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Articles 181 - 198 of 198

Full-Text Articles in Archival Science

Do Archives Have A Future In The Digital Age?, Ivan Szekely Dec 2017

Do Archives Have A Future In The Digital Age?, Ivan Szekely

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

The rapid development of information and communication technologies pose significant challenges to archival theory and practice. The analysis of the dominant information operators of the archival institutions in the respective paradigms of archival history shows that today’s internet-based services can replicate all the main functions of the archival institutions, at least at the level of the fundamental information operators, on a mass scale. Despite these developments, the author argues that archives are under no direct threat of abolition or loss of function in the digital age, not only because of institutional inertia and traditions, but also their role in preserving …

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Open-Source Opens Doors: A Case Study On Extending Archivesspace Code At Unlv Libraries, Cyndi Shein, Carol Ou, Karla Irwin, Carlos Lemus Sep 2017

Open-Source Opens Doors: A Case Study On Extending Archivesspace Code At Unlv Libraries, Cyndi Shein, Carol Ou, Karla Irwin, Carlos Lemus

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) Libraries is in its third year of implementing the open-source archival collection management application ArchivesSpace, and is sharing UNLV-developed code that extends ArchivesSpace’s built-in functions. The case study demonstrates how adopting and building upon community-created code and developing original local code is improving critical workflows that support creating collection descriptions, cleaning up metadata, and disseminating finding aids that are easier for researchers to comprehend. UNLV discusses how using an open-source application has opened up opportunities for cross-departmental collaboration, moving UNLV further down the path toward full implementation and closer to the goal of …

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Altmetrics And Archives, Elizabeth Joan Kelly Feb 2017

Altmetrics And Archives, Elizabeth Joan Kelly

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Altmetrics are an alternative to traditional measurement of the impact of published resources. While altmetrics are primarily used by researchers and institutions to measure the impact of scholarly publications online, they can also be used by archives to measure the impact of their diverse online holdings, including digitized and born-digital collections, digital exhibits, repository websites, and online finding aids. Furthermore, altmetrics may fill a need for user engagement assessments for cultural heritage organizations. This article introduces the concept of altmetrics for archives and discusses barriers to adoption, best practices for collection, and potential further areas of study.

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Review Of Start A Revolution: Stop Acting Like A Library, Philip Shackelford Sep 2016

Review Of Start A Revolution: Stop Acting Like A Library, Philip Shackelford

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Start a Revolution: Stop Acting Like a Library is a convenient and thought-provoking manual for libraries and other cultural institutions interested in enhancing their community presence and marketing efforts. Technology Director Ben Bizzle offers insights gained from experience, marketing results, and other individuals who contribute appendices on related topics.

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The Wild West No More: Preserving 40 Years Of Electronic Records At The University Of Wyoming American Heritage Center, Tyler G. Cline May 2016

The Wild West No More: Preserving 40 Years Of Electronic Records At The University Of Wyoming American Heritage Center, Tyler G. Cline

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

The University of Wyoming American Heritage Center (AHC) provides access to all unrestricted collections, per its Mission Statement. However, over the past 40 years, the AHC has acquired born-digital collection material on physical media that it has been unable to provide access to. In the summer of 2014, the AHC undertook a project to migrate all born-digital records to a secure server, thereby creating the means to provide access to the material. After surveying collections databases and finding aids, the Digital Archivist and a graduate intern successfully ingested 346 pieces of digital media from 75 collections. The project was successful …

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A Comparative Study Of User Experience Between Physical Objects And Their Digital Surrogates, Anastasia S. Varnalis-Weigle Feb 2016

A Comparative Study Of User Experience Between Physical Objects And Their Digital Surrogates, Anastasia S. Varnalis-Weigle

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Librarians and archivists have embraced innovative technologies in providing users a way to engage with collections. This engagement is increased through various forms of social media “sharing,” which broadens cultural institutions' visibility to new or remote users. While we make strides in designing new ways to access digital collections, the question remains: what are users losing in sensory (sight, touch, sound, smell) and emotional experience at the digital level? A phenomenological approach consisting of observation and semi-structured interviews was used to investigate user experience with physical objects and their digital surrogates. Students, faculty, and staff from a large academic institution …

