Program
Please note that all times are in Central Daylight Time (UTC -5). You can find a time zone converter at this website.
Time |
Event |
Location |
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7:30–9:00 |
Registration & Continental Breakfast |
Ballroom |
9:00–10:15 |
Opening AERI Meeting |
1201 |
10:15–10:30 |
Morning Break |
Ballroom |
10:30 –12:00 |
Opening Plenary: Ed Benoit III & Jill Trepanier, PROTECCT-GLAM: Providing Risk of The Environment’s Changing Climate Threats for Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums. |
1201 |
12:00–1:30
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Lunch
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Ballroom
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12:30-1:15
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Optional Lunch Trip: Visit to Mike's Habitat
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Meet in Front of HPL Field House
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1:30–3:00
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Research Session #1: Sustainability in a Warming World
Moderator: Sony Prosper
The aim of my thesis is to use Yarning as an integrated data collection and analysis method in exploring the creation of a sustainable living digital heritage archive that respects Aboriginal knowledges, cultural protocols and community archiving requirements, using the Wunungu Awara Project of virtual 3D models as a case study.
Existing archival systems are generally developed based on western archival thought and practice, and they often lack Indigenous ways of knowing, doing or being. This research addresses this omission by investigating digital archives through Yarning. Yarning is a culturally sensitive form of communication that I, the researcher, have grown up with. Yarning is also a qualitative research methodology that can be utilized to improve research practice.
From the sharing of this expertise, this research has provided a greater understanding
on two main levels. It provides a personal reflection upon my research journey where
I have shifted my original research design trajectory to better reflect what the participants
have shared with me. Further it presents findings and provides considerations for
others in the field to adopt Creating resources that facilitate the preservation of community-based archives and ecological knowledge in the Louisiana coastal region is integral to its survival amongst the effects of climate change. Research and records created and stored within the Louisiana coastal region have a higher predisposition to the drastic and pervasive effects of climate change and natural disasters. Modern archivists can insert themselves into the work of climate change action through their advocacy of safeguarding collections that have been created by communities and individuals through raw scientific data and unpublished research. Just as archivists continue to frame their professional work around a theory of best practice, a similar module can be created to navigate preservation in this Anthropocene, and the uncertainty it brings. To create best practices, it is essential to build a foundational understanding of the unique development and needs of the communities, individuals, and researchers. The project intends to craft a toolkit to facilitate the safeguarding of ephemera from community-based archives and ecological knowledge. The project will highlight ecological and community-based knowledge that has been created in a response to or relates to climate change themes.
The project intends to form a parallel between ecological knowledge and community-based archives. Specifically, those who seek to document and establish first person narratives of experiences directly related to climate change issues. Community based archival collections and ecological knowledge directly connected to the Gulf Coast region can provide essential historical and scientific expertise.
The ephemera of conservationist and engineer John Edgar Land will function as a case study model. The intent is for the unprocessed content to serve as a prototypical case of ecological knowledge. Through the contents arrangement, description, and preservation methods, it will serve as a toolkit for other knowledge and community-based collections. Considerations of physical and digital availability to a wide range of individuals such as students, teachers, researchers, historians, scientists will be examined. The objective is for the collection to model the use of community and ecological archival knowledge in filling historical gaps and empowering communities. The creation of inclusive and high-quality lifelong learning is required by Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) to ultimately improve society's knowledge base. Ten targets on SDG4 support this purpose, with Target 7 having the greatest resonance in the museum community. By enabling citizens to experience and engage with both their own cultural expressions and heritage as well as that of others, in this regard museums are motivated to preserve and maintain the world's cultural heritage. Even though the 'goal' encompasses sectors not specifically related to museums, but it promotes development strategies and lasting knowledge practices in the knowledge development sector. Art galleries and museums have expressed a desire to include education as an empowering tool in their collections. One such organization is the Tshwane Art Museum, which was established in 1932 and is in Pretoria, South Africa. It is regarded as the most significant museum of historical and contemporary art in the world. As a result, there is a real need to increase the effectiveness of material distribution in museums' functional role of education. To attract visitors, maintain a vital global presence, and educate their audience on topics related to cultural heritage, museums are currently faced with the challenge of developing online knowledge discourses. In this conceptual paper, will be argued that international museums have the potential to be settings where information and communication technology (ICT) can be used to promote cultural education knowledge. This feature of the museum sector helps achieve SDG4's Target 7 and demonstrates how museums are best positioned to implement lifelong learning in the context of contemporary society.
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1201
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Research Session #2: Topics in Archival Education As evidenced by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions Library Information Science in the Middle East and North Africa (2016), jobs in the information sector are expected to grow much faster than average, however the region lacks the knowledge building infrastructure to prepare graduates for these imminent workplace needs. Accordingly, this presentation asks the question: What are the factors needed to build sustainable Information Science and Archival Literacy Programs in the region while also seeking to argue how such programs can help to develop educational opportunities based on outstanding iSchool models that respond to the vast geographical region with qualitative and effective methods of instruction and learning that are significant to the fundamental needs for information professionals across MENA and beyond. Using Egypt as a case-study, the nation’s current socio-economic landscape demands and fosters an educational system that is producing engineers and scientists to help meet its development goals. What is also at stake is the increasing importance of knowledge generation and management as a competitive advantage for Egypt, is changing the paradigm of education and in particular is a critical driver of sustainable economic growth and the development of knowledge societies that must focus on information management at traditional and new information dissemination models. Most university programmes have a component of experiential learning that entails placing university students in the industry for practical training for a certain period of time. Experiential learning or sometimes referred to as practical attachment may be implemented in different forms across universities and across programmes. This paper discusses experiential learning experiences of students of archival studies in the Department of Library and Information Studies’ (DLIS) students in the University of Botswana. The paper undertook a survey research design to collect data. A structured questionnaire was distributed through a Survey monkey to the Bachelor of Information and Knowledge management 56 students registered for practical attachment in the year 2022 winter session, 40 responses were received. The results were quantitatively analysed and presented in figures. The research findings indicate that government departments absorbed the majority of students (87.50%) while the rest of the students (12.50%), were placed at quasi government organisations. Students indicated in high numbers that they would like the practical attachment training duration to be increased (64%), followed by the need for more visits from school (18%). The results also show that government departments appreciated them as majority (87.50%) of the students indicated that they felt welcomed by their host institutions. This paper recommends an increased duration of experiential learning for DLIS students from six weeks to three months. The paper also advocates for placement of students in other types of organisations such as private companies and Non-Governmental organisations. It also recommends enhanced lecturers’ visits for students to gain maximum benefits from the experiential training programme. This paper suggests recommendations that afford guidance to the DLIS and other LIS departments in the region on experiential learning. The recommendations would ensure that students are rightly placed, motivated and ready to apply archival skills at the workplace. The findings also give a deeper understanding of the programme which may be used to maximise its benefits towards the outcome based learning as per the University strategy. Zines, fanzines, and minicomics represent a significant educational opportunity for undergraduate students studying digital curation and digital cultural heritage or related fields. As objects which often transcend the physical-digital divide, especially in more contemporary forms, zines can be a tool for exploring archival materiality in the classroom. In this short paper, I will present the viability and instructional design of a zine-centric digital curation course created for The University of Maryland’s undergraduate program in information science’s digital curation emphasis. This course will give students a simplified workflow process for archival work, guiding them through making a physical zine, creating a simple controlled vocabulary, object digitization, description, and a digital record. Students will create their own physical zines, made by hand or printed from their digital design, which will serve as their archival object of study for the remainder of the course. This overarching course project culminates in an Omeka digital archive that collects all individual student zines and archival records. Using zines as a central artifact in the course can enable engaging students in the digital archiving workflow through work with a single artifact of which they will have intimate knowledge. Our course Omeka site will highlight student work and demonstrate the cumulative skills student will gain during the course. The course focuses strongly on archival materiality. This focus will encourage students to reflect on the importance of their object’s physical qualities within digitization and digital preservation workflows. Teaching about archival materiality will also enable students to ask more probing questions about representing physical objects as digital objects and potential failures of accessibility in digital archives. This course is designed with a significant emphasis on students guiding their education and their working process. Assignments are kept relatively open, with goals and values emphasized in the classroom and space for challenging norms and conventions built into course assignments. In-class assignments and activities will be active and immersive, encouraging students to think critically about digital curation work at every point in the process. This talk will engage the design process of the course, pedagogical considerations, the structure and purpose of assignments, and the importance of these approaches and perspectives to archival education for undergraduate and MLIS students. I will also discuss the utility of educating digital curation and cultural heritage students about archival materiality and the applications of theory and course design in teaching these values at all levels of education. |
1270 |
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Research Session #3: The Future of Archives?: Artificial Intelligence and the Digital
World This study sought to investigate the users’ perception on the utilisation of artificial intelligence (AI) for the management of records at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa. User perception plays a crucial role in the utilisation of AI for the management of records at the CSIR. It is important to know the views of the users, especially how they think AI can be utilised for effective and efficient management of records. The convergent mixed methods research was applied, and data was collected using interviews and questionnaires. Data was analysed thematically and statistically and presented using tables and figures. This study reveals that the users were not aware of the application of AI for the management of records until the workshops, which were facilitated by the researcher. The users are of the view that AI can be used to provide efficient storage of records, quick retrieval of records and adequate security. The study further reveals that the CSIR is not yet ready to use AI for the management of records, due to the lack of knowledge and resources to implement AI. The study also proposes a framework regarding the users’ perception on the utilisation of AI for the management of records at the CSIR. It is hoped that the framework proposed will serve as a benchmark and guideline for user perception regarding the use of AI for the management of records in the archives and records management industry. This paper investigates the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to facilitate archival arrangement and description. It provides a review of the relevant literature on this topic, including case studies of recent initiatives to develop and/or leverage AI tools for arrangement and description tasks. It also endeavours to provide a high-level analysis of the opportunities and challenges AI offers for the archival profession in this area. While other literature reviews (Colavizza et al. 2021, Hutchinson 2020) have previously examined the prospects and directions for integrating AI technologies into archival workflows, there has yet to be a focus specifically on the area of archival arrangement and description. Here, we aim to collect, synthesize, and critically engage with the research that has been done in this area in order to enable future scholarship.
The paper outlines the reasons why archivists and recordkeeping professionals may opt to utilize the assistance of AI when processing archival materials. It discusses the access-enhancing and labor-saving opportunities of tools such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML), pointing to specific projects where these tools were deployed to enhance poorly described records, process overwhelmingly large amounts of material (such as in an email account), and to provide links between creators and records subjects in separate fonds. It also identifies challenges faced by archivists in implementing these initiatives. Through this process, we aim to identify and address gaps in the literature on this topic. Additionally, we offer a demographic analysis of the sources reviewed, and acknowledge that they largely reflect the researcher’s positionality as an English speaker from a North American academic context and as such overrepresent work from western, Anglophone countries. We thus situate this gap as a site for future research. Finally, the paper touches briefly on the ethical implications of using AI to arrange and/or describe archival records, especially in the context of archival neutrality.
This literature review is a product of the research project (Explainable & Teachable Artificial Intelligence for Archival Arrangement and Description: Multimodal Lesson Plans and Materials) discussed in the preceding proposal. It builds upon an annotated bibliography compiled earlier in the project, the objective of which was to identify examples of archivists and records professionals using (or testing) AI in their arrangement and/or description practice and to establish relevant information and didactic materials that could be incorporated into a curriculum. Here, we use a critical lens to place these sources in conversation with each other and to situate our research within the current academic field. |
1276 |
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Research Session #3B Digital Curatorship & Literacies Moderator: Caitlin Christian-Lamb The uptake of technology in developing countries is low because the citizens lack digital and information literacies to fully utilise information and communication technologies (ICTs) in order to navigate records and archives. Archives should be effortlessly accessible to the public in order to refer or learn about their historical heritage. However, in the absence of adequate digital and information literacies, it is difficult to locate a required archival document because every search retrieves many related archival documents. Archive centres should provide user-friendly services so that users can easily comprehend the content and its values. There should also be ICT infrastructure and low data price that enhance effective access to online archives. Despite the recent mandatory data price reduction by the dominant internet service providers, data price remains unaffordable in South Africa. The purpose of this study was to investigate the status of digital and information literacies within the archival centre in South Africa since 2016. This qualitative study used a scoping review to collect secondary data comprising research articles published in the years ranging between 2016 and 2022. The scholarly databases such as EBSCOhost and Springer were used to search data. The timeframe was informed by the interest in the developments made in archives since the digital technologies emerged. Data were thematically analysed. Major findings revealed that users do not know the type of materials that are available in the archival holdings and how to use them. There are low digital and information literacies to young and old community contributed by the exorbitant data costs, poor IT infrastructure and inconsistent electricity supply. The study concluded that the primary schools should have computer laboratories in order to impart these literacies at an early age and deploy ICT infrastructure to make archives ubiquitously accessible. Practical implications of this study include the alignment of curriculum towards ICT in order to face the everchanging digital technologies. This study sought to share experience pertaining to Development of modules for archives and records management as benchmarked from ICA digital curatorship workshop and InterPARES Trust project in the ODeL environment. The study relied on the authors’ module development experience, analysis of module development policies and literature to share experience pertaining to module development for archives and records management honours qualification modules. The study discovered that developing modules for qualification entails consideration of many elements or factors to enable processes and activities execution to unfold, such as planning, design, development, implementation and quality assurance. Quality assurance also need to be applied across all the activities during the development process. The study proposed a framework for curriculum development and implementation process which is believed to serve as a Centre of benchmark for other institutions engaging in the same or related process. |
1280 |
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3:00-3:15 |
Afternoon Break |
Ballroom |
3:15-4:45 |
Research Session #4 Just Practices: Ethical Recordkeeping and Representation in Archives
It is now generally accepted by most scholars that the Eurocentric definition of an archive is universally limited as it tends to be not accommodative to the indigenous ways of knowing especially from Africa. Post-coloniality and post-colonial scholars have shown the existence of African epistemologies and ontologies and how imperialism and colonialism have been on the forefront in the unprecedented epistemic onslaught of these knowledges. This paper intends to contextualise indigenous archives as annals which are embedded into the African Knowledge Systems. The paper will further investigate how this archive has been used, abused, and underutilised. One of the findings that come out is that this archive which is communally owned by the African communities is now being externalised through commercialisation and in the process losing its provenance. The recommendation being proffered is that there is a need to rethink how the African archive can be copyrighted without violating its communal use vis-à-vis commercialisation. Archives are sites of symbolic annihilation (Caswell, Cifor and Ramirez, 2016; Caswell et al., 2017; O’Sullivan, 2020) for identity-based communities that sit outside the white, hetero-normative, CIS-gendered norm. This is especially for Indigenous peoples. Representation of Indigenous peoples within institutional archives is often inadequate at best and racist, derogatory, and violent at worst. Many of the colonial institutions that have symbolically annihilated Indigenous peoples in the past have experienced a paradigm shift and now claim to support Indigenous self-determination and data sovereignty. But how do achieve such a mammoth praxis shift in an institution that is based on the past? The first step in supporting Indigenous self-determination and data sovereignty in these archives is to assess the quality of Indigenous representation at every stage of the record continuum. In this presentation, I deliver my doctoral research findings which explores symbolic annihilation of Indigenous peoples in archives and provides a framework for assessing Indigenous representation in archives based on the records continuum model. The research advocates for a new understanding of right to know that is grounded in Indigenous sovereignty, and consequently argues that Indigenous people have the right to know about all records that relate to their Country, not just personal records. Partnering with Indigenous people as decision makers for the records about their Country, themselves and their communities will bring archives more closely in line with their goals of supporting Indigenous self-determination and data sovereignty. The title of my submission for AERI 2023 is motivated by the words of Rhiannon Abeling who has been working with me at Monash on Rights in Records by Design research since 2017. In developing presentations on the MySSy prototype of a rights-based Care recordkeeping infrastructure that we co-designed with Rhiannon and other Care experienced advocates, she has been keen to remind the audiences (and me) that we are discussing “Your work, but my life”. Her words are a timely reminder of how the human impact of recordkeeping in out-of-home Care contexts must be at the forefront of our minds and guide our actions – whether on the child protection frontline or in research that we hope can make a difference there.
