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An increasing fake paper problem is a cause for concern in the scientific community. These papers look scientific but contain manipulated data or are completely fictitious. So-called paper mills produce fake papers on a large scale and publish them in the name of people who buy authorship. The aim of this study was to learn more about the characteristics of fake papers at the metadata level. We also investigated whether some of these characteristics could be used to detect fake papers. For that purpose, we examined metadata of 12 fake papers that were retracted by Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology (NSAP) in recent years. We also compared many of these metadata with those of a reference group of 733 articles published by NSAP. It turned out that in many characteristics the fake papers we examined did not differ substantially from the other articles. It was only noticeable that the fake papers came almost exclusively from a certain country, used non-institutional email addresses more often than average, and referenced dubious literature significantly more often. However, these three features are only of limited use in identifying fake papers. We were also able to show that fake papers not only contaminate the scientific record while they are unidentified but also continue to do so even after retraction. Our results indicate that fake papers are well made and resemble honest papers even at the metadata level. Because they contaminate the scientific record in the long term and this cannot be fully contained even by their retraction, it is particularly important to identify them before publication. Further research on the topic of fake papers is therefore urgently needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Honesty of publications is fundamental in science. Unfortunately, science has an increasing fake paper problem with multiple cases having surfaced in recent years, even in renowned journals. There are companies, the so-called paper mills, which professionally fake research data and papers. However, there is no easy way to systematically identify these papers. Here, we show that scanning for exchanged authors in resubmissions is a simple approach to detect potential fake papers. We investigated 2056 withdrawn or rejected submissions to Naunyn–Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology (NSAP), 952 of which were subsequently published in other journals. In six cases, the stated authors of the final publications differed by more than two thirds from those named in the submission to NSAP. In four cases, they differed completely. Our results reveal that paper mills take advantage of the fact that journals are unaware of submissions to other journals. Consequently, papers can be submitted multiple times (even simultaneously), and authors can be replaced if they withdraw from their purchased authorship. We suggest that publishers collaborate with each other by sharing titles, authors, and abstracts of their submissions. Doing so would allow the detection of suspicious changes in the authorship of submitted and already published papers. Independently of such collaboration across publishers, every scientific journal can make an important contribution to the integrity of the scientific record by analyzing its own pool of withdrawn and rejected papers versus published papers according to the simple algorithm proposed in the present paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Alessandrina Library was founded in 1667 by pope Alexander VII Chigi and is nowadays housed in the Campus of Sapienza University of Rome (Italy). Within its Ancient (mostly made of rag paper) and Modern (mostly made of contemporary paper) collections, it includes more than one million books produced from the XVI to the XXI century. In 2019, six thermo-hygrometers were deployed in its multi-storey repository to monitor temperature (T) and relative humidity (RH). Hourly T and RH data collected over 2 years allowed us to evaluate spatial and temporal thermo-hygrometric distributions and to carry out a comprehensive assessment of the climate-induced risks (mechanical, chemical, and biological deterioration mechanisms). Vertical temperature gradients associated with unstable conditions occurred in winter, resulting in upraising air flows up to the ceiling. The risky short-term RH fluctuations (EN 15757:2010) were determined to avoid mechanical stress in case of loans, relocation, and consultation. The Time Weighted Expected Lifetime (TWEL) index was used to evaluate the chemical risk for different paper-based collections as a function of their acidity and degree of polymerisation, also considering the typical response time of paper books to T and RH changes. The TWEL calculation estimated that the durability of acidic paper was around 300 years and highlighted that rag paper could be subject to cellulose hydrolysis only in summer and autumn, while contemporary paper was mostly at no risk. The risk of mould germination (Sedlbauer diagram) was possible on few days in Autumn, while the production of insect eggs (Brimblecombe empirical function) was favoured during approximately 42% of time over the year. In addition, illuminance and colorimetric measurements (performed on selected book covers) showed that light-sensitive objects could be exposed to the photodeterioration risk in the east-facing side of the repository. Although the investigation focussed on a specific case study, a similar approach could be effectively adapted to most library and archival repositories conserving paper-based collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some errors exist in the above paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archival boxes are used as a preventive measure to control the microenvironment in museums and archives storages. However, their efficiency in protecting valuable artefacts