Library and Information Science Commons^™

“Describing Without Identifying”: The Phenomenological Role Of Gender In Cataloging Practices, Travis L. Wagner

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores gendering practices of visual information catalogers. The work aims to understand how catalogers perceive gender when describing persons within visual information. The qualitative study deployed queer interpretative phenomenological analysis to understand how catalogers think broadly about describing identity. The infused queer theoretical tenets helped to understand that while participants may not directly name gender as challenging, the conflation of gender into cisnormative monoliths (assuming every person's gender matches their sex-assigned-at birth) or silence around gender produce telling opinions concerning nonbinary gender. The research also utilized a Think Aloud exercise wherein participants undertook in-the-moment cataloging three moving images. …

Ledgers Of The W.T. Carter And Brother Lumber Company: An Archival Processing Project, Christopher Cameron Cotton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The W.T. Carter and Brother Lumber Company began in 1898 and operated until 1968 when it was sold to the U.S. Plywood Corporation. The Polk County, Texas company harvested longleaf pine during a crucial period of development for the Texas economy. The lumber industry was the state’s first large scale commercial enterprise not dependent on farming and provided a model for future extractive industries in the state. The W.T. Carter and Brother Lumber Company town of Camden, Texas exemplifies rural implementations of the company town system in the Texas lumber industry. This public history thesis provides a brief history of …

A Framework For Verifying The Fixity Of Archived Web Resources, Mohamed Aturban

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

The number of public and private web archives has increased, and we implicitly trust content delivered by these archives. Fixity is checked to ensure that an archived resource has remained unaltered (i.e., fixed) since the time it was captured. Currently, end users do not have the ability to easily verify the fixity of content preserved in web archives. For instance, if a web page is archived in 1999 and replayed in 2019, how do we know that it has not been tampered with during those 20 years? In order for the users of web archives to verify that archived web …

The Afterlives Of Government Documents: Information Labor, Archival Power, And The Visibility Of U.S. Human Rights Violations In The “War On Terror”, Rachel Daniell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is about access to information.

It examines the different ways that access to U.S. government records related to the “War on Terror” is generated through the intersection of law, bureaucratic policy and procedure norms, and the everyday work of archivists and transparency advocates. I argue that, both through their labor pushing for access to government records via complex records searches, Freedom of Information Act requests, and legal action, and also through their labor layering those records with new forms of metadata in public digital circulation platforms, these individuals, in the context of their organizations, generate new forms of …

Around Her Table: A Digital Community Archive Featuring Azorean-American Women In New England, Suzanne Lyn Parenti Sink

English Theses & Dissertations

Around Her Table is a born-digital dissertation dedicated to collecting, preserving, and validating the Azorean-American woman’s immigrant experience and cultural identity through the transformative power of participatory archives. The site address is www.aroundhertable.org. The digital exhibit features the oral histories and artifacts related to the domestic sphere of six Azorean-American families, with particular emphasis on artifacts related to the kitchen, hand-worked textiles, and religious practices. Driving the urgency for the creation of new archival records for this community is that fact that despite the nearly one million North Americans who trace their ancestry to the Azores, traditional institutional and civic …

Aggregating Private And Public Web Archives Using The Mementity Framework, Matthew R. Kelly

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Web archives preserve the live Web for posterity, but the content on the Web one cares about may not be preserved. The ability to access this content in the future requires the assurance that those sites will continue to exist on the Web until the content is requested and that the content will remain accessible. It is ultimately the responsibility of the individual to preserve this content, but attempting to replay personally preserved pages segregates archived pages by individuals and organizations of personal, private, and public Web content. This is misrepresentative of the Web as it was. While the Memento …

A Tribal Special Library And Archives Project: Establishing The Malki Museum Special Library And Archives, Andrea Geyer

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The Malki Museum Tribal Special Library and Archives project is an on-site repository created in order to provide access to information regarding tribal culture and heritage to local tribal members and researchers. The project filled the need for a space dedicated to material related to the history of local Southern California Native American tribes and information regarding the topics of Archaeology, Anthropology and History. The collection includes: books, manuscripts, documents, audio/visual media, and photographs. Bringing together multimedia sources, the Special Tribal Library allows for the preservation and accessibility of these items through cataloging and digitizing the collection. This method allows …

Remembering The Church In The Wildwood: The Archival Processing And Digitization Of The Martinsville Baptist Church Collection, Allison N. Grimes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Martinsville Baptist Church was founded in 1912 in a rural farming community on State Highway 7 in eastern Nacogdoches County. The church was founded during a revival being held in the community of Martinsville and has been in continuous operation ever since. The church grew throughout its lifetime, reaching record attendance and membership numbers between 1950 and 1980. Since the early 2000s, church attendance and membership has been in decline. This thesis outlines the history of Martinsville Baptist Church and explains conservation measures taken during the archival processing and digitization of records in the Martinsville Baptist Church Collection.