In this presentation my aim is to discuss the features, functionality and affordances of our MySSy prototype from the perspective of the recordkeeping research and development responsibilities it implies. Developed as a design provocation – a tool of, and for, the imagining of participatory recordkeeping networks – I will explain how it forms part of a blueprint of rights-based recordkeeping where those currently cast as the client of services and ‘subject’ of records, can participate on equitable terms. I will discuss how having knowledge of and an appropriate say over who has access to their personal and sensitive information can be re-imagined through digital technologies to better enable rights to identity, privacy and autonomy, and support the development of sense of self and worth. I will also discuss some of the challenges in communicating this kind of research that goes beyond describing wicked problems to exploring and advocating system transformations. |
1201 |
Research Session #5 Methodologies for Studying the Materiality of Archives: Foregrounding
Artifacts, Practices, and Infrastructure Archival collections are increasingly heterogeneous in terms of the types of materials they contain and their methods of creation, curation, and maintenance. They are often blends of analog and digital media formats, may be sustained by institutional and non-institutional actors, and can evolve through the reformatting and migration of formats through complex workflows. Adopting interdisciplinary research paradigms that are attuned to the materiality of archival media and infrastructures and considering them at multiple levels of analysis can help researchers study dynamic and complex archival contexts. This panel will introduce methodologies for studying archives that draw on fields including science and technology studies, media studies, digital forensics, and history of the book. It will articulate a set of methods useful for studying the materiality of archives at multiple scales, from the micro-materiality of physical records, digital code and the material practices of archival professionals, to the macro-materiality of archival infrastructures, systems, and digital networks. This paper will discuss the use of qualitative-interpretive methods for understanding the work of media preservationists, Analysis of their workplace practices and discourses, along with their self-reflections on their work reveal how media preservationists put into practice their moral commitments to community-sanctioned knowledge, standards, and ethics. This paper demonstrates the value of holistic analysis of preservationists’ sensory and situated practices along with their discourses for understanding archival work. This paper will demonstrate the use of digital forensics as a historical methodology to examine the digitization and preservation practices of non-institutional archival workers. Without comprehensive training in institutional standards for documenting the digitization and publication of archival materials online, many archival workers develop innovative, yet idiosyncratic methods of digitizing and arranging archival material. Using historical methods informed by digital forensics, this paper reconstructs the practices of several self-appointed archival workers contributing to the Internet Archive’s collections of software, web, and print materials. Case studies are selected from the author’s recent articles in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Information History and New Media & Society. While deploying metadata standards and techniques has historically been the domain of librarians and archivists, it has recently become the work of computer scientists, database designers, and standards engineers. Networked digital technologies now leverage user generated data and metadata to design and shape experiences and information ecologies. While traces of human behavior recorded as metadata are often hidden from users, they are increasingly leveraged in social platform development and training data for the advertising technology that underwrites the personalization of web experiences, including online shopping, search, and news consumption). This paper will discuss how platform metadata are formed through a constant churn of making and remaking data ontologies that spill across communities with competing views of semantic technologies and how researchers can “read” metadata as both records and artifacts of human experience of social platforms. |
1270 |
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Research Session #6 Archival Lagniappe I The University of Oklahoma faced financial difficulties in the spring of 2019, causing closure or reduction of funding for various campus collecting repositories. The Julian P. Kanter Archive (PCC) was one of the repositories targeted for removal. Purchased by the University of Oklahoma in 1985, the Archive consisted of 25,000 political ads compiled by a private collector, Julian P. Kanter, with the purpose of acquiring political ads, indefinitely. The Archive includes political ads, debates, interviews, and other political programs from both television and radio. These include campaigns for president, senators, representatives in the house, governors, and other statewide, local, and county offices. It also includes ballot initiatives, propositions, advocacy ads, and public social policy issues.
For years, the PCC operated successfully as a unit with substantial funding for a director, full-time archival staff, student technicians, and 20-27 members of the Advisory Council. This support helped the Archive grow to 56,000 ads by 1996. By 2003, the Archive had 70,000 cataloged items, with the caveat that over 10,000 ads had not been cataloged.
The Collection was estimated to be 90,000 ads in 2009, and it was reported that PCC had captured more ads by July 2008 (3,800 ads) than it had throughout the entire 2008 election cycle. The 2009 report indicated forty boxes of ads that had not been opened, potentially accounting for tens of thousands of additional ads.
By 2012, the Archive was reported to hold more than 125,000 ads, though there were conflicting reports of totals ranging from 110,000 to 125,000. The 2012 report also documented a significant transition from collecting 'physical' materials to collecting ads as they are posted on the Internet or from other born-digital sources. Because of this shift, more ads were captured, resulting in immediate Archive growth and backlog intensification.
When the Carl Albert Center took custody of the Archive in late 2019, PCC management reported 119,000 commercials in total. There were numerous inventories, catalogs, and notes included with the Archive, which contained information for many of the commercials. These records, mostly collected by students from the late 1985 to 2018, were in various formats and stored in a variety of locations, including paper files, internal and external hard drives, external servers, cloud storage, and other local networks.
In 2022, the National Science Foundation awarded funding to the Center, Harvard University, and the University of Iowa to develop an automated system to identify politically relevant content from ad images, audio, and text, as well as to create a cutting-edge user interface that allowing researchers to query, interact with, and view videos and other output currently provided by traditional ad collections.
The Center's task was to gather and deliver a thorough, structured corpus of materials to project collaborators as quickly and efficiently as possible. This presentation is the story of a single, full-time archivist, accounting for hundreds of thousands of individual ads, metadata, and records in various stages of order, largely during a pandemic. The study explored the authors self-archiving to create awareness of open access institutional repositories in universities. The qualitative approach of the study was informed by the interpretive paradigm as well as the case research design. The target population for the study were all the twelve (12) open access institutional repositories managers and administrators purposively selected from the five (5) universities in Ghana. The universities were chosen since they were the only ones listed in the Directory of Open Access Repositories. Interviews were conducted using a semi-structured interview guide and data were analyzed using thematic analysis. The study revealed that academics had some information about self-archiving in open access institutional repositories and university libraries with open access institutional repositories were using DSpace software. Managers and administrators of open access institutional repositories mediated content uploaded and believed that author self-archiving could improve awareness of open access institutional repositories. The study recommended that universities should fully implement the author’s self-archiving protocol, and academics should be trained to be able to upload research works onto open access institutional repositories. Furthermore, the university and university library should provide rigorous policies on author self-archiving and incentives for author self-archiving in the open access institutional repositories. Stories have power. They can influence, they can help, and they can allow people the chance to process events. Sometimes, this can be something small like winning an award at work and sometimes it can be large like processing the aftermath of natural disasters and war.
For example, across the Gulf of Mexico and the wider Caribbean, stories have been told about hurricanes for centuries. So many people across those centuries have encountered hurricanes, lived through them, and then had to process what happened after those storms. Sometimes, this processing involves the creation of public history in the form of archives and memorials.
These allow people who lived through the event to remember and process trauma. It also allows people who are interested in learning more to engage with the stories around an event. This power can be seen by looking at examples in Texas, The Bahamas, and Dominica. |
1276 |
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Research Session #7 Addressing Community Archival Needs Since 1850s, Chinese immigrants and Chinese American in the United States have faced systematic racism and discrimination. This has only escalated in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic. There is an increasingly growing number hate crime targeting Chinese immigrants and broader Asian communities, which pose a serious threat to their life safety and mental well-being.
Research questions: My research intersects the fields of Community Engagement Scholarship (CES) and Critical Archival Studies. I aim to address two key questions: (1) How can use archives for community engagement, assist researchers in fostering mutually beneficial relationships with communities, incorporating their lived experiences, and addressing the root causes of inequalities, racism, and discrimination; (2) How can CES inform our understanding of communities' needs with regards to archival practices, including creation, appraisal, description, arrangement, and access?
Research process: In my study, I engage in community-based services with the goal of building trust with community members, understanding the challenges they face, and addressing their needs for archival and cultural heritage preservation.
First, I host workshops on Chinese American history and preservation for Chinese and Chinese American youths. These workshops aim to educate and engage the youth in the Chinese immigrant community and become a platform to express their perspectives on Chinese immigrant history, their cultural heritage, and their envision of the community future. The workshops are audio-recorded with the approval of the Institutional Review Board (IRB).
Second, I engage in conversations with Chinese immigrants and community leaders who run advocacy NGOs for Chinese immigrants' rights. These discussions provide valuable insights into the challenges faced by these individuals and organizations and how they understand cultural heritage within a broader social-political context.
Third, I employ a participatory approach to create a community digital platform that centers community members' counter-stories and emotions related to racism. The community platform is currently built on Miro, a whiteboarding platform for storytelling developed by Google. The counter stories shared by Chinese immigrants contribute to understanding the challenges faced by the community. Meanwhile, community members also share their knowledge on archival accessibility through the participation.
Research findings: This research is ongoing, and at this stage, the results of the workshops with youth participants have demonstrated that archives can play a crucial role in facilitating community engagement scholarship. By exploring and analyzing the stories behind the archival records, the youth are developing empathy for the Chinese immigrant community and taking action towards preserving their archives. Additionally, through these workshops, the youth are gaining a deeper understanding of critical concepts such as racism, discrimination, stereotypes, and equality.
The ongoing creation of a community digital platform for counter-stories highlights the desire among the immigrants to share and preserve their experiences. However, the fear of Asian hate has also been identified as a factor that may influence their decision about the accessibility of their community archives. This ongoing research provides valuable insights into the interplay between community engagement scholarship and critical archival studies that can inform future efforts towards preserving Chinese immigrants’ experience and cultural heritage. Digital projects that aim to serve and engage Indigenous communities have grown in the past 20 years. Through digitization, scholars, librarians, archivists, and museum professionals have facilitated greater access to Indigenous collections. These projects often take the form of digital projects, such as virtual exhibitions, online databases, and educational tools. Early digital projects lack community involvement, but more recent efforts have increasingly sought community input. More recent scholarship discourages projects that lack community consultation or consent. Members of Indigenous communities and scholars have voiced their concerns over the creation of digital projects that utilize Indigenous collections that have not gone through appropriate community consultation. As Indigenous digital projects continue to increase, it is important to ask: What are the critical characteristics of Indigenous digital projects, and how do we assess them?
To answer this, we examined the literature, developed an assessment protocol, and analyzed online platforms. Our assessment protocol identifies five characteristics common across many Indigenous digital projects. The first is Traditional Knowledge Protection, or the mechanisms that are in place for restricting access and use of content as well as designating intellectual ownership. The second is Design and Layout, which refers to the presentation, functionalities, and overall aesthetics of the project and how these reflect community values and cultures. The third category Description and Classification, looks at the technical standards, schemas, and systems used to represent individual items. The fourth category, Community Relationship, explores how digital projects represent the relationships between Indigenous communities and institutions. The fifth category is Sustainability, which seeks to understand the maintenance plans and actions in place to ensure the long-term accessibility of projects. Our goal is to offer a set of questions that encourage critical reflection for those involved in the design and development of Indigenous digital projects, not as a one-size-fits-all requirement checklist. Online game community is an online social group formed by people who meet in online games. The members entertain, communicate, and make friends on the online game platform, forming a fixed circle, gradually building a series of internal norms, forming a certain collective identity, and engaging in continuous interaction. The concept of online game community archiving in this paper follows the definition of "archiving" in the theory of personal digital archiving and refers to the behavior of online game community members to keep the community information formed by them for a long time, which is an "unofficial" storage behavior. At the practical level, online game communities can form a strong sense of autonomy, and there are many game activity archives uploaded by game users in Internet Archive. In addition, in the practice of cultural memory institutions, there are web-based information archiving projects including the preservation of online gaming community information, such as the Digital Gaming Communities Web Archive project organized by Ivy Plus Libraries, the International Internet preservation Consortium's Game Walkthroughs and Web Archiving project. Therefore, it is necessary for community members, governments, cultural institutions, and other entities to preserve them for a long time, and the priority is to clarify what actions have been taken by the information formers and custodians - the members of online gaming communities - and what are the characteristics of their basic preservation environment. Direct research on online game community archiving has demonstrated the documentary properties of online community information in the framework of the theory of practical activities and the theory of documents. The tangible form of online community documents includes all types of information materials formed by community members during their community information activities on online platforms, such as blog posts, comments and tweets, and data files generated by tracking activities on social media platforms. Research on online game community information management has focused on the exploration of members' information behavior, making it clear that online game community members spontaneously use, and even jointly manage, community knowledge. The most basic knowledge management relies on knowledge sharing behaviors to establish, and knowledge sharing can effectively drive the recording and commenting behaviors of community members. Overall, the research on online game community information management does not go deep into the level of information preservation and lacks an archival perspective. Based on this, this paper aims to explain the current situation of online community archiving, analyze the existing challenges, and propose strategies to deal with them from the perspective of online community subjects. The article focuses on an individual case of FF14 game community. Questionnaires and interviews are used to collect subjective descriptions of the community members' archiving activities; secondly, qualitative text analysis is used to extract conceptualized elements of online game community archiving practices. Finally, we conclude the challenges and coping strategies of autonomous community archiving in the context of relevant theories. |
1280 |
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4:45-6:00 |
Break & Mentoring Meeting |
1201, 1276, 1280 |
6:00-8:00 |
Opening Reception |
Ballroom |
Time |
Event |
Location |
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8:00-9:00 |
Registration & Continental Breakfast |
Ballroom |
9:00-10:15 |
Plenary: John Barbry & Julia Barry, History and Future of the Tunica-Biloxi Cultural and Educational Resource Center (CREC) |
1201 |
10:15-10:30 |
Morning Break |
Ballroom |
10:30-12:00 |
Research Session #8 The Yarning Circle: Indigenous Communities and Archives This paper discusses the importance of relational accountability when researching Indigenous archives in an Australian context. Barlo, et al., (2021) describe the Yarning methodology as a protected space where relationships exist in research between Country, Ancestors, data, history and Knowledge. Further, Geia, et al., (2013) contextualise Yarning as an approach to embed unique Indigenous research perspectives and standpoints aligned with practices of Aboriginal storytelling.