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Archiving Governance In Palestine, Caitlin M. Davis Feb 2016

Archiving Governance In Palestine, Caitlin M. Davis

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

During the 1980s, a historical turn within the discipline of anthropology fueled an ‘archival imaginary’, which encouraged scholars to enter archival spaces, study their documents, and collect the historical ‘context’ that had been missing from previous ethnographic texts. The archive, in other words, became a repository, a site for the extraction of information about a particular topic. In the historiography of Palestine, these activities have proved fruitful; new historians have mined military and state archives in ways that have illuminated the nefarious details regarding the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Fewer scholars, however, have positioned ‘the archive’ as a subject (not …

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Developing A Typology Of Human Rights Records, Noah Geraci, Michelle Caswell Jan 2016

Developing A Typology Of Human Rights Records, Noah Geraci, Michelle Caswell

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

What makes a record a "human rights record"? What types of records fall under this umbrella term? How and why might we develop a typology of such records? What is at stake—ethically, theoretically, and practically—in the ways in which and the reasons why we define and classify records as such? This article seeks to answer these questions by delineating a typology of human rights records. First, this article will provide a literature review exploring the history of conceptions of human rights records in archival studies, as well as the ongoing discussion in information studies more broadly about the politics of …

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Artist' Studio Archives: Managing Personal Collections & Creative Legacies, Heather Gendron, Eumie Imm Stroukoff, Joan E. Beaudoin, Neal Ambrose-Smith Jan 2016

Artist' Studio Archives: Managing Personal Collections & Creative Legacies, Heather Gendron, Eumie Imm Stroukoff, Joan E. Beaudoin, Neal Ambrose-Smith

Library Staff Publications

A guide for artists, their assistants, and others managing and preserving an artist's studio archives.

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Quidditch, Zombies And The Cheese Club: A Case Study In Archiving Web Presence Of Student Groups At New York University, Aleksandr Gelfand Dec 2015

Quidditch, Zombies And The Cheese Club: A Case Study In Archiving Web Presence Of Student Groups At New York University, Aleksandr Gelfand

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Student organizations are a unique feature of university life whose records merit preservation. Since the mid-to-late 1990s, these records have been increasingly transitioning from analog format to a digital, web-based platform; a pattern that has only picked-up in the 2000s. This paper looks at a case study of the New York University Archives and its attempt to archive student organizations using the Archive-It service.

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The Half-Life & After-Life Of New Media, Nancy Austin Nov 2015

The Half-Life & After-Life Of New Media, Nancy Austin

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

It is fitting to think of the half-life of new media using the time-based metaphor of radioactive decay. As a metaphor, an object’s half-life can be a useful way to talk about the potent technological modernity of new media and, like Walter Benjamin’s well-known notion of the aura, call attention to an object’s performativity. However, Benjamin’s aura remains a constant reminder of irrevocable originality whereas remarking on half-life references a quality that changes over time. But what happens after the rhetorical impact of being new has run its course? What is the life expectancy of once-new media and what of …

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When Narrative Fails: Context And Physical Evidence As Means Of Understanding The Northwest Boundary Survey Photographs Of 1857–1862, James A. Eason Nov 2015

When Narrative Fails: Context And Physical Evidence As Means Of Understanding The Northwest Boundary Survey Photographs Of 1857–1862, James A. Eason

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

The photographs of the Northwest Boundary Survey, taken chiefly in 1860–1861, present many of the problems commonly encountered in the study of nineteenth-century photography. These views documenting the international border between modern British Columbia and the American Pacific Northwest provide a useful case study in the close reading of physical attributes of photographs. They afford an opportunity to compare imagery and evidence across known sets, and to draw conclusions from sequencing, variant captioning, and other physical evidence. These details will help archivists and other collection managers make good decisions about depth of cataloging, digital imaging choices, and interfaces for online …

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Faded But Not Forgotten: Thinking About The Records And Relics Of America's Earliest Forays In Photography, Jeffrey Mifflin Nov 2015

Faded But Not Forgotten: Thinking About The Records And Relics Of America's Earliest Forays In Photography, Jeffrey Mifflin

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

The first documented photographs in America were taken in the spring of 1839 by enthusiastic experimenters after studying recently arrived publications from England, detailing William Henry Fox Talbot's instructions for making photogenic drawings. The images have not survived, but meaning can nevertheless be found in the circumstances surrounding their production and disappearance.

