays centered around the question: “what does it mean to be a woman of color in librarianship?” The responses reframe the discussion of the goals of librarianship to focus on inclusion and social justice within the profession. The volume is informed by the theory of intersectionality and cites the feminist practice of consciousness-raising as a model for its conception. Topics covered include how to understand the unique pressures faced by women librarians of color, the need for recognition of the contributions of women of …

Review Of Ethical Questions In Name Authority Control, Itza A. Carbajal

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Ethical Questions in Name Authority Control is a new and thoughtful addition to the metadata and cataloging field of study and practice. Consisting of eighteen essays written by a number of libraries, archives, and information scholars, this edited volume investigates and responds to a number of ethical questions regarding name authority control.These include topics such as the privacy of the creator, use of geographic names for contested lands, critique of the use of gender in authority control systems, as well as considerations around multilingualism, to name a few. While the title mostly appeals to a particular field of work and …

Review Of Project Management In Libraries, Lydia Tang

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

The term “project management” brings to mind images of executive boardrooms or software teams, but projects on a large and small scale happen every day within a library. While many library science programs equip students with technical expertise, not many programs specifically offer project management training. Drawing upon over twenty years of working in public, special, and academic libraries as well as her formal training as a certified project management professional, Carly Wiggins Searcy provides a lean but approachable guide to project management applied to libraries. Using recognizable library-related scenarios, Searcy demystifies and clarifies the relevance of project management techniques …

Review Of Digital Curation For Libraries And Archives, Barbara Austen

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Stacy T. Kowalczyk wrote Digital Curation for Libraries and Archives as an introductory textbook for students in information, library, and archival science, as well as for working librarians, archivists, and information professionals. It provides a good balance of theory and practice. It succeeds as a textbook but could be challenging for working professionals without a strong technical background.

Toward A Competency Framework For Canadian Archivists, Anne Daniel, Amanda Oliver, Amanda Jamieson

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

The goal of this research project is to establish a foundational competency framework for Canadian archivists. This was achieved by performing a qualitative analysis of established frameworks and generating a foundational competency framework from that analysis. The framework reflects current skills and knowledge requirements. The competency framework is meant to capture all facets of managing an archives, including activities such as governance and human resources. It is intended to strike a balance among all aspects of archival practice. Future iterations should include emergent issues such as emotional labor and regional practices. This competency framework is intended to define and communicate …

Review Of A Matter Of Facts: The Value Of Evidence In An Information Age, Beaudry Rae Allen

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Laura A. Millar’s A Matter of Facts: The Value of Evidence in an Information Age sets out to convince the general public of the value of evidence and why it matters by presenting several stories about evidence through the lens of recordkeeping. Millar frames the book around how do we trust information, especially in this post-truth world, and examines it through three main questions: what is evidence, why is it important, and what do we ultimately do next?

Review Of Reference Librarianship & Justice: History, Practice & Praxis, Julie M. Porterfield

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Reference Librarianship & Justice: History, Practice & Praxis exemplifies its call for an emphasis on social justice and shared ways of knowing in reference librarianship by incorporating contributors with diverse experiences with reference librarianship, as well as maintaining an inclusive definition of reference librarianship and a flexible organizational structure. The authors represent the experiences of reference services in academic, public, and prison libraries. Additionally, of particular interest for this journal’s readership, there is the inclusion of archives and museums. As a result, a broad definition of the work and responsibilities associated with reference librarianship takes shape in the volume, which …

Issues Of Ownership: Leveraging Accession Documentation And Provenance Research To Improve Collection Access, Kara Flynn

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Records created about archival materials—including deeds of gift, collection-related correspondence, and other accession documentation—play an important role, particularly when it comes to providing access and maintaining partnerships with other recordkeepers. This case study will describe a project to review the accession documentation of all collections within Augusta University’s Special Collections & Institutional Archives, and the collections of the local historical society, held on deposit with the department.

Review Of Science In The Archives: Pasts, Presents, Futures, Emily A. Graham

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

A collection of essays written by members of the Archives of the Sciences Working Group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Science in the Archives: Pasts, Presents, Futures leads the reader on an exploration of the history of data preservation, data management, and information organization in the sciences. This review examines the themes connecting the essays and considers how researchers and historians of science understand the meaning of archives.

Review Of Making Things And Drawing Boundaries, Greta K. Suiter

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Jentery Sayers’s edited volume moves forward long-standing debates within the Digital Humanities. This collection of essays increase the reader’s general understanding of what the digital humanities are and will leave the reader with more questions around who the digital humanities are. Many of these essays work against expected disciplinary norms and assumptions and the reader is given multiple viewpoints to consider. Topics such as invisible labor and the value of labor, collaboration and inverting expertise expectations, and digital artifacts and how humanists study and/or create them, are given ample room for exploration and are examined from multiple perspectives with many …

Review Of Learner-Centered Pedagogy: Principles And Practice, Kayla Harris

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Learner-Centered Pedagogy: Principles and Practice combines theory and application to explain why “who we are as people matters” in regards to learning. Although the text is written for instructional librarians teaching information literacy, the scenarios are easily adapted to a special collections context, making this a key text for any archivist, especially those with responsibilities for outreach or instruction.

Describing Web Archives: A Computer-Assisted Approach, Gregory Wiedeman

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Currently, web archives are challenging for users to discover and use. Many archives and libraries are actively collecting web archives, but description in this area has been dominated by bibliographic approaches, which do not connect web archives to existing description or contextual information, and have often resulted in format-based silos. This is primarily because web archiving tools such as Archive-It arrange materials by seeds and groups of seeds, which reflect the complex technical process of web crawling or web recording, and are often not very meaningful to users or helpful for discovery. This article makes the case for arranging and …

Review Of Sustainable Thinking: Ensuring Your Library’S Future In An Uncertain World, Ben Goldman

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Sustainable Thinking: Ensuring Your Library’s Future in an Uncertain World explores strategies for how public libraries can become more sustainable organizations in a time of social and environmental disruptions. Sustainability, viewed through the lens of triple bottom line accounting, can be accomplished by understanding and prioritizing the needs of the communities that libraries serve. While not written with archives in mind, the book offers important insights for archivists, who collectively must do more to prepare for climate-driven disruptions to their work.