This paper shares how Yarning was utilised as a key research methodology to frame the research Unclasping the White Hand: Reclaiming and Refiguring the Archives to Support Indigenous Wellbeing and Sovereignty (Thorpe, 2022). The Yarning approach was vital in the process of engaging with research participants to explore whether the current dominant approaches to archiving and managing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges support the wellbeing of Indigenous people and recognise Indigenous sovereignty in an archival context. Yarning enabled relational accountability in the research process by establishing participatory research practices and protocols built on trust. This was critical in order to surface the stories of participants on topics related to the contested nature of the archives and the level of agency that Indigenous people have to control and own their archives.
This paper will share insights on the use of Yarning as a methodological approach and demonstrate its value as a culturally appropriate method for investigating Indigenous priorities in archival studies. Overall, it will show the importance of developing ethical and reciprocal research approaches that connect research to the mind, body and spirit. This short paper discusses the greater consideration across archives and archival research regarding respectful and reverential ways in which to discuss Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ancestors and ICIP held in collecting institutions. The paper will outline the background, findings and methodological approach for the PhD research ‘Hair Samples as Ancestors and Futures of Community-led Collection Care’ (Booker, 2023). The research investigates the settler colonial context and white possessive logics (Moreton-Robinson, 2015) of acquisition and the ongoing institutional retention of Ancestors’ hair across the GLAM sector, questioning the lack of visibility of the histories of hair sampling as a racist research practice in Australia, the legislative and ethical ‘grey area’ and futures of community-led care for Ancestors’ hair as discussed with an interdisciplinary First Nations led research participant group
This paper will assert First Nations people’s Right to Know about both the history and the current location of Ancestors’ hair and related records, as well as the right to determine use, access and repatriation. Furthermore, the paper will also raise the need for First Nations voices leading the decision making and research to enable truthtelling that is self-determined, informed and respectful. This paper will take the opportunity to reflect on the methodological approaches of the PhD research, including Indigenous Women Standpoint (Moreton-Robinson, 2013), Yarning (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010; Atkinson, Baird & Adams, 2021), Indigenous Storywork principles (Archibald, 2008) and the Refusal as methodology (Simpson 2017). Overall, this paper will illustrate the clear priorities of Indigenous self-determination, care and truthtelling needed for Ancestors’ hair held off-Country. |
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Research Session #9 Archival Lagniappe II As the lowest level administrative unit in China, rural areas have undergone earth-shaking changes in recent years under the “rural revitalization strategy” and the construction of “new countryside”. More and more attention has been paid to rural archives and rural memory retention. Rural archives refer to the historical records formed in the daily work and life of rural organizations in different forms and carriers of preservation value, such as text, chart, audio and video. As the largest developing country and an ancient civilization with a long history, China’s rural archives have distinct regional characteristics and cultural flavor. At the same time, rural archives, as the product of China’s top-level design, is adopting the idea of “co-construction”
“Co-governance” and “sharing” archives to build rural archives into more high-quality management resources and more common public products under the background of the shift of governance focus and the expansion of service scope.
This paper focuses on three questions, which are: What role does rural archives play in China's grass-roots governance? The Development Status of Rural Archives in China? What impact will rural archives have on rural development in China? In order to answer the above questions, field investigations were conducted in Pinggu District of Beijing, Chengdu City of Sichuan Province and Chengde City of Hebei Province in December 2022. Questionnaires were issued to investigate the construction of township archives in five typical villages, and face-to-face interviews were conducted with six archivists engaged in rural archives work. It is found that China's rural archives play the role of textual research, auxiliary management and retention of memory in the grass-roots governance. After a development process from start-up to recovery and then to acceleration, it has formed some characteristic experiences,
such as three-level organization management network, digital form filing, “village style memory project” and “local tourism industry”. “The 14th Five-Year Plan for Promoting Agricultural and Rural Modernization” points out that in the future, Chinese countryside will comprehensively promote the strategy of rural revitalization based on the regional characteristics of rural areas, and move towards realizing the modernization of agriculture and rural areas. The archives work will have a profound impact on maintaining social order, improving the cohesion of villagers, and promoting the development of economic and cultural industries. This research begins with refection upon a couple of now commonplace observations about archival description. First, creating archival finding aids requires substantial judgment and interpretation, and is therefore inevitably influenced by the positionalities—the perspectives, personal histories, and social identities—of the archivists. Second, finding aids sometimes need revision, sometimes for fitting a new data standard, but also to correct errors, reduce bias, and remove harmful language. Hence, the positionalities of its authors and its revision history constitute significant information about a finding aid and, consequently, may affect the user’s understanding of the collection it describes. Important questions, then, are whether and to what extent this information should be recorded and to whom it should be available.
The paper has two parts. First, it offers an argument, that, all else equal, it is desirable to record and publish metadata for finding aids, particularly data about their authorship and revision history. This argument draws on the history of archival finding aids and recent work on reparative description, bringing into focus the circumstances under which finding aids are revisited and revised. The argument then explores the significance of archivist positionality, drawing on feminist work in the philosophy of science, especially views developed by Sandra Harding. The upshot is a constructive response to recognizing the untenability of postures of detached neutrality in archival description.
Second, the paper will report on a small study of the readiness and willingness of archivists to provide and manage metadata about the revision and authorship of finding aids. As of the writing of this abstract, currently underway is a survey of archivists at state archives in the United States. The survey begins by taking stock of current practices for managing data about the creation and revision of finding aids, and then queries archivists’ attitudes about having their identities and positionalities linked to the finding aids they create. Survey results will be interpreted in light of the theoretical case for attending to metadata about finding aids. Professional identity is a set of beliefs about one’s professional role that related to how we perceive ourselves within our occupational context and how we communicate this to others. With a set of factors have changed the framework for archives management and restructured the professional practice in the digital age, the archival profession is going through an identity crisis all around the world. Professional identity is based on the result of work activities which are constructed within a socialization process, like a story. The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented global crisis that has already been declared as modern history’s gravest health emergency. In the face of the global crisis, many international organizations, including UNESCO, as well as ICA, emphasize the value of documenting and call archivists to action. The way the archival profession is responding to this crisis will be part of history books, and it will definitely affect the way archivists doing their work, as well as how they perceive themselves. In the above context, this paper focused on two research questions, they are: Has the professional identity of Chinese archivists changed after COVID-19 pandemic? How COVID-19 pandemic affects the professional identity of Chinese archivists? In order to answer all these questions, field surveys and interviews were carried out in July 2021 at Wuhan city, where the COVID-19 pandemic first broke out in China. We conducted field surveys on Wuhan Archives and Hubei Provincial Archives, and had an interview with 4 archivists who deals with the archives related to COVID-19 pandemic. The study found that the professional identity of archivists interviewed has been significantly improved during the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. How could this happen? Based on the analysis of survey data, we concluded that such improvement is based on the specific work environment and work activities during the pandemic, and mainly comes from the results that great attention of superiors, emergency rules making, effective outreach activities and perceived social approval effect comprehensively. |
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Research Session #10 A Future Generation of Archivists: Changes in Internships and
Instruction The archival profession has codified its opposition to unpaid internships on the grounds they foster inequity and de-value student labor. In response, library science programs and schools of information studies where many archival programs reside are beginning to drop required internships in favor of additional classroom studies or optional practicum experiences. The impact on the profession is three-fold: 1. Institutions that previously used interns to complete valuable or even essential projects and functions must now consider how to secure funding for paid positions, or how to function without this labor pool 2. Students may graduate without any hands-on experience, reducing the opportunity for them to develop basic processing skills under guided conditions, which both leaves them less prepared for a processing position and makes it more difficult for them to determine if this career path is a good fit for them, 3. Hiring managers will begin to receive applications from recent graduates that are no longer guaranteed to include 150 or more hours of field work, making comparisons to experienced applicants more challenging and increasing on-the-job training needs. While professional standards set forth by the Academy of Certified Archivists (ACA) are underpinned by theory, they demand an understanding of the practical application of archival methodologies as a litmus test for professionalization. Each of the seven Domains covered by the ACA’s certification exam are broken into tasks, which denotes the practical nature of archival work and the need to understand the functions of this profession.
This paper offers as a case study a course in arrangement and description of archival collections offered through the School of Information Studies (the i-School) at Syracuse University. IST 628: Arrangement and Description of Archival Collections provides crucial and in-depth practical experience alongside foundational theory, without increasing fees or time commitment incurred for a typical 3 credit course. A symbiotic relationship is established between the IST 628 students and the Special Collections Research Center, wherein the student’s practicum learning is embedded. Student learning results in processed collections and completed finding aids for SCRC, without the added burden of supervising 12 individual interns. The success of the program is evident in improved student outcomes and increased student satisfaction. Multiple iterations of the course have been presented and subsequently analyzed to improve and streamline the course, with the data showing that greater time spent on the practical methods of archiving is resulting in higher quality assignments and increased student satisfaction. If library science and archival studies programs no longer mandate internship experiences, there is room within targeted course curriculum to incorporate in-depth practical learning experiences that build from the theoretical instruction already offered, and produce students well prepared for the professional practice of archiving. Digital scholarship is relatively an emerging aspect in the archives and records management (ARM) profession. The curriculum is South Africa have gaps and redundancies as far as digital scholarship is concerned. The content of digital scholarship is either in or not in the ARM curriculum depending on the LIS school’s specialization. This study aimed at exploring the incorporation of digital scholarship into the ARM curricular in South Africa. Some of the constructs from the Wolf curriculum development framework informed this study as a conceptual underpinning. The study adopted a constructivist paradigm using a qualitative approach. A multiple case study design through semi structured interviews was used to collect data. Ten LIS schools that houses ARM courses were targeted for this study however, only five responded. Ten participants comprising of heads of departments and digital scholarship lecturers participated in this study. The study revealed that digital scholarship contents were infused in some LIS schools as far as ARM was concerned and in others were not there. Those that had contents on digital scholarship generally lacked the practical component of digital scholarship. Those that had no digital scholarship content, their course objectives were not aligned with digital scholarship content. Recurriculation of the content was underway through consultation with relevant stakeholders in some LIS schools as they have realized that they will render graduates that are irrelevant for the ARM job market. There were gaps, redundancies and opportunities that were identified from LIS schools that had contents on digital scholarship. The study concluded that most LIS schools had no contents on digital scholarship. Those that had contents had gaps and redundancies such included the lack of practicum in the courses. Recurriculation was recommended for most LIS schools and some of them had already embarked on the process. Consultation of all the relevant stakeholders in the ARM profession was recommended for LIS schools. It was recommended that LIS schools should be reciprocal to the needs of the ARM sector. The study recommended that LIS schools ensure that content on digital scholarship should be evident through the entire bachelor’s or Honours in ARM qualifications. Austria has a history of academic archival education dating back to 1854. Since then,
the Institute of Austrian Historical Research has been an esteemed training institution
for archivists renowned for its highly selective admission procedures. In the twenty-first
century, however, curriculum reforms have transformed the education programme while
digitalisation has changed the professional landscape. First, the Bologna Process
initiated the turn of an era by transforming the selective postgraduate course into
a regular master’s degree which is open to anyone holding a BA in a historico-cultural
discipline. Second, the relationship between the institute and the archival sector
underwent significant change. In contrast to the old system, current students do not
undergo their academic training on the job but depend on the degree in order to get
a job. Whereas previous generations of Austrian archivists relied on a linear education pathway,
today’s students experience an entirely new mode of learning. This aspect is most
evident in the new archival curricula as of 2006 in the form of a mandatory working
placement. The quality criteria have been intentionally kept vague in the past as
the institute does not assign the placement but leaves the entire organisation to
the students. Due to increasing student numbers and the retirement of those responsible
for accreditation, however, they have recently become a frequently discussed topic.
In theory, the placement is just a module of the archival curriculum. In practice,
however, it involves conflicting interests among stakeholders, such as the university,
archival educators, archives, and students, requiring expectation management. |
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Workshop #1 Yvette Ramírez, Tam Rayan, & Nazelie Doghramadjian In this workshop, each facilitator will begin by briefly discussing their respective projects and issues they are grappling with in using archives made by Bolivian, Palestinian, and Armenian diaspora communities. We define diasporas as communities that have been displaced, live in exile, or cannot easily return to their ancestral homes. Each example will serve as a case study to provoke discussion amongst workshop participants. We will build an ethical framework in the form of guiding principles for archival scholars using diaspora archives in their research. We believe this is an important endeavor given the lack of ethical research guidelines for archival scholars. As such, this workshop is specifically geared towards archival scholars with a background or an interest in researching and engaging diaspora communities.