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The Role Of National Archives In The Creation Of National Master Narratives In Southeast Asia, Michael Karabinos Sep 2015

The Role Of National Archives In The Creation Of National Master Narratives In Southeast Asia, Michael Karabinos

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This paper is a working paper for a research project in its initial stage. Using an article by German historian Stefan Berger on the role of national archives in the creation of master historical narratives in Europe as its inspiration, I look at the same concept for postcolonial Southeast Asia. Particular attention is paid to Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. Due to the colonial past of these countries, what is held in their national archives includes many records created by the former colonial administrations. How this affects the creation of master historical narratives will be addressed in this research project. I …

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Graduate Archival Education In The United States; A Personal Reflection About Its Past And Future, Richard J. Cox May 2015

Graduate Archival Education In The United States; A Personal Reflection About Its Past And Future, Richard J. Cox

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

From one vantage, those who started their careers decades ago, graduate archival education has made tremendous leaps forward; from another perspective, those in the early years of their careers, education in this field may look spotty, disjointed, and confusing. As I near the end of my career (although old archivists don’t fade away, they get preserved), I have increasingly felt like an archival source in ongoing professional dialogue. In this essay, I briefly consider the evolution of graduate education since the 1970s, the emergence of a new archival professorial corps, the maturing of our field’s professional and scholarly research, and …

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Selecting An Electronic Records Repository Platform At The South Carolina Department Of Archives And History, Brian Thomas Apr 2015

Selecting An Electronic Records Repository Platform At The South Carolina Department Of Archives And History, Brian Thomas

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

In the 2014–2015 fiscal year the South Carolina Department of Archives and History decided to embark on the journey to creating a repository that would house and preserve incoming state agency electronic records. This case study discusses the journey of the newly hired electronic records archivist in researching, evaluating, and recommending a digital repository platform. It also provides a set of take-away lessons learned through the process in the hope that it will help other archivists investigating repository platforms.

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Investigating The "Small World" Of Literary Archival Collections: The Impact Of Eac-Cpf On Archival Descriptive Practices – Part 1: Relationships, Description And The Archival Community, Katherine M. Wisser Feb 2015

Investigating The "Small World" Of Literary Archival Collections: The Impact Of Eac-Cpf On Archival Descriptive Practices – Part 1: Relationships, Description And The Archival Community, Katherine M. Wisser

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This article opens an exploration of the description of relationships between entities made possible by the new standard, Encoded Archival Context - Corporate bodies, Persons and Families (EAC-CPF). Presents the results of a survey conducted in 2013 to gauge the archival descriptive community's perceptions of the significance of contextual information, relationship types, and other aspects of relationship description. Survey results indicate that the archival descriptive community has just begun to think about relationships in a formal way.

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A Genealogy Of The Lesbian Herstory Archives, 1974-2014, Rachel F. Corbman Mar 2014

A Genealogy Of The Lesbian Herstory Archives, 1974-2014, Rachel F. Corbman

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This paper traces the collection development of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, a community based repository founded in 1974. I argue that the collection grew organically as a reflection of a dialogue between an evolving cohort of volunteer archivists and a community of donors. Primarily focusing on the first five years, this paper pinpoints key early decisions made by volunteer archivists. Specifically, I examine the Archives’ early collecting priorities and the introduction of the special collections in 1978. These decisions, I argue, laid the foundation for the Lesbian Herstory Archives and continue to shape it today, forty years later.

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