Exploring Rockingham County’S Past: Recapturing Local History And Promoting Accessibility, Kayla Heslin

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

In 2018 Exploring Rockingham’s Past (ERP) launched. ERP is an online repository created to house local records from the Rockingham County, Virginia circuit court. Just a little over a year before its launch, Clerk of the Court, Chaz Haywood entreated facility and graduate students within the history department of James Madison University to help develop community access to the records housed within his institution. Sadly, over the decades the records of the courthouse had fallen into disarray, rendering them useless. Seeing this as a significant loss of culture and heritage, Haywood and James Madison University began developing a platform that …

“Who’S Driving The Bus?” Or How Digitization Is Influencing Archival Collections, Kathelene Mccarty Smith, David Gwynn, Beth Ann Koelsch, Jennifer Motszko

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Archivists who work directly with unique collections, as well as librarians and other professionals who coordinate digitization, generally agree that access should be prioritized. However, each group has its own goals, standards, and timelines that may conflict with those of their colleagues. The push to maximize access to collections may, in some cases, go so far as to influence collecting policies. Is the lure of rapid digitization affecting best practices of arrangement and description? If online access to the collections is the ultimate goal, and if each stakeholder has a different perspective on how best to accomplish this, who decides …

Economic Provenance: The Financial Analysis Of Art Historical Records, Amy C. Whitaker

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

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 records and related correspondence. This paper argues that these records form an “economic provenance” that is important both to both art market analysis and art history. This economic context is sometimes overlooked because of the contested relationship between art and markets. In this context, the archive can …

Review Of The Rare Books And Manuscripts Section 2019 Conference, Elizabeth Hobart

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

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 conversations about anthropogenic climate change and special collections, including strategies for mitigation, responding to climate disasters, and ensuring long-term availability of library materials.

Assessing Impact Of Medium-Sized Institution Digital Cultural Heritage On Wikimedia Projects, Elizabeth Joan Kelly

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

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 literature detailing the process and results of such strategies centers primarily on the work of large research institutions and focuses on web analytics to show success of such projects. It is unclear if smaller institutions with niche and focused collections will see the same results as many …

Curating Care: Creativity, Women’S Work, And The Carers Uk Archive, Alice Hall, Hannah Tweed

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

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 gives voice to traditionally silenced populations of carers through a strikingly diverse range of letters, edited collections of fiction, minutes of meetings, video diaries, newsletters, and anthologies of creative writing. As a case study, the Carers UK archive provides an important …

Recognizing Co-Creators In Four Configurations: Critical Questions For Web Archiving, Amy Wickner

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Four categories of co-creator shape web archivists' practice and influence the development of web archives: social forces, users and uses, subjects of web archives, and technical agents. This paper illustrates how these categories of co-creator overlap and interact in four specific web archiving contexts. It recommends that web archivists acknowledge this complex array of contributors as a way to imagine web archives differently. A critical approach to web archiving recognizes relationships and blended roles among stakeholders; seeks opportunities for non-extractive archival activity; and acknowledges the value of creative reuse as an important aspect of preservation.

The Strategy Of Using Social Networks In The Arab Archives, Elsayed Salah Elsawy

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

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 the content of archives’ social platforms is archived. The study included twelve Arab national archives, as well as examples of foreign archives, to understand their strategy for using social networks. The study found that Arab national archives do not have …

Lessons From The 1800s: Creating The Miss Porter's School Digital Archive, Deborah Smith

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

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 archives to increase access. Founded in 1848, Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut was one of the first independent schools devoted to the education of young women. This article reviews the creation of the Porter's digital archive in 2018 and examines issues specific to …

Not 'Just My Problem To Handle': Emerging Themes On Secondary Trauma And Archivists, Katie Sloan, Jennifer Vanderfluit, Jennifer Douglas

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

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 traumatic record; working with donors and researchers; the effects of organizational culture and archival professional norms; the impact of precarious labor on experiences of trauma; and the role of archival education programs and professional associations in preparing and supporting archivists to work with difficult materials. The …

Summoning The Ghosts: Records As Agents In Community Archives, Jessica Tai, Jimmy Zavala, Joyce Gabiola, Gracen Brilmyer, Michelle Caswell

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

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 archives, this paper examines how community archives users conceive of records as agents, embodied with the voices of past lives, and capable of facilitating meaning for those who access, activate, and interpret them. In our findings, users of community archives not only surfaced the notion of records as dynamic, …

Review Of Archival Futures, Eira M. Tansey

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

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 intelligence, format challenges, and storage issues. Ultimately, the volume falls short of contextualizing archives within troubling future global trends, particularly those of labor casualization and climate change.

Low-Cost 8mm/Super 8 Film Digitization Using A Canon 9000f Ii Flatbed Scanner And Photoshop: A Case Study, Kenneth Eckert

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

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 expense. This case study examines typical problems and proposes a simpler and low-cost solution involving using a Canon flatbed scanner with a transparency adapter and improvised film holder, and more importantly, describes technical solutions and script code to straighten and …

Review Of Things Great And Small, Lydia Tang

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

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.

Review Of Putting Descriptive Standards To Work, Katy Sternberger

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

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 American Archivists. The book provides readers with the context and the applied examples needed to explore the possibilities of descriptive standards.