Diaspora adds a specific space-bound context to cultural identity which impacts information practices given its varied spatial and temporal characteristics. By bringing together three distinct diasporas and their respective relationships to archives and recordkeeping, this workshop aims to work with participants to both discuss and collectively co-write guiding principles around researching diaspora archives alongside their respective communities. The Palestinian, Armenian, and Bolivian communities pose unique case studies in which to frame the ethical dimensions of researching diaspora archives because of their culturally specific oral, aural, and kinetic traditions that have remained as components of their personal and community recordkeeping. We define diaspora archives as materials that document the epistemologies and experiences of forced migrants and their descendents, moving with them to support community formation in their ongoing displacement (Lopez, 2017). Building from the facilitators’ work in their respective diaspora communities, this workshop seeks to build participant-based knowledge on the following themes shared across diaspora recordkeeping: 1) How to identify archival needs for different communities of the same diaspora. Each locale has varying conditions underlying the reasons for their displacement and differences in how they are situated in the host land, impacting their expression of identity and culture. How do archival scholars understand the particular diaspora consciousness of each community and engage in culturally specific archiving? 2) How to acknowledge contesting forms of memory work and documentation which may embody varied values, cultural contexts and historical colonial interventions. This can include records that may not be traditionally recognized as archival but created and experienced through day-to-day lived experiences. 3) How to approach diaspora records when navigating practical and theoretical issues of ruptures, discontinuity, loss, trauma, and dispersion. Many forced migrants experience multiple migrations to two or more foreign places after being dispersed from an original center. This impacts the continuity and comprehensiveness of their documentary heritage as records are lost and scattered on their journeys. How do we, as archival scholars, push against conventional archival theory and praxis to make space for the creation of unconventional records used to fill these gaps? The guiding principles created with this workshop will provide the foundation for a post-workshop blog post or short article to document and highlight the knowledge production and reflection process. |
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12:00-1:30 |
Lunch |
Ballroom |
12:30-1:25 |
Optional Lunch Tour: Hill Memorial Library |
Meet in Front of HPL Field House |
1:30-3:00 |
Research Session #11 Archival Methodology, Conflict, and Activism Time is of the essence when natural disasters, unrest, and/or armed conflict upend civilian life. Provisions and legal arguments asserting the obligation to protect cultural heritage date to the Roman period, convoking the heritage professions alongside judiciary and law enforcement agencies at the per country and international levels. UNESCO marked the 2018 European Year of Cultural Heritage and the early 50th anniversary of its 1970 Convention by then publishing a valuable toolkit for the latter two authority communities that now has by its very use, demonstrably made good on the aim to secure and safeguard heritage from the threat of illicit trafficking. Two new translations underpinned UNESCO's January 18-20, 2023 Warsaw workshop training over 35 representatives to counter the looting and destruction of Ukrainian cultural property. The workshop arrived in response to already incalculable losses of life and human rights, obviously the first priority in a collective response, and of protected cultural property including archives, historic sites, and their complete contents. The two are in fact linked, as stated in several international legal instruments including for Indigenous people, thus guiding efforts to re-establish peace and stem further losses of identity and history. Our AERI presentation will incorporate an analysis of the above recent use of UNESCO’s toolkit among a lineage of awareness-raising efforts intended to: recast the authority communities’ role as first responders, establish shared goals and definitions, comprehend the actor dynamics and economics that connect forged and plundered art to war crimes, identify opportunities and roles for combatting the continued displacement of artifacts from countries of origin, and make use of special or open educational resources to fill knowledge gaps. Provenance-researching archivists interact with the $64 billion global art market every day, and their restorative work can bring about the spiritual and psychological healing of people who have been impacted by conflict. When peace prevails, the unifying presence of cultural property will hasten communities’ ability to regain their lost sense of place. Diary methodology remains underutilized in qualitative research in the social sciences. Yet, diary studies have the potential to capture unique insight unavailable through other research methods due to their longitudinal, spontaneous, and highly contextualized nature. Solicited diaries have been used in affective examinations of labour relations (Tschan et al 2005; Poppleton et al. 2008; Holman 2016), workplace bullying (Rodríguez-Muñoz et al. 2022), work-related stress (Bono et al 2007; Clarkson & Hodgkinson 2007; Sonnentag et 2008), emotional exhaustion (Portoghese et al. 2017) and unfair events (Barclay & Kiefer 2019; Matta et al. 2014). Few, if any, diary studies have endeavored to study the workplace from the perspective of archivists. As a result of increased awareness around the emotional and traumatic aspects of archival work, and after initial research into this area, we embarked on a three-year, SSHRC-funded project (PIs: Wendy Duff and Cheryl Regehr) to better understand the emotional responses of archivists when working with records, researchers and donors. The research team conducted one-time, in-depth interviews in addition to a solicited diary study.
This presentation will use the project’s solicited diary and interview research as a case study to contrast and compare the data which emerges from studying the same subjective phenomena through differing methodology. The day-to-day diary entries made explicit everyday stressors and tensions that were less apparent in interviews focusing on major emotional events. Comparing the emotions and experiences captured through the different methodologies enriches and widens our understanding of archivist’s emotional responses to archival work. The presentation will also explore the ethical implications of using diary methodology to study difficult emotions; the diary’s potential benefit to participants should be balanced against the diary’s potential to harm. Ethical research practice works to reinforce rigour by developing a relationship of trust and collaboration between researchers and participants. The presentation will finally reflect on the project’s commitment to a reflexive, slow and proactive research process, which necessarily involved relinquishing researcher power and control, to prioritize respect for the rights, privacy and well-being of research participants. My research aims at investigating practices of remembrance in grassroots lesbian archives, focusing on these archives’ practices and their relationship to memory-making, community-building, and activism. The research also delves into theoretical discussions about memory, heritage, remembrance and oblivion, and the potentials and limitations of memory institutions for feminist and LGBTQIA+ struggles in contemporary societies. I am interested in how these archives create resistance and political engagement, and strengthen the senses of community and activism through practices of remembrance.
Initially, my intention is to frame the analysis focusing on two or three case studies. Two archives have already shown interest in collaborating with the research: Bay Area Lesbian Archives, in Oakland, and Archives Recherches et Cultures Lesbiennes, located in Paris.
The main question guiding the research is: how do these lesbian archives produce counternarratives and resistance through their collections and practices? The subquestions address 1) their archival strategies to gather, preserve, index, and make the records accessible to the public; 2) how the issues of remembrance, silence and oblivion tackled by these archives; 3) what these archives can tell us about lesbian history in their countries; 4) how they articulate discussions about gender and sexuality into broader political debates and activism, and how their connections with other organisations for this purpose are established.
In regards to the methods, I intend to use semi-structured interviews, participatory observation, and archival research, conducted during periods of fieldwork in the archives.
Since I am in the first year of my PhD, I believe I will not have many results to share on this occasion. My plan is to start my data collection this fall, once I have gotten the approval from the ethics committee of my university.
My intentions in taking part of the 2023 Archival Education & Research Institute are to present my research in its current state, and to share my ideas and plans for the next years of my doctoral studies. I am sending my registration to “Research/work in progress” and “Lighting talk” as I think that both opportunities would be extremely beneficial to improve my research. I would be thankful for the opportunity to connect with researchers and practitioners interested in similar issues and discussions, to get feedback/suggestions on my work, and to be able to contribute to the development of other researchers’ works. |
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Research Session #12 Essential Services: Addressing the Needs of Specific Communities Homeless services systems provide unhoused individuals access to emergency shelter, subsidized housing, and other life-sustaining resources. In this paper, we present a qualitative study that draws on the experiences of fifteen social service workers to examine how recordkeeping practices sustain homeless services systems and unite a tangled web of institutions and actors, including public housing systems, nonprofit agencies, and local governments. We address the following research questions: How is the infrastructure of homeless services sustained by recordkeeping? How are social service workers affected by increasing recordkeeping demands? In what ways do social service workers work against or ‘find the play’ in this system? To address these questions, we collected interviews and conducted artifact walkthroughs with our study participants. We analyzed the data using an infrastructural lens and found that current recordkeeping practices within homeless services systems comprise an "infrastructure of last resort" that functions logistically, prioritizing efficiency and speed. In addition to tracing how recordkeeping practices function, we also considered the ways in which they break down, and how social service workers navigate a logistified infrastructure via tactics we term translation work.
We show that social service workers “speak back” to this logistification by working to make the infrastructure legible to their unhoused clients through revealing some aspect of its inner workings, or by mediating their clients’ narration of their life experiences in order to achieve better outcomes. The ubiquity of this mediating work, between the categories and ways of knowing imposed by the system and the lived experiences of unhoused people, highlights the social complexity of recordkeeping processes and underscores how unhoused people’s life chances can hinge on minute detail. Our findings show how structuring recordkeeping in ways that privilege efficiency and speed disrupts social service work and interferes with social service workers’ ability to provide care for vulnerable individuals facing life-altering and life-threatening hardships. This discussion of logistification and translation work has important implications for the study and practice of recordkeeping within social service and care work. In the broadest sense, our participants’ narratives offer a compelling case for thinking critically about the function of social service bureaucracies. For any ecology of records, they ask us to consider, does this alleviate harms, or exacerbate them? The role of volunteers in archival institutions are meant to be ones of mutual benefit: institutions are able to complete projects that require more work than their paid staff is able to accomplish, and volunteers are given the opportunity to contribute to an important historical project. But “power relations are inherent in every archival act” (Cifor, Caswell, et al, 2018, p. 85). Volunteer guidance documents emphasize the logistical and planning aspects of using volunteer labor; however, they give little attention to the treatment of their volunteers. Within larger institutions, volunteers enter into a hierarchy in which they are valued as processors, unless a skill valued by the institution is uncovered. A hierarchy of power and expertism create expectations placed upon the bodies of volunteers. This power is circulated and enacted through bureaucratic structures, surveillance, and standardization. Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor (2016) argue for radical empathy in which “archivists are seen as caregivers, bound to records creators, subjects, users and communities through a web of mutual affective responsibility (p. 24), and this empathy should extend to volunteers. In order to put this empathy into practice, the individual goals and needs of each volunteer should be incorporated into the planning of the project, and this can most effectively be done by incorporating volunteers into project management. This paper identifies a disconnect between institutions and professional organizations and volunteers in the archive, and a call for extending radical empathy and an ethics of care to those necessary volunteers. An appeal like this is not without tension, as archivists must be prepared for “unaccustomed levels of professional humility…welcoming dispute and debate around the contents…[and] a new emphasis upon facilitation, dispersed community coordination, and emergent design” (Eveleigh, p. 222), and must also advocate for empathy in their institutions. From 2020-2021, the Virtual Footlocker Project (VFP) held focus groups with nearly 100 veterans and active duty military personnel. The subsequent analysis identified their personal military records' unique preservation needs and concerns. Utilizing the backwards design model, the VFP developed two curricula—one for active-duty military and veterans and another for cultural heritage workers. The curriculum for active-duty and retired is designed to provide military personnel with the skills and knowledge to identify important personal records, prioritize items for long-term storage, apply basic strategies for organizing and preserving their records, and locate additional resources. The curriculum for cultural heritage workers provides attendees with a foundation in the key challenges of personal military records, how to implement best practices when working with veterans, how to utilize the VFP veterans curriculum, and how to design and implement community-based projects focused on veterans. This presentation will summarize the development of the curricula content and website, and the results of the initial in-person and virtual workshops held during the past year. |
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Research Session #13 Indigenizing Archives as Reparative Practice Ia Bull, Lydia Curliss, Audrianna Goodwin, Ellen Holt-Werle, Diana Marsh, & Amanda Sorensen Shifting practices and scholarship in the archival field is moving towards what has been termed a “reparative turn” (Sedgwick 1997), defined by the Society of American Archivists as the “remediation of practices or data that exclude, silence, harm, or mischaracterize marginalized people in the data created or used by archivists to identify or characterize archival resources" (SAA Dictionary of Archives Terminology). While this work is gaining traction in “mainstream” archival spaces, in Native and Indigenous archival work, decolonizing frameworks, Indigenous data sovereignty, Tribal archives, and community archives are driving the development of specific knowledge organizations, ontologies, and platforms that reflect Indigenous knowledges and epistemologies, and which are often locally or regionally tailored (Littletree and Metoyer 2015; Christen 2020; Smith 2021). These Indigenous knowledge ontologies and descriptive practices reframe core Western archival principles. Aligned with these reparative and decolonizing approaches, there are movements toward Indigenizing theoretical frameworks. Indigenizing, as defined by the University of Canada Alberta:
…is a collaborative process of naturalizing Indigenous intent, interactions, and processes and making them evident to transform spaces, places, and hearts. Indigenization benefits not only Indigenous students but all students, teachers, staff members, and community members involved or impacted by Indigenization.
While the concept of Indigenizing has not gained as much traction in archival spaces, examples of Indigenizing work includes work that focuses on communities’ needs and priorities such as reparative descriptions, working towards archival material return, or engaging with communities to build out projects that center and benefit community needs.
This panel seeks to highlight new work and research in archival spaces seeking to Indigenize archival concepts, systems, collections, or wider practices. We are looking to highlight the work particularly of those who are engaged in Indigenizing practices, in their own institutions or partner repositories, and scholarship that engages with these ideas through examining theoretical, pedagogical, and methodological perspectives.
Audrianna Goodwin (Red Lake Nation) and Ellen Holt-Werle will discuss the processing project Goodwin is undertaking of the Helen Parker Mudgett papers, which is a continuation of conversations that happened during the Towards Recognition of University Tribal Healing (TRUTH) Project. Mudgett, a white woman, was an assistant professor of history and also intercultural education in the University of Minnesota’s General Extension Division. In addition to broader work around human relations, her work focused on American Indian communities, and Ojibwe people in Minnesota. Her unpublished manuscript, The Ojibwe Chronicles, and some of her papers were donated to the University of Minnesota Archives.
What does it mean to have a citizen of a Tribal Nation process the papers of someone who researched and interviewed members of that community? What context and depth can be added to prioritize the agency of members of that community? While the collection is of the papers of a white woman, who was privy to and recorded ceremony, how can it be described to not only enhance respectful access, but most importantly, to reflect, acknowledge, and honor members of the Tribal Nations she interacted with? |
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Workshop #2 Natália Tognoli, Forget Chaterera-Zambuko, Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Rebecca Frank, Jamie A. Lee, Ana Roeschley, & Ashley Todd-Diaz This workshop will be led by archival faculty and instructors from a variety of institutions, who will facilitate discussion about teaching archival courses across several delivery types (face-to-face, online asynchronous and synchronous, and hybrid) at multiple institutions. The role of the course syllabus in successful courses will be interrogated at length. Workshop facilitators will share lessons drawn from their own experiences, offer possible solutions to challenges encountered, as well as discuss and share the syllabi they have crafted, modified, and delivered. The workshop will offer a discourse on the elements of a presumed good syllabus. These include but may not be limited to overall course rationale, defining the course learning outcomes, outcome-driven assessment, grading methods, student responsibilities, reading material as well as the teaching philosophy.
This discussion will lead into a hands-on collaborative syllabi audit, as well as a chance to contribute syllabi to several collaborative research efforts (including the ArchiPrEd led by Sarah Buchanan and Ed Benoit, and the IMLS grant project led by Alex Poole and Ashley Todd-Diaz). Participants will collaboratively brainstorm what topics ideally should be covered in archival courses, suggest readings and assignments, as well as suggested best practices. This workshop is ideal for graduate students, early career faculty, and practitioners who are planning to start teaching or have just begun. Participants are welcome to bring in-progress syllabi for collaborative consultations and feedback. |
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3:00-3:15 |
Afternoon Break |
Ballroom |
3:15-4:45 |
Research Session #14 Where are the Children? A Community Discussion on Children’s
Records and Recordkeeping Nicola Laurent, Melissa Nolas, Stephen Curley As scholars Alice Fothergill and Lori Peek argue children “make important contributions and have many strengths, which are all too often misunderstood or overlooked altogether. In times of trouble, the fates of children are every bit as complex as those of adults” (Fothergill and Peek, 2015, pg. 4). Unfortunately, most scholarly conceptions such as the child resilience myth assume that many children just “‘bounce back’ quickly from the harmful effects of disaster” or the helpless victim myth which “casts children as powerless and fragile, depict youth as completely incapable of acting in the face of disaster” (Fothergill and Peek, 2015, pg. 4). Such misconceptions thwart deeper understandings of the history of children, the experiences of these vulnerable subpopulations, and the importance of using stories and records to both remember the past and make way for the future. But given the relatively short span of research and projects on children’s records and the general absence of a focus on the child as an archival subject, user, and creator of archival records (Carbajal, 2022) this panel brings together emerging archival work on this very topic.