Articulating Digital Archival Practice Within Writing Program Administration: A Theoretical Framework, Amanda Girard

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Throughout Writing Program Administration scholarship there has been a clear call for archivization and archival work. This dissertation project takes an interdisciplinary approach to digital archival practices for Writing Program Administrators to consider and employ in their home institutions. While I recognize that WPAs are not typically identified as “archivists,” I situate the digital archive within the digital humanities as an interdisciplinary, collaborative project and offer suggestions that lead to recommendations for making an institutional archive. I review archival practice in order to justify the digital archive as an appropriate vehicle for WPAs’ work. Further, I argue that the digital …

Human Selection And Digitized Archival Collections: An Exploratory Research Project About Choice Of Archival Materials Digitized For Online Public Availability, Randy Nelson Smith

Theses and Dissertations

Our collective memory, the history that is cultivated through reflection, documentation, and consensus of historical data, is predicated upon the citizenry having access to the historical materials that society has created. Digitization has enabled greater public access to those materials. However, are items being scanned or digitally photographed to create surrogates that are then not made available to the world? The impetus for this study is to delve into whether or not intentional or unintentional personal choices play a role in determining which items archivists transform into digital surrogates; both in the decision of what to digitize and what to …

A Case Study Of University Archives: Illinois State University Archives As A Model Archive, Tammy M. Hansen

Theses and Dissertations

Given the diversity of sizes, administrators, and archival theory, it would appear logical to think that college and university archives would vary greatly in their development, processes, collecting policies, and challenges. While there is some variation, there are more similarities in college and university archives than there are differences. This study of four state universities in Illinois examines theses similarities and differences, comparing them with the Illinois State University Archives and with best practices and standards set by the Society of American Archivists and the National Archives and Records Administration.

#Mplp: A Comparison Of Domain Novice And Expert User-Generated Tags In A Minimally Processed Digital Archive, Edward A. Benoit Iii

Theses and Dissertations

The high costs of creating and maintaining digital archives precluded many archives from providing users with digital content or increasing the amount of digitized materials. Studies have shown users increasingly demand immediate online access to archival materials with detailed descriptions (access points). The adoption of minimal processing to digital archives limits the access points at the folder or series level rather than the item-level description users' desire. User-generated content such as tags, could supplement the minimally processed metadata, though users are reluctant to trust or use unmediated tags. This dissertation project explores the potential for controlling/mediating the supplemental metadata from …

Native American Empowerment Through Digital Repatriation, Michelle L. Fitch

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Following the Enlightenment, Western adherence to positivist theory influenced practices of Western research and documentation. Prior to the introduction of positivism into Western scholarship, innovations in printing technology, literary advancements, and the development of capitalism encouraged the passing of copyright statutes by nation-states in fifteenth century Europe. The evolution of copyright and positivism in Europe influenced United States copyright and its protection of the author, as well as the practice of archiving and its role in interpreting history. Because Native American cultures practiced orality, they suffered the loss of their traditional knowledge and cultural expressions not protected by copyright. By …

Genre, Database, And The Anatomy Of The Digital Archive, Elizabeth J. Vincelette

English Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to define shared characteristics of literary digital archives, specifically to explore how conceptual and structural qualities of such archives express generic qualities. In order to describe digital media such as database or digital archives, scholars resort to metaphors, and this study offers the metaphor of anatomy as a generic inscription with historical and methodological implications. The definition of the anatomy genre draws from Northrop Frye's in Anatomy of Criticism, in which Frye describes how anatomies are characterized by proliferating lists, the mixing of prose and non-prose forms, and self-reflexivity--under the guise of knowledge …

Digital Repository Adoption In New York City Research Institutions, David J. Williams

Student Theses

As more scholarly and research materials are created in digital formats, institutions charged with managing, preserving, and disseminating these materials are increasingly adopting specialized software tools and environments created to fulfill these functions. Concurrently, subscriptions to serials databases provided by academic publishers are increasingly prohibitive and problematic. This paper surveys the adoption of digital institutional repositories by research institutions in the New York City region as of the Spring of 2009, and concludes that in spite of their potential advantages these systems are still not widely applied toward addressing the issues of preservation and access to their fullest potential.

Double Duty: Processing And Exhibiting The Children's Home Society Of Florida Collection As An Archivist And Public Historian, April Anderson-Zorn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Children's Home Society of Florida, often referred to as "Florida's Greatest Charity", is the state's oldest non profit welfare agency. Founded in 1902, the society was instrumental in creating and reforming child welfare laws as well as helping countless children in the state of Florida find loving homes. This paper focuses on the archival processing of the Children's Home Society of Florida Collection papers and the creation of a subsequent web exhibit. The role of archivist and public historian is examined to see how each profession works toward a common goal.