Bringing together a panel of archivists and scholars each working with records regarding children, childhoods, and both painful and joyous life experiences sets the stage for exposing the importance of this new archival area of study. The Find and Connect Australia project demonstrates growing attention towards foster care and out of home care records for Australians youth and their adult selves. The Children’s Photography Archive, one of the first of its kind, highlights records created by youth creators documenting a number of lived experiences through the perspectives of those directly living them. Finally, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition shares insights on their ongoing work towards cultural revival, healing, and resource sharing using archival records of children who lived through oftentimes difficult boarding school experiences in North America. Together, this panel features crucial intersections between the importance of introducing young record creators alongside their future user adult selves, descendants, or relevant communities. |
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Research Session #15 Sustainability and Collaboration: Institutional Policies for
Better Archives To build, sustain, and grow ethical human infrastructures for preserving the cultural record, we need to continue to improve and demonstrate our understanding of how to support and lift up archival workers. Grant-funded initiatives in the United States such as the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSR), the Archives Leadership Institute (ALI) and the Archival Education and Research Institute (AERI) have held capacity building as a central part of their outcomes. Often described as catalysts for support and belonging, these initiatives and many others have focused on fostering community and professional networks as a means for building capacity. However, deliberate analysis and scaffolding are important for avoiding replication of prior practices that may not be accessible or inclusive.
This paper will outline and discuss one phase of an ongoing research project about archival labor, care, and capacity. This short presentation will engage with the following research question, “What practices from capacity building initiatives in archives and cultural memory offer potential for replicability, ethical labor practices, and sustainable advocacy and growth?” with analysis and results from a qualitative pilot survey of documentation from projects on archival labor. Appraisal is central to archival work as not everything can be kept, and decisions must be made on what to keep and what to pass on. A collection policy often guides such decisions; this is an official statement issued by libraries and archives that identifies the kinds of materials they accept and the conditions or terms that affect their acquisition. In archival literature, appraisal has been described as the most complex and intellectually demanding task. Much has been written about appraisal since the publication of the Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives in 1898. Nevertheless, how appraisal should be done and the role of the collection policy in the real world are not well understood, and the literature lacks empirical investigation.
This study seeks to better understand the collection policy's role in appraisal by examining such policies. This is a preliminary examination of the first phase of research aimed at exploring appraisal practice within special collections at university archives and libraries. Special collections, which are composed of unique materials that are distinct and have intrinsic value to the institution, were chosen in this study because they often require special consideration in the appraisal process.
In this study, special collections at Association of Research Libraries institutions in the United States served as the population of this study (N=103). The institutions' websites were first searched for a collection policy. If a policy could not be found on the website, a combination of Google searches was completed using the library's name and the terms "AND collection policy," "AND collection development policy," or "AND appraisal policy." A total of 59 (57%) out of 103 policies were located. The policies will be uploaded to NVivo, qualitative analysis software, for qualitative content analysis. The codes will be derived from the literature and tested on a smaller sample size. Any new codes that arise during the process will be categorized and added to the codes. Institutional information will be taken from the IPEDS data center to enable the researchers to analyze how institutional characteristics may be related to the policies at various academic institutions. Once the coding is finished, an intercoder reliability test will be done by comparing the results of both coders. The types of topics covered in the collection policy statements will be summarized. The implications of the findings in terms of special collection appraisal and acquisition will be discussed. Libraries, archives, and museums have long shared similar missions: to collect and preserve items for future generations as well as ensuring that those items remain accessible to the public. However, they do not have a history of collaborating to achieve their goals. By working together, these memory institutions could achieve those goals by combining their often limited resources, as well as sharing expertise to provide new perspectives.
The idea of collaboration has been discussed for years, but without any major developments in that direction. In 2008, the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) published what is still one of the most well-known and comprehensive reports on inter-institutional collaborations: “Beyond the Silos of the Lams: Collaboration among Libraries, Archives, and Museums.” This report, along with workshops, conferences, and other publications, sparked discussion of collaboration, though there has been little consensus on how to collaborate effectively.
Through a series of case studies, this project will analyze documentation and conduct interviews to examine past inter-institutional collaborations in order to discover the strengths and weaknesses of each attempt and develop a framework to guide and encourage future collaborations. The chosen studies are: The Jane Collaborative, Smithsonian Team Flickr, and the Museum and Online Archive of California. They each represent collaborations between several combinations of memory institutions (i.e. museum/library, museum/archive, library/archive/museum), as well as different goals in those collaborations. Smithsonian Team Flickr and the Museum and Online Archive of California both heavily feature an online component in their collaborations, while the Jane Collaborative involves collaboration through outreach.
The challenge in this project will be to find a balance between the goals of each individual institution, the specific purpose of any collaboration attempt, and ensuring that any collaboration through digital means is as safe from obsolescence as possible. |
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Workshop #3 Forget Chaterera-Zambuko, Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Rebecca Frank, Jamie A. Lee, & Ana Roeschley This workshop aims to fill a gap in the education of many doctoral and master’s students in archival and information studies programs, as well as practitioners who aim to teach - being able to identify and clearly articulate their own pedagogical style to compose an effective teaching statement. This workshop will bring together a group of presenters/leads with a range of types of experience who have all gone through the process of examining their pedagogical approaches and successfully crafting teaching statements to use in packages for applying to jobs and for promotion. This workshop will also bring in education faculty and pedagogical experts from LSU to provide further background and training on identifying what pedagogical style best matches each participant, and how to connect pedagogical practice to teaching statements.
Workshop leads will share examples from their own work and portfolios, as well as samples shared from other archival faculty at various stages of their careers. Participants will have the opportunity to workshop their in-process teaching statements or begin crafting one for the first time, with guidance and feedback from the workshop leads and fellow attendees. By the conclusion of the workshop, participants will be able to create stronger teaching statements, provide better feedback to peers on their own statements, and have greater insight into their preferred teaching style.
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4:45-6:00 |
Break & Networking |
Ballroom |
6:00-8:00 |
Small Group Networking Dinners |
Time |
Event |
Location |
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8:00-9:00 |
Registration & Continental Breakfast |
Ballroom |
9:00-10:15 |
Plenary: Amber N. Mitchell, Tilling the Soil: Educating the Public about the Legacy of Slavery at the Whitney Plantation |
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10:15-10:30 |
Morning Break |
Ballroom |
10:30-12:00 |
Research Session #16 The Aims of Our Institutions: Archives Addressing Human Needs This paper presentation focuses on the topic of the archival subjugation of vulnerable populations, specifically youth. Given the lack of scholarship on children and adolescents and archival recordkeeping, few archival theories grapple with questions on how archival records are shaped and interact with populations of youth as users, subjects, and creators of records. Archival collections may include records recalling an adult’s childhood through oral histories or records created by children but collected by adults such as parents or notable figures like presidents. The child rarely gets noted as a contributor and most times will exist as a subject of observation or participation. In most archival collections of records, “children as subjects remain part of a larger whole of ignored or harmed populations such as women and domestic abuse survivors” with many being portrayed as helpless victims or passive observers. (Carbajal, 2022) Few collections exist that document, preserve, and provide access to records created by youth, for youth users, and about youth subjects as active agents in the historical narrative.
Feminist social theory questions a number of existing biological theories positioning human beings according to race, ethnicities, religion, biological sex, class, and of course age. Using these hierarchies, human societies across time, space, and groups have asserted power and control over others or have faced this domination with various degrees of resistance or acceptance. The proposed term of archival subjugation draws from a number of feminist scholars and theories including the making of the savage, norms and normalization, dynamics of subjugation, as well as obligation, relations, and care (Heidi Stark, 2016; Dean Spade and Craig Wilse, 2015; Spade, 2013; Luna, 2020). While additional research must be conducted to fully understand the entire scope of children’s archival recordkeeping and use, this presentation looks to first understand the issue of positioning children as archival subjects. This positioning not only represents the majority of today’s focus on children’s records, but it also highlights a feminist framing of the child as a subject to be monitored and controlled. Children as a whole already represent a vulnerable population, but there exist even more marginalized and hyper documented youth subpopulations such as the case with those in the foster care system.
Establishing a relationship between youth and records requires critical interrogation of the ways records created by foster care institutions and agents surveil, document, study, and control this subpopulation of children. While some policymakers and advocates of the foster care system will praise the use of a heavily involved recordkeeping system as a mechanism for social care and protection, these systems also hold extensive power over the subject without providing many vehicles for subject control. As archival subjects studied through a limited understanding of their lives, children become what Jacob Breslow frames as the “figure of the child” rather than examples of “real” lives of “actual” children (Breslow, 2021, pg. 5) For foster care youth living through difficult and at times disastrous moments, how can present and future record balance finite and biased historic representations and understandings of the child with more complex representations of children and their varied and complex lives? What are records? Are they merely objects? Or are they something more intersected with human activity and meaning? This presentation poses several arguments based on the idea that records are representative of human activity (records management practices), human thought (recorded information) and human perception (integrity and authenticity). Records managers are tasked with creating tools to support and supervise practices to manage organizational records and information. At a time when government organizations work to meet increasing demands for improved access to information, information technology continues to innovate. The implementation of electronic records management systems (ERMS) in government organizations presents an opportunity to leverage the knowledge and expertise of information professionals, while presenting new risks.
This presentation argues that records, or recorded information in any format, are co-created as a result of activity. This collaborative-creation is evident when we engage in process mapping activities that result in records creation. The records are evidence of the activity – and in turn, tell the story of actions in moments in time. While not all of these stories may be terribly exciting, they each have meaning to the individuals about whom they pertain.
RMPs are in a unique position to observe how records users behave, as well as their attitudes towards managing records. The challenges of privacy breaches, improper records storage, destruction and poor information security are, in part, the outcome of poor records management practices. As part of my doctoral dissertation study, this presentation draws from my adaptation of Braun and Clark’s (2006) Thematic Analysis (TA) methodology. The data was collected through semi-structured telephone interviews with twelve participants represented different Canadian Federal Government departments and agencies. Thematic analysis is a method used to identify, analyze and report patterns (themes) and describes a data set in detail. Thematic analysis also uses specific vocabulary, which is useful for consistent reference and meaning. The purpose of thematic analysis is not necessarily to develop theory, but to discern themes that may contribute to theory building in future projects. This presentation includes several themes resulting from my doctoral study. Human-centeredness in documentation holds interest for information professionals. This paper reports preliminary findings on qualitative content analysis research exploring documentary practices evident in the official transcripts of oral histories at the Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. Documentary practices in the oral history genre not only serve the purpose of discovery and access; they attest to the social contexts of plural stakeholders who produce an information resource.
Qualitative content analysis techniques are appropriate for textual analysis and human interpretation of static texts. The research question centers on analyzing the social production of oral history documentation through the lens of human information behavior in library and information science research. I focus LIS-HIB sensitizing concepts in the literatures of information practice and information work, joined with communities of practice concepts on lifelong learning in informal environments, as analytical tools. My use of sensitizing concepts aligns with qualitative LIS studies of human information behavior and the social construction of knowledge.
Research design specifies three units of analysis: the sponsoring and-or funding entities of oral history projects, official transcripts of individual oral histories within projects, and bibliographic documentation of official transcripts in the institution’s library. In line with the case study approach in qualitative methods, the Science History Institute’s location in Philadelphia sets a geographic boundary. Data collection began in September 2022 using the institution’s online platform for Digital Collections and filters to refine the census’ and purposive samples’ quantitative and qualitative data. Research design is emergent. Data are coded through my use of NVivo and Excel spreadsheets, and data analysis relies on inductive reasoning inspired by constructivist grounded theory. Triangulation is aided by the use of quantitative analysis of the samples and reference to Oral History Association Principles and Best Practices https://oralhistory.org/principles-and-best-practices-revised-2018/. Limitations include uncertainty of authorship in static texts and the researcher as sole coder. Member-checking with the research communities of information professionals mitigates researcher bias and enhances trustworthiness.
Analyzing official transcripts in the samples, statements found in the front matter document the interests of the original project entity, the funder, and the rights holder. Using sensitizing concepts to analyze information use as the social production of documentation, oral histories feature multiple agents who conceptualize, produce, and contextualize resources through documentation. As stakeholders, multiple agents range from oral history project originators and funders to the numerous interviewers and interviewees who effectuate specific oral histories. Additionally, bibliographic documentation connects the “works” of an oral history project to the institutional library through the agency of librarians, archivists, and information professionals who provide access points to holdings and reference services for users. Whereas documentation in oral histories is attributed to stakeholders, however, documentation in archival and library science tends to anonymize metadata creators’ intellectual contributions.
In sum, preliminary findings indicate that the human-centeredness of documentation in oral histories and oral history projects contrasts with anonymized documentation limited to the purposes of discovery and access. Next steps include refining analyses and implications for greater recognition of human-centered stewardship. |
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Research Session #17 Educating and Engaging Students: Issues in Today’s Archival Scholarship Archival practitioners and academics concur that metadata and description are at the basic and core to discoverability, including access of archival materials in variety of ways. Therefore, the archives and record management sector require archivists who are highly skilled and motivated to perform metadata duties with sets of metadata competencies. This suggests that archival education and training programmes should produce graduates with the requisite skills to perform right away on their first jobs. Additionally, archival institutions are mandated to provide access to oral history content in variety of formats. While oral history content does not fit properly in archival standards for description, the practitioners also lack knowledge and skills to deal with the conceptual metadata required for oral history This qualitative study was focused on education and training of metadata and metadata creation in South Africa to determine the available training and the content scope covered by these programmes. The study also intended to contribute to the inclusion of metadata content and oral history in the education and training programmes. Data was collected using document analysis and interviews from archival practitioners, to determine the content of the education and training programmes with special reference to oral history content. The findings revealed that the archival education and training programmes do not cover metadata description on oral history content. The study also revealed that, despite oral history content being an integral part of archival collections, often education and training of oral history content are often offered separate from archival and records programmes. The study recommended collaboration between archives and record sector, and oral history sector. It also proposes guidelines to inform education and training of metadata and metadata standards and/schema. The presence of a core theoretical and practical knowledge base distinguishes a profession not only by unifying it but by helping it accrue power (Bastian & Yakel, 2005, 2006). Examining a grouping of courses at a given school or department, analyzing the topics contained in syllabi, and scrutinizing the required and recommended readings in syllabi—all represented vehicles through which to gauge core knowledge.
Bastian and Yakel (2005, 2006) analyzed introduction to archives course syllabi from 33 programs that specified weekly topics and readings. First, not one topic was covered in all the introductory archives courses; Bastian and Yakel (2005) therefore highlighted “the variety and inconsistency of archival knowledge across programs and across venues” (p. 110).
Second, Bastian and Yakel (2006) conducted a citation analysis of the 33 introductory syllabi that specified required readings. They ferreted out 2,393 citations representing 1462 unique titles. Scatter prevailed: no single reading was used in all 33 courses, a whopping 1,110 of those readings were used in only one course, only two of the eight most frequently used articles dated from after 1990, and instructors leaned heavily on books in the SAA Archival Fundamental Series, which Bastian and Yakel deemed regrettable. They characterized the core as weak and suggested that educators had yet to achieve consensus on core literature, much less on a standardized curriculum. This paper revisits Bastian and Yakel’s work. We analyze 43 introduction to archives syllabi (2018-2021), namely their learning objectives, weekly topics, readings, and assignments, to determine whether the scatter discerned by Bastian and Yakel persists—and what such a scatter suggests about the presence of a core knowledge base in Archival Studies. Engaged scholarship is described as the integration of education with community development. Research in such initiatives leads to collaboration, relevance, and the co-creation of knowledge. At the University of South Africa, engaged scholarship is firmly set within its vision of being the African University, shaping futures in the service of humanity. The Department of Information Science at this institution launched an engaged scholarship project titled ‘Decolonising archives: building an inclusive archive at the Gauteng Provincial Archives Repository’ in 2019. The project aims to work with previously disadvantaged communities in the province of Gauteng to transform their archives. This is done by collecting sports memories that are unfortunately missing in the provincial repository. Most black communities remain undocumented in public archival repositories in South Africa as a direct consequence of the previous undemocratic apartheid dispensation. Efforts by the government and other stakeholders towards transforming the public archives from 1996 till now have resulted in minimal changes. Through participatory action research, the researchers, in collaboration with the Gauteng communities and the provincial archives, are working towards building a sports collection reflective of all communities in Gauteng. This paper discusses how this engaged scholarship programme, through collaborative efforts, increased research, and engaging outputs such as collection at the provincial archives, capacitated communities in collecting oral history while also boosting the postgraduate programme and transforming the archival curriculum. Discussion on this shared experience could further strengthen the project and benefit similar postgraduate projects worldwide. It is concluded that through the relationships with local communities, the engaged scholarship enabled us to draw from the knowledge heritage of communities and learn from situated knowledge outside the academy. At the same time, the archives repository can also build its collection by including memories of those previously excluded. Members of the community developed skills in collecting oral history. Engaged scholarship can therefore be used to revitalise and transform the archival curriculum towards greater social justice and more effective corporate citizenship. |
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Research Session #18 The Online Archive: Development, Preservation, and Access The rapid transformations witnessed on the digital landscape today have led to the increased generation of digital records, prompting the growing interest by universities to adopt sustainable digital archiving implementations to ensure the continued access of archives. This paper presents findings of a doctoral study concluded in 2022 at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa. The study investigated digital archives management practices in selected public universities in Kenya. The objective of the study was to develop a digital archiving framework for archival repositories at the institutions. The study sought to answer five research questions which were: what is the state of digital archiving readiness of public universities in Kenya? How are digital archives identified and administered in Kenyan public universities? Which legal and regulatory frameworks govern digital archives management in Kenyan public universities? Which risk factors are digital archives exposed to in these universities? What possible solutions can be adopted to mitigate the identified risks and support sustainable digital archiving implementations in Kenyan public universities? A mixed methods approach was used, albeit with a qualitative priority. The study was underpinned by the records continuum model, Open Archival Information System Reference model and the Archives and Records Management Association (ARMA) Records Management Maturity model which were triangulated to coin a conceptual framework for the study. Six public universities were purposively selected namely: the University of Nairobi, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Moi, Kenyatta, Maseno and Egerton Universities. Purposive sampling was also used to select 205 respondents from various categories to participate in the study. Data was collected using questionnaires, interviews, and document review. Quantitative data was analysed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and presented using inferential and descriptive statistics. Qualitative data was analysed thematically using NVivo and presented using charts, graphs and tables as applicable. Key findings of the study suggested that public universities in Kenya are not ready for digital archiving owing to the risk exposures for digital records in the institutions. The overall conclusion was that even though the institutions had instigated various approaches to mitigate identified risks, a lot needed to be done to improve the state of digital archives management in the universities. The study recommended a framework for digital archiving that brings into perspective a collaborative approach, whose core focus is to enhance d-archiving practices in archival repositories of collaborating institutions. Given their power and ubiquity, a broad coalition has evolved within society that seeks to inculcate or train a sensitivity or a critical posture to algorithms as they live alongside information technology, computational culture, and the processes that involve data and calculation. Multiple governance frameworks, models, and community spaces now exist to scrutinize the social, technical, and regulatory challenges posed by algorithms, as well as the ways that these systems impact decision-making and its outcomes. Such initiatives run the gamut from the research-focused ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency to the policy-focused European Parliament Governance Framework for Algorithmic Accountability and Transparency, the human rights-focused Toronto Declaration, and the developer-focused Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) project.
The evaluative concepts informing this research and policy work have taken on different frames. A key frame, that of accountability, is coupled with the notion that there is an ongoing legal, moral, and ethical obligation for actors to acknowledge responsibility in the event of negative consequences brought about by algorithmic systems. Accountability carries with it the notion that actors should be held responsible for their actions, with controls to that effect coming from internal and/or external sources.
Administrative and political accountability is predicated on relevant actors creating and maintaining critical information about the actions taken. Taking onboard the premise that information management and governance (IG) is a key aspect of algorithmic accountability leads to questions about which actors are suitable to take on such a role and what information will be managed in that process. Drawing on our work as part of The University of Texas Good Systems project, our research sharpens the link between algorithmic transparency and data and recordkeeping requirements, creating an accompanying IG transparency framework in two parts. The first part identifies and describes the information and data governance issues within existing legal, regulatory, and policy frameworks for algorithmic accountability. Building on these insights, we also formally define the requirements for preserving algorithms and algorithmic systems for accountability and transparency purposes, in association with the various methods necessary to facilitate this preservation process. Kenya Agricultural Research Institute through its research and related activities generates a lot of agricultural materials that are born digital and others that are the product of digitization. The information generated serves to improve and promote transfer of agricultural technologies, provide knowledge, inform the clientele, respond to demands and opportunities leading to the enhancement of agricultural production. Therefore, there is need to preserve these digital materials properly.
The aim of the study is to assess the current practices and challenges in preservation of digital agricultural information at KARI with a view to proposing strategies and recommendations for promoting access to agricultural information. The study objectives are to: establish current practices adopted with regard to digital preservation of agricultural information at KARI and establish the types of digital records created, preserved and disposed of. Other objectives included examining existing policies at KARI pertaining to long term preservation of digital records; determining infrastructure for preserving digital records; establish the challenges encountered in preserving digital records and making recommendations for addressing the challenges identified by the study.
The theoretical framework for this study is the National Archives of Australia Digital Recordkeeping Guidelines 2004. The guidelines comprehensively discuss issues pertaining to the creation, management and preservation of digital records. The guidelines cover the following areas namely importance of digital records, digital recordkeeping framework, creating digital records, creating information about digital records, determining how long to keep digital records and storing and securing digital records.
A sample population of 32 respondents is purposively selected. The research is qualitative in nature and KARI was used as the case study. Data was collected by means of semi structured interview schedule, supplemented by observation and documentary evidence. Data was analyzed qualitatively. Tables are used to enter specific types of data and to show relations between variables.
The study key findings are: KARI creates and preserves digital records, there are no existing policies and standards governing preservation of digital records, infrastructure in place is wanting, environmental conditions for digital records is not conducive, there is a digitization draft policy, security measures are in place and there is no disposition and retention schedules for digital records. Recommendations directed towards improving and promoting digital agricultural information preservation at KARI included: strengthening the institution networks; implementation of digital preservation policies and techniques; coordination of digital preservation activities within the institute; development of institutional policies for acquisition, conversion, storage, and maintenance of digital records; and development of infrastructure capable of supporting distributed systems of digital records within KARI network. |
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Workshop # 4 Jessie Johnston & Rebecca D. Frank Digital curation skills have become an important part of many archival education programs. Instructors use a variety of approaches to teaching digital skills, tools, and preservation or curation workflows, from hands-on media archaeology to software demonstrations to live coding. Yet, the pedagogical value and effectiveness of techniques such as these are underdocumented and often only learned by future faculty and teachers through trial and error. In this session, we will explore and critically reflect on current instructional approaches to teaching digital curation tools and skills, ranging from exploration of bit rot to file format analysis to preservation policy, and work with attendees to develop their own sample lesson plans for teaching technical tools and topics. This session is geared toward current or future educators and faculty members and will provide a space to observe, analyze, and learn about pedagogical approaches to teaching technology in the digital curation classroom.
The format of the workshop session will be as follows: · After a brief welcome and round of introductions participants will work through a hands on activity together that the facilitators have used in their own teaching practice. · This will be followed by reflection and discussion. · Participants will then develop lesson plans, learning modules, and/or assignments that they can incorporate into their teaching in archives, digital preservation, cultural heritage, or digital curation courses.
The goal of this session is to provide an interactive example of teaching digital skills/tools, and to create opportunities for participants to develop their own teaching materials in a collaborative and supportive environment. Participants who have done hands-on teaching with technology or developed curricular materials in this area will be encouraged to bring their materials to the workshop, but it is not required for participation. |
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12:00 |
Lunch on-the-go and Transportation to Afternoon Excursion |
Meet in Front of HPL Field House |
1:00-5:00 |
Lunch and Learn: Musician Kid Ory and the birth of jazz + tour at the Louisiana State Archives Biographer John McCusker spent over a decade researching the life of jazz pioneer Kid Ory. His findings reveal Kid Ory as an essential, generational link between the first jazz band leader, Buddy Bolden, and the city's ultimate jazzman, Louis Armstrong. The presentation will feature recordings, videos, and ephemera from McCusker's personal archive. A raffle for copies of McCusker’s book Creole Trombone: Kid Ory and the Early Years of Jazz will take place at the end of the lecture, along with a book signing. Afterward, explore artifacts from McCusker’s extensive archive and experience your choice of tours at the Louisiana State Archives. Guided tours include either the Accessions, Audio-Visual departments, and the Research Library or a curator-led tour of the current astrologically-themed exhibition, Written in the Stars, Celebrating 100 Louisiana Luminaries. Zoom link. |
Louisiana State Archives |
Discover Louisiana's Rural Past The LSU Rural Life Museum is dedicated to the preservation and exhibition of materials from the cultures of 18th and 19th century rural Louisianans. Through the forethought and generosity of the Burden Family, the LSU Rural Life Museum remains intact for future generations. The LSU Rural Life Museum holds the largest collection of Louisiana vernacular architecture and the most extensive collection of material culture items from the 18th and 19th centuries. The museum includes 32 historic outbuildings that spread over 25 acres and are divided into four sections: the Working Plantation, the Upland South Region, the Gulf Coast Region, and an Exhibit Barn. Visit the Rural Life Museum website to learn more. |
LSU Rural Life Museum
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A compelling and authentic presentation of slavery on a Louisiana sugar plantation. Whitney Plantation is the only former plantation site in Louisiana with an exclusive focus on slavery. Generations of Africans and their descendants were enslaved here to establish and maintain indigo, rice, and sugar crops. Visitors learn about this history through tours, exhibits, memorials, and artwork. On this Guided Tour, visitors will be led through the grounds of the museum by a member of our team of Historic Interpreters. Each Interpreter is extremely well-knowledgeable about the history of our site as well as the history of slavery in Louisiana as a whole. They each come from a variety of backgrounds, but rest-assured that whoever is leading your tour, you will be in excellent hands. Visit the Whitney Plantation website to learn more |
Whitney Plantation |
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6:00-8:00 |
Faculty Dinner |
Ballroom |
Student Dinner & Evening |
Cypress Hall |
Time |
Event |
Location |
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8:00-9:00 |
Registration & Continental Breakfast |
Ballroom |
9:00-10:15 |
Plenary: Kirsten L. Campbell & Erika Witt, The Louisiana Experience: A Conversation with Doctoral Candidates |
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10:15-10:30 |
Morning Break |
Ballroom |
10:30-12:00 |
Research Session #19 Archival Justice and Carceral Archives in Academia The early 2020s have been years of great change across the United States – amid a global pandemic, George Floyd’s murder by police in Minneapolis focused national and worldwide attention on police brutality and anti-Black violence, and the subsequent spate of protests around the world marked a shift in institutional acceptability of Black Lives Matter as a strategic priority rather than a “fringe” or radical view. Over the past decade or so, there has been a steady increase of published work on the relationship between justice and archives, but there have not been localized, in-depth systematic studies of challenges to implementing and engaging in social, reparative, and restorative justice as an archival imperative within institutional settings. Academic archives in particular have begun to grapple with the legacies of slavery that built and funded many academic institutions, and how this past continues to echo today through the experiences of students, staff, faculty, and community members.
This presentation will cover early findings from my dissertation research, which focuses on the intersections of social, reparative, and restorative justice and archival practice in academic archives settings, using the University of Maryland and the 1856 Project as the primary case study - the newly established 1856 Project aims to “build an inclusive university community by enhancing the collective understanding of the Black experience at UMD.” Participant observation and interview data from the UMD case study will be triangulated with a supplementary interview study with archival practitioners at other academic archives engaging in justice work. My paper presentation will report on the findings of my recent research on university archives that steward records related to incarceration. In the past decade, archives have carved out a place in our social discourse on prisons and policing with new collecting, description, and access initiatives focused on incarceration. As archivists increasingly respond to the needs of users researching mass incarceration, they must contend with the challenges of stewarding records that hold the potential to re-criminalize, stigmatize, or traumatize those documented by them. Despite these challenges, there has not been empirical research on how archivists are approaching their work with incarceration materials. My project addresses this gap by asking the following question: Within U.S.-based university archives that collect incarceration-related records, what factors do archivists consider when appraising, processing, and providing access to these collections? This paper presentation will report on my findings from interviews with ten archivists at six different university archives that hold significant collections related to incarceration. By gaining an understanding of this emergent area of archival collecting across different archival repositories, this research is a first step toward establishing best practices for documenting the age of mass incarceration. |
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Workshop #5 Vanessa Reyes, Anastasia Weigle, & Gerry Benoît The workshop will cover the proof of concept for a Digital Storytelling Scrollytelling toolkit that will make archival collections available for others to experience in an informative and interactive way. The presentation will demonstrate through practice the potential of creating our message, connecting collections in archives with users, and sharing stories that otherwise would not have been told. To make archival collections more visible, this project was born out of a grant proposal for the Library of Congress CCDI (Connecting Communities Digital Initiative) in hopes to bring awareness, find solutions, and implement changes aimed toward appreciating, acknowledging, and recognizing unseen unique and beautiful collections. Our workshop will provide a comprehensive background on how "scrollytelling" can connect communities to collections by reinvigorating interest in a more contemporary web presence to a maintainable and scalable interface that is user-friendly and adaptable to any cultural heritage institution. The project aims to develop practices of the already-tested interests and perspectives of community members by adapting information professionals' knowledge with our own. Our workshop will seek feedback that will help improve the design and implementation of the applications. We aim to inspire archivists to try our proof of concept in a live setting to reveal the application's broader reach into other fields such as the humanities, social sciences, art history, studio arts, literature, architecture, engineering, and the material sciences. |
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Workshop #6 Part 1 Jessica Crouch & Christine Di Bella The open source application ArchivesSpace has become the choice for archives information management in thousands of organizations of many different types and sizes throughout the world. Gaining experience with it and an understanding of its role in management and performance of archival functions is increasingly important for many students as they prepare to work in a wide variety of repositories. Archival educators can help their students by incorporating exposure to the system into relevant coursework related to accessioning, arrangement, description, preservation, access and other common archives functions.
This workshop will focus on the value of the ArchivesSpace application as it relates to archival functions commonly taught in intro and more advanced archives coursework. Part 1 will provide a general overview of the system, along with information about ArchivesSpace’s free Educational Program Membership, which provides resources to make using ArchivesSpace with students easier. Part 2 will offer deeper exposure to the system, with an opportunity to work through exercises in archival description and collection management for physical and digital materials. Both parts will provide an opportunity to ask questions and interact with other educators around these topics, while becoming more familiar with the system and the possibilities it presents for archival work.
While attending both parts of the workshop is welcomed, depending on an individual attendee’s prior knowledge of ArchivesSpace one may be more pertinent than the other. |
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12:00-1:30 |
Lunch |
Ballroom |
12:30-1:25 |
Optional Lunch Trip: LSU Museum of Natural Science |
Meet in Front of HPL Field House |
1:30-3:00 |
Research Session #20 Colonialism & Diaspora Diasporas, which originate largely due to colonialism, represent an in-flux state of formative identity-making through the processes of migration and identity reclamation. In relation to diaspora, it is displaced and dispersed records that are largely associated due to the interplay of recordkeeping with the nation-state, it’s agents as well as the varied spatial and temporal characteristics of records of a diaspora (Gilliand 2017, Punzalan 2014). Missing from the diasporic archival literature however is the explicit attention on personal records versus than at the national and institutional level. The personal archive, as both an unmediated and mediated site, allows us to “witness” specific construction and negotiations of memory taking place. Sue McKemmish’s concept of witnessing, within personal archives, provides insight of how communities might maintain collections and apply formats in line with cultural memory traditions (McKemmish, 2005). This paper will examine the role of personal archives within diasporic communities, particularly US Andean communities, as sites that affirm, confront and reconcile identity as Andean, diasporic and in this particular case Indigenous. It will ask the question: What are the practical and symbolic motivations of Andean communities in the United States when preserving records within personal archives? How do personal archives communicate with embedded traditions of format, function and apparatuses pertaining to diasporic Andean recordkeeping?
This paper will also address gaps in the existing literature around an experience by which the field would widely benefit from: US Latinx populations, in particular Indigenous-Latinx. For example, It wasn’t until 1991, where the first protocol to appraise, document, and archive US Latino collections was created and 1985 when SAA’s American Archivist published the first case study to examine the documentation of a Latino community - Houston’s Mexican American community (Baeza Ventura, Gauthereau & Villarroel 2019, Grimm & Noriega 2013). As a segment of the population that has largely remained underrepresented and misrepresented in US archival studies and collections, Latinx are also a truly complex population given its vast socio-cultural, linguistic and racial differences. By understanding the wide range of culturally specific oral, aural, and kinetic Andean traditions, we can better situate embedded values, cultural contexts and historical colonial interventions. For this very reason, localized research is necessary within not only personal archives but also that of diaspora communities. The archives of diasporic groups trouble conventional archival praxis, whereby the urgency of exile, the complexity of multiple migrations, and the scattering of community members result in a documentary heritage that is difficult to track in both its origins and order (Gilliland & Halilovich, 2017). Yet, archival records are valuable to those in diaspora because they support the reconstruction of memory and identity (Gilliland & Halilovich, 2017), a sense of belonging away from the homeland and with other communities of the same diaspora (Malek, 2021), resistance to erasure (Saleh, 2022), and the transfer of cultural and historical knowledge to others in exile (Wagner & Legros, 2022). In particular, the Palestinian diaspora is noteworthy among other Arabs as well as other refugee groups as the largest and longest-standing population of refugees worldwide, who have never had opportunity for resettlement. Due to Palestinians’ long-standing exile, established diaspora communities exist all over the world, but extant scholarship examining their situation in relation to memory and identity originates from interdisciplinary fields outside of archival studies (Abu-Ghazaleh, 2011; El-Aswad, 2010; Davis, 2011; Hanafi, 2005; Al Husseini & Signoles, 2014; Khoury, 2018; Mason, 2007; Masalha, 2018; Naber, 2012; Wills, 2019). The lack of attention towards the Palestinian diaspora’s recordkeeping by archival scholars presents an opportunity in which to investigate not just the impact that archives as objects have towards preserving identity in exile, but also the impact of the process and practice of archiving as an act of memory transfer and a tool for preserving indigenous epistemology outside of the homeland.
Utilizing an ethnographic study of a significant Palestinian diaspora community located in Michigan, my research addresses this gap through the following question: how do people in the Palestinian diaspora conceptualize a transformative archival representation of their experience in exile? Many diasporic groups are largely distrustful of collaborating with institutional archives which are in service to governmentality, involve problematic Western practices of archiving, and act as a technology of settler colonialism (Lopez, 2017). Moreover, diasporic groups exiled under conditions of imperialism see themselves erased in the colonizer’s archives while their own nation’s official archives neglect the diaspora as a site of knowledge production (Saleh, 2022). For these reasons, the aim of this project is twofold: 1) to understand the current landscape of Michigan Palestinians’ memory work practices and their particular recordkeeping needs in light of their archival ruptures and migration challenges, and 2) to attend to these needs by envisioning a transformative archival representation built upon a future-focused, culturally specific epistemology of Palestinian knowledge production and organization. A careful investigation into the recordkeeping needs of this Palestinian community offers insight into how diasporic groups renegotiate their collective memory after their physical connection to the homeland is severed and transform conventional archival praxis to align with their own epistemologies of memory work. After the Armenian Genocide in 1915, displacement happened in more than one way: 1) in families had to flee Armenia and what became present-day Turkey; 2) in artifacts that were lost, destroyed, or sealed by the Turkish government; and 3) in land and historic sites that existed within.1 Some Armenians went to America, Russia, Lebanon, Syria, and each diaspora encountered vastly different experiences, each incomparable to one other. These conditions made it so our archives are incomplete, “irretrievable, or unknown” (Gilliland & Hovhannisyan, 2020, p. 235), meaning that efforts in retrieving lost information are actually impossible. We have to find different ways to reconstruct our history, as important cultural sites and their artifacts (i.e. churches–which are the cultural epicenter of Armenian life and community in all states and countries where Armenians exist) simply do not exist anymore. So, where do we go from here?
Faced with this reality of a lost, incomplete, and violent history, the preservation of information in the Armenian community is vital in remembering our history, preserving what is left, and (re)building for the sake of our culture and memory. This paper asks: what archives are being built today in the Armenian community? What is being collected and why? This question is especially pertinent at a time where various geopolitical wars have been launched in present day Armenia, and Artsakh has effectively been cut off from the world 2 This paper aims to uncover and document archival efforts exerted by the Armenian diaspora in America, specifically in the populated communities of Southfield and Dearborn, Michigan. While there are clear indicators that archives of this nature exist here,3 this paper is more interested in what current efforts are being taken by the community in building something new, constructing and preserving narratives that have never been heard before, and have yet to be largely publicized. |
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Research Session #21 Histories of Violence and Trauma in the Archives As we move to a person-centred archival profession that recognises and respects the value of lived experience in our community we must also acknowledge and respond to the trauma inherent within archives. Utilising the framework of trauma-informed practice we can facilitate a safer archival environment for all who engage with archives. But to enable this, we must first truly understand the international impact of trauma in archives on the people involved.
This paper will discuss the results of the 2022 survey Understanding the international landscape of trauma and archives. This project was funded by the International Council on Archives Programme Commission in partnership with the Section for Archival Education and Training (SAE). The survey sought to identify and quantify how widespread experiences of trauma in archives were, what support was available and what education, training and resources were needed. The survey received over 1100 respondents from 100 countries, highlighting the importance the archival community places on gaining a stronger understanding of trauma and archives.
While archives will always be unsafe for some, professionally we are striving for an open and diverse workforce, and inclusive places and spaces. Recognising the trauma in archives and including explicit discussion of it within archival education enables us to empower future archivists - to make their own choices when it comes to participating in the archival profession and whether it will be a safe environment for them to engage with.
This paper will provide an overview of the survey results, discussing how aware the archival community is of trauma in archives, how prevalent experiences are, and describe the current support structures people use. We will consider what resources, education and training respondents described as being needed, focusing on the recommendations provided to the SAE as part of the project. With an emphasis on those who identified as students or new professionals, the responses provide an opportunity to consider what archival education and training programmes need to include to ensure the next generation of archivists are prepared for potential exposure to trauma in archives. Archives have been historically used as one of the tools of oppression, but they are now being used as a means to reconcile a violent past (Boel et al, 2022). Jewish and disabled communities have been gravely injured in this archival violence; this is most clear in Nazi Germany (Proctor, 2002) . However there has been little discussion of how this archival violence continues to afect the two aforementioned communities today. This dehumanization continues to be reproduced within the language and structure of archives. These archives are often incomplete; when trying to understand these often mistreated communities, one must follow threads in the hopes of fnding what was. This paper presents preliminary research from my doctoral project Finding and Fearing Disease in the Archive, which seeks to identify and understand the tensions in researching hereditary disease in the archive. I, like many people, have turned to genealogy to understand the most difcult parts of myself. Many complex and interlocking questions arise from such a project: questions about what it means to engage with – and participate in – the archive and other institutions that have sought to simultaneously scrutinize and erase sick people; what it means to seek evidence of disease while disabled and Jewish, given the history of weaponization of the archive against us. I use discourse analysis and autoethnography to fully examine these tensions and queries. Autoethnography is not a method without controversy, but the personal element is needed in this research to fully show the realities of these records. Genealogical records are tied into afective webs of relationships. This paper responds to previous research on the archival gaze (Anderson & Inefuku, 2016) and the familial gaze (Hirsch, 2016). I combine these concepts to create the familial archival gaze which is related to the emotional and familiar experiences of working with genealogical records. |
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Workshop #6 Part 2 ArchivesSpace for Educators Part 2 Note: You do not need to attend Part 1 to attend Part 2 |
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3:00-3:15 |
Afternoon Break |
Ballroom |
3:15-4:45 |
Research Session #22 Archiving as Activism How appraisal helps archivists achieve an equitable, fair, and all-encompassing representation of society has been a longstanding challenge. With institutional Records Disposal Authorities predominantly determining what to transfer into an archive, can another approach better represent communities of activism and disruption? Communities countering mainstream and traditional worldviews are at risk of perpetual marginalization by government-centric collecting policies. By using the Records Continuum understanding of appraisal as: … a multi-faceted, recursive process which begins with defining what should be created (Dimension 1), what should be captured and managed as record (Dimension 2), what should be managed as a part of individual or organisational memory (Dimension 3) and what should be pluralised beyond organisational or individual memory (Dimension 4). (McKemmish, 2017, 141) … A new approach to appraisal as community-centered, recursive, and multi-faceted is proposed through case study research conducted at Monash University, Australia. Archiving activist stories in their voice requires solutions suited to grassroots, geographically disparate, networked community. The emergent concept of “radical recordkeeping” is explored to understand how activists and archivists use records and digital infrastructure to disrupt established norms. How radical appraisal is undertaken (for remembering and forgetting) is a new area of research, particularly in applying these concepts to animal activism. Using Records Continuum Theory and modelling, an activist-driven understanding of community needs, and risks, informs a proposal for a Critical Functional Appraisal (CFA) framework. A CFA is a community-centric appraisal tool, reflecting activist needs, ready to be owned, adapted, and adopted by the research participants. A CFA framework can aid the planned longevity and shared understandings to support activist-led decision-making and secured narratives over time. Archival institutions develop a critical role in society since they preserve and disseminate the collective knowledge of its culture. The public Archives are the citizen's closest representative institutions, where the exercise of citizenship takes place entirely, the rights are proved, local history is protected, and culture is disseminated.
Considering the power of archives and archival institutions in the inclusion and exclusion of people and events in the history of a community, and in the wake of more inclusive knowledge organization systems as part of effective institutions for promoting access to information as a fundamental right, we wonder: how can public archival institutions promote social justice through their knowledge organization systems? It aims to discuss the concept of social justice in archival science literature, considering the archival knowledge organization (AKO) and its practical implications in the public archives in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). The specific goals are: to point out the relationships between social justices, archives, and Knowledge Organization (KO); to verify if the Public Archives in Rio de Janeiro have archival policies to promote social justice; to analyze the Rio de Janeiro Public Archives knowledge organization systems focusing on the fonds and collections of marginalized communities. The research focuses on the Rio de Janeiro City Archive, which is responsible for the policies of the Archives and Memory System of the City of Rio de Janeiro, whose mission is to meet the needs of the State itself in decision-making and satisfy citizens in search of evidence to defend their rights. The study gathers a theoretical and an applied dimension divided into two stages. The first one discusses the relationships between social justice, archives, and KO from a literature review. The applied dimension – in progress - is the research's second stage, divided into three parts:
Content analysis of the archival policies of the selected institution regarding the acquisition and cultural diffusion of collections and fonds of marginalized communities (if they exist).
Analysis of some chosen archival knowledge organization systems - aiming to verify if and how marginalized communities are represented in these systems.
User study using domain analysis to know their perspectives on social justice in archives. Mainstream archives in the present moment impact disabled people in a number of ways: through historic records that document disabled people in ways that can deny their subjectivity and agency—for example asylum documentation, criminal records, and medical files—disabled people can feel erased in history. These feelings of erasure are shaped not only through documentation that mis- or under-represents disabled lives but also the ways that archives can replicate power imbalances through archival decision-making. Moreover, disabled people can feel a sense of unbelonging in archival spaces through archival inaccessibility.
In response to the contemporary archival landscape around disability, this project asks: what would an archives built around disabled people’s desires look like? In contrast to mainstream archives which can perpetuate violence, erasure, or misrepresentation of historically minoritized people, community-based archives have been found to offset historical violences through offering spaces for communities to shape their own representation. This research, as the first phase of a community-based disability digital archive, aims to investigate how disabled people want to see themselves through archival materials. This paper introduces the preliminary findings from focus groups conducted with disabled archival users. The focus groups centred around two main questions: How do disabled people want to be remembered in the future? And how might some issues disabled users have with current archives be addressed, redressed, or reimagined? Through these questions, this research aims to investigate how disabled people want to see themselves in an archive through fostering conversations around the ways we (disabled people) want to be documented and what features are important for digital archive use.
The conversations not only touch on different records and the ways that disability gets represented but also the ways that archival decision-making—i.e. description, order, and access—can impact how disabled people want to access their own histories. The focus group conversations will be used to generate scholarship about disabled experiences in archives and will lay the foundation for building a community-based disability digital archive. Through these preliminary findings, these conversations show how disabled people desire, dream, and reimagine archival systems. |
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Research Session #23 Archival Futures In this paper, I introduce Christina Sharpe’s conceptualizations of wake and wake work, as they pertain to archiving the experiences of Blackness to better understand how the archive and archives are vital for those living and working in the wake of slavery. I am particularly interested in the wake work conducted both in literary works (speculative fiction) and at information sites (archives). To that end, I closely examine archives as they are presented in literature so as to explicate how these archival narratives created by Black authors perform wake work. Moreover, I make the connection between literary wake work, that which is performed by Black speculative fiction writers, and information wake work, that which is performed by Black archivists, before delving into an analysis of the physical act of creating archives as the wake work of Black community archivists. This investigation of wake work and archive(s) is meant to articulate Black life through a multidisciplinary lens, one that merges scholarship in Black studies, archives, information, and literature. My interrogation of archiving Blackness centers on the concepts of “wake” and “wake work,” and how they can be used to characterize the act of archiving the histories and the futures of Black people as an intervention towards coloring and diversifying the archival record. In this work in progress presentation, I will discuss some of my recent work with The Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures (GRASAC), examining their knowledge sharing system at a time of technical change, and also seeking feedback on next steps for future dissertation research. GRASAC is a network of researchers, museum and archival professionals, and community members who maintain a digital platform that aggregates museum and archival research on Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Huron-Wendat cultures into a centralized database, the GRASAC Knowledge Sharing System (GKS). From semi-structured interviews with creators, maintainers, and users of the GKS, I explored ‘frictions’ that occurred during a time of platform improvement and regular maintenance. Drawing from Paul Edwards concept of knowledge infrastructures, or, “robust network of people, artifacts, and institutions that generate, share, and maintain specific knowledge about the human and natural world” (Edwards, 2010, p. 17), I found that most of the frictions that arose during this time of structured change occurred in following categories; collaborative friction, data friction, and systemic friction. Through the notion of systemic friction, I explore the challenges that GRASAC members encountered when working against the colonial legacies of museum and archival collections.
For my dissertation, I’m interested in further building on this work, and examining archive and museum collections' role in larger networks of knowledge infrastructures. Much of the writing on KI is on global scientific networks documenting things like climate change (Edwards 2010) and water quality (Jackson and Buyuktur; Steinhardt 2016); recently though archival scholars have begun note the roles of memory institutions in these infrastructures (Acker 2015; Trace 2022). KI’s are complex networks that require constant maintenance, and through my work with GRASAC it was apparent that challenges arise when defining roles on whose job it is to maintain certain aspects of the KI. Pulling from scholarship on digital labor practices, in future work I hope to examine maintenance practices in KI’s, especially in networks that include memory institutions which are precariously funded. I’m interested in understanding how different institutions, actors, and workers perform this work within KI’s, especially ones that have taken a stance on not using extractive labor practices (i.e. not taking from communities, or relying on unpaid student labor, etc.). I’m currently looking for potential sites or cases to explore this for my dissertation work, and hope to present this work at AERI to get feedback on this idea. This paper will share preliminary analysis of data collected in Sri Lanka about intergenerational archiving and Tamil community-led desires for the digitization of personal archives related to human rights. This data was primarily collected in 2017 and 2022, and includes over 30 interviews with families of the forcibly disappeared across 6 districts of Sri Lanka’s two Tamil-speaking provinces. Read alongside Sri Lankan women’s activism and relationship to record keeping during other major conflicts, the data reveals cross-ethnic patterns of resistance against violence and its erasure of humanity through personal narratives and life writing/story telling. Finally, the paper will turn to the ‘promise of the digital’ understood by community leaders as a way of keeping records alive even when those who created and activated them through protest pass away. Looking at previous attempts to digitize human rights records in Sri Lanka, I argue that ‘abiding by Sri Lanka’ (Ismael) requires leaders and researchers like myself to establish a balance between the limitations of digital archives and community desires to preserve their unique records. |
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Research Session #24 Healing the Past: Repatriation and Community Narratives This presentation keeps track of a work-in-progress dissertation proposal around the repatriation and return of archival material. Drawing from the literature on repatriation from archival studies, museum studies, museum anthropology, performance studies, sound studies, and ethnomusicology, I argue that a full understanding of archival repatriation is incomplete without examining the role diasporic communities play as actors in such efforts. While the sources in the areas I draw from have largely kept track of activities at the national and international planes, more of the literature needs to do the same for diasporic communities who might also have a stake in repatriation and return. In this presentation, I explore the several approaches to archival repatriation emerging from the literature and end by proposing an empirical research study examining how the Radio Haiti Archives at Duke University should be repatriated and returned to Haiti and the role the Haitian diaspora plays.
This proposed research study tracks the following inquiries: how should the Radio Haiti Archive at Duke University be returned and repatriated to Haiti? What role does the Haitian diaspora play in such efforts? What are the barriers and obstacles to repatriation and returning the Radio Haiti Archive? It will provide a specific view into how three different groups view the repatriation and return of the Radio Haiti Archives through semi-structured interviews. The first group is archivists and information professionals who worked on the Radio Haiti archives in whatever capacity and location, whether at Duke University or elsewhere. The second group is archivists, cultural keepers, and information professionals in Haiti who would receive the archives and possibly have already received slices of the archive in digital form. The third group is members of the diaspora affiliated with or who have worked with Radio Haiti, including the Radio Haiti archives donor Michelle Montas. These three groups provide three different entry points and angles from which to view and examine archival repatriation and return. I will also conduct an analysis of archival records supplemented by archival field observation. I will consult primary source material from the relevant institutions, including Duke University, where the majority of the Radio Haiti archive is located. As much of the literature is mostly historical analyses and case studies, this is the first empirical study examining archival repatriation and return, focusing on the role diasporic communities play in such efforts. This work-in-progress short paper addresses the growing effort within memory studies and mis/disinformation research to address the transnational spread of misinformation and, in particular, the impact of political mis/disinformation on historically marginalized and immigrant communities. Through the lens of memory creation, preservation, and transmission from the intergenerational, transnational, individual, and collective scopes, this study interrogates misrepresentations in mass, mainstream, and traditional archives and the ways of communal imagined futures.
Inter-community conflicts within the Vietnamese diaspora, from historical contexts through present-day digital communication polarizations, forefronts the need to understand the social, political, and cultural reproductions that are recreated when carrying and adapting memories between new and old homelands. While misinformation spreads across cultural, sociolinguistic, and geo-political contexts, it impacts communities’ memories differently according to pre-existing power structures and information resources. In the context of the spread of mis/disinformation within the Vietnamese diaspora during the 2020 and 2022 U.S. elections, the presenter will share qualitative research findings that identify transmission of information, radical differences of sensemaking, and intergenerational relationship building within a specific refugee and immigrant community as memory projects. This work is grounded by the practices of transnational organizations such as Viet Fact Check and other community-led initiatives working to provide fact checking and online media analysis in Vietnamese and English.
Through qualitative coding of social media data and focus group discussions with Vietnamese Americans across generations, social media sites, and geographic locations, we explore the proliferation and complexities of misinformation within one such immigrant diasporic community. Findings from focus groups highlight a prevalence of intergenerational divides in political information seeking, lasting historical and political traumas of immigration, and language barriers underpin the saliency and impact of misinformation for Vietnamese Americans. Findings from social media analysis discuss salient misinformation narratives that spread throughout Vietnamese diasporic Facebook posts, fact checking, and inter-platform networking activities. Further, we explore how misinformation impacts political engagement, highlighting the consequences of misinformation at a familial and community-level as they establish their authenticity of community building and anti-communist and democratic political memories. This work contributes contextual knowledge to researchers seeking to understand how to represent and include immigrant diasporic communities, their sociocultural contexts, and transnational memory studies and information disorder around sociotechnical systems. In many cultures, ancestral burial practices include laying loved ones to rest near or in their homes (residential burial) and, oftentimes, with their material belongings. Residential burials, cave burials, and other similar burial practices are carried out in order to create space for ancestral return to familiar places where they are welcomed by evidence of themselves. These and other intentional acts of remembrance are part of how we demonstrate care for and invite ongoing connection with our ancestors as they once lived. In this short paper, we speak to the right to be remembered in context, extracted from the often hostile filters of the Western lens.
Taking a duoethnographic approach, we ask, for example, why we do not see our ancestors in the archives (beyond the known, such as the imposed colonial structures that are reflected in archival spaces)? Is it that our ancestors do not dwell in and do not visit the archives because we have not created appropriately personal and culturally specific spaces –resting and dwelling spaces–for our ancestors to visit? Is it perhaps because we do not approach archival materials with the same care with which we might approach our ancestors?
Prior archival scholarship has suggested that archivists be seen as caregivers, bound to their communities through webs of mutual affective responsibility (cf. Caswell and Cifor, 2016). Here we expand this scholarship to consider new ways of thinking about archival carework. We conceive of an archival carework that demands finding our ancestors in the archival story and, in turn, offers a vision of a more robust and multifaceted record. We argue for an archival praxis that stands opposed to the flattened narratives that emerge from rudimentary understandings of both ancestry as a concept and the myriad ways our ancestors have been unintentionally excluded from archival spaces. |
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Research Session #25 Archival Lagniappe III Oral histories tell the stories of our communities. By properly preserving our oral histories, we are preserving our cultural heritage, keeping it in the public’s consciousness, adding to the historical narrative, and safeguarding knowledge of past experiences for future generations.
The history of oral history shows a response to widespread social, cultural, and technological shifts. Oral history has adapted through the years from its initial focus in the 1930s to 1940s on orally-based biographies to a concept of collection for preservation, curation, and future academic use in the 1950s and 1960s. From there, it evolved to a method for ordinary people to document their experiences in the 1960s through the 1980s and then to a standard of practice for academics and an asset for communities in the 1980s and 1990s. Ultimately, in the 2000s, it became a method of collection and a tool for academics and ordinary people to adopt and use within their sectors, given their agenda, resources, experiences, and expertise. In the present day, arguably the fourth generation, oral history is defined differently as its use, implications, creators, and users have changed and continue to change.
Now the accessibility and usability of oral history collections have increased. This has been made possible by technological advancements and improvements to digital infrastructures. Such advances have created the opportunity to create and share oral history in new and innovative ways. They also have added complexities to existing ethical and legal issues in conducting, collecting, managing, archiving, and accessing oral histories.
This presentation will critically analyze the literature on ethical issues in oral history archives. Major thematic trends in the literature will be identified; such trends include actual ethical issues and conflicts experienced by archivists and oral history practitioners and practices and/or strategies for addressing and resolving ethical dilemmas. Then the strengths and limitations of the literature will be described. Finally, possible avenues for future research that have not been sufficiently addressed in the literature will be suggested. Oral histories provide archives with opportunities to create, collect, preserve, and access unique records that document the past in ways that paper records cannot. Just as the history preserved in these oral records can be different from other forms of historical documentation, the actual act of collecting and archiving oral histories is also unique and worthy of inquiry. For cultural institutions that generate, house, promote, and maintain oral histories, there is a need to complete an investigation that provides a comprehensive overview of the landscape of archival oral history work and the research that supports it. To address this need, we conducted a scoping review informed by the PRISMA for Scoping Reviews guideline. We examined journal articles on oral history in the context of libraries, museums, and other cultural institutions published from 2010 to 2022 retrieved from various databases. Two independent researchers determined which articles met inclusion based on pre-specified eligibility criteria; we found 78 full-text articles that met our criteria. The goal of the scoping review was to map the literature to find patterns and trends in the field and to ultimately contribute to a roadmap for directing future research on the connections between archives and oral history. In addition, we also examined what concepts, theories, and practices are utilized in the existing research on archives and oral history.
We discovered that most examined articles were case studies related to specific oral history projects, often involving stakeholders from different institutions. These projects were often used as pedagogical initiatives to involve students in oral history. We found a benefit of numerous case studies was the diversity of perspectives amid different projects. The studies include detailed accounts of the challenges and issues authors encountered in their oral history work and the field at large, including processing and preserving oral history, making oral history accessible and discoverable, the use of oral history collections, and ethical/legal issues when considering access to oral history. [Background / Purpose] The terminology "archive" is increasingly used in different professional fields. In recent years, digital humanities(DH) research and projects are in full swing around the world. The digital resources DH targets are often archived and preserved in the form of archival management, so some DH projects are also called "digital archive". This "archive" is actually very different from the professional concept of archival studies, and even diverges. Indeed, in the past archives referred to collections of physical matter, rather than digital substitutes; but 'archives' in the digital era have increasingly become collections of resources with a specific purpose, beginning to imply that which has been selected and archived. This produces the linguistic turn of the ‘archive’. Therefore, it is of great significance to clarify the connotation of "archive" in DH, and it can also help archivists better participate in DH research.
[Design / Approach] This paper adopts the methodologies of case study and content analysis. More than 40 cases we mainly select are mainly from the 2012-2022 International Digital Humanities Award, as well as China's DH Projects. Using the case study method, to explain the existence of this phenomenon, and interpret its conceptual transformation through the content analysis method.
[Findings / Results] Archivists and digital humanists use the word "archives" in both fields, but regarding the historical background of the archival collections and the role of archivists, both sides have different understandings to varying degrees. How to break through this layer of communication barriers is the linguistics key to a smooth dialogue between the two communities. Moreover, in the digital era, human recording methods are constantly changing. More and more things are stored in digital form in full-scale and full-element, and information with archival value is becoming more and more generalized. The concept of “archive( 档案)” and recordkeeping could be updated and expanded. In addition, looking at archival concepts and theories from outside communities can help to gain insight into society's views on archival undertakings.
[Originality / value] This paper analyzes the connotation of "archive" in award-winning projects of the International Digital Humanities Award (DHA) , and points out its differences from traditional archival science. In particular, it points out the difference in the understanding of "archive" between Chinese archival science and DH education, and tries to bridge the communication gap. |
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5:00-6:00 |
Poster Session & Reception Mahlatse Shekgola & Mpho Ngoepe, Digital Curation of Archives Through Open-Source Software in South Africa
Kaitlyn Bailey, The Dr. William Bertrand Collection: Digitizing a Small Museum’s Slavery Exhibit Gillian Brownlee, Daena Carrillo, Kaitlyn Bailey, Best Pratices for the Use of Zoom-Based Focus Groups in Archival Research: A Case Study
Haley Moore, Kaitlyn Bailey, Edward Benoit III, Jill Trepanier, Jennifer Vanos, Mandy Hatman, Mary Sidwell, Symonne Russell, Virginia Seger, Paige Boutte, Amanda Latta, Zoe Mohammad, Kyriel Felton, Erin Deliman, Breanna Benson-Pearce, Wendy Johnson, Allyson Russell, Baillie Pretzer, Christopher Reeder, Melissa McConnell, Lisa Dahlke, Kaitlynn Melear, Lillian Bodi, Savannah T. Lyle, Zach Lannes, Gwen L. Wells, Benjamin A. Teincuff, Jason M. Straight, Tiffany Rockwell, Shane T. Manthei, Jennifer L. Benner, Jane Fiegel, Amanda Lima, Elizabeth Rininger, Caroline Melinger, Deborah Metz-Andrews, Meryl Roepke, Karen Isaac, Mallory Collins, PROTECCT GLAM: Development of a Comprehensive Dataset of All U.S. GLAMs
Katherine Fresina, Preserving the Embodied Meaning of Objects |
Ballroom |
6:00- |
Dinner on Own |
Time |
Event |
Location |
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8:00-9:00 |
Continental Breakfast |
Ballroom |
9:00-10:30 |
AERI Business Meeting |
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10:30-11:00 |
Morning Break |
Ballroom |
11:00-12:00 |
Concluding AERI |
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