from fluctuations in relative humidity (RH) is not yet fully understood. In this study, the environmental performance of different archival boxes with different configurations (size, design, presence of holes/paper material, cardboard types, surface modification) was included in the evaluation of internal environment (RH). The effectiveness of archival boxes on reducing relative humidity fluctuations was investigated by testing various properties of boxes and boards, such as air exchange rates (AER), moisture sorption and water vapour transmission rates (WVTR). While most cardboard boxes showed only a limited buffering against the humidity ingress, strategies such as surface modification limited the interaction of a box with the external environment, resulting in a more stable internal environment. Material and box properties, such as moisture sorption, AER and WVTR proved to be useful quantitative tools for assessing the environmental performance of the selected archival boxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the publication of Francis Skinner's papers, which were lecture notes and dictations he had taken of Ludwig Wittgenstein in the mid-1930s. The papers were sent to mathematician Reuben Goodstein after Skinner's death, but were left unnoticed in an archive for many years. The collection includes various texts on different topics, providing insight into Wittgenstein's philosophy. However, the article questions the meaningful unity of the texts and suggests that their association with Skinner does not necessarily reveal anything significant about Wittgenstein's thought. Despite this, the article acknowledges the value of the texts for those interested in Wittgenstein's work. [Extracted from the article]

While archival user studies have largely focused on humanities (and adjacent) scholars, this paper focuses on anthropologists engaged in scientific research. Based on qualitative results from an open-ended survey, we investigate how science-based anthropologists perceive and use archives in their work. We ask: How are science-based anthropologists and archaeologists reusing archival data in their research? What difficulties or barriers do they encounter in reusing archival data in scientific contexts? What attitudes or understandings about archival research are held by science-based anthropologists and archaeologists? Our findings primarily add to the body of literature about user experience in archives and more broadly to the emerging literature on archival data reuse. Major findings include (1) barriers and gatekeeping legacies that impact archival research and the ability of researchers to reuse data and (2) mixed perceptions about archives among researchers. We also discuss suggestions made by these communities of practice, and the ways that barriers to archival data reuse may stem from a lack of knowledge about core archival and information infrastructures among researcher communities. Together, this research showcases possible (re)uses of important primary source data in archives among scientific communities but highlights that barriers to access and misperceptions create a gap in exploiting that potential. We argue for a "re-imagining" of anthropological archives as relevant to contemporary communities and scientific pursuits toward a richer scientific research environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The critical question of how sustainability and resilience can inform archival practice in regional communities is motivated by the experience of flooding in Lismore, Australia, which exposed the vulnerability of local archives to the effects of climate change and the limitations of local infrastructure. Regional historical societies and community organisations serve as a repository for the history of particular communities, preserving records, artefacts and other materials that document the unique stories and experiences of that place. Collections are independently curated and generally run by volunteers but poorly resourced with insufficient space. They are more likely to be subject to extreme weather events that disproportionately impact regional Australia compared to its cities. Regional collections fall outside national strategies for sustainability, digitisation or investment. Without urgent attention to the fate of regional archives, local heritage is under threat, and with it, an understanding of how that history contributes to the national past and the connection to place and community. This paper explores regional archives from the perspective of the local historical records of Lismore, Northern New South Wales, where flooding is a familiar experience that has reached a new intensity in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2005, a Swedish television documentary that revealed gross misconduct and abuse in Swedish children's homes led to a number of inquiries that culminated with the passing of the Redress Act. This act entitled everyone that had suffered from abuse in out-of-home care to 250,000 Swedish crowns (close to 25,000 Euros). However, only 42 percent of the Swedish claimants were granted the compensation, a very low number in international comparison. The starting point of this study is this—in many accounts failed—redress process. Why did Sweden, self-appointed moral superpower, produce such deviating results? This question is addressed by an inquiry into the Swedish scheme of redress, focusing on the role of archives and recordkeeping with particular focus on the concepts of total archives and politics of regret. This paper argues that it was impossible for the Swedish Board of Redress to make satisfactory assessments of redress claims, given the set criteria and the archival material on which they were required to base their decisions, and that it is a futile task to base the writing of individual life stories on official documentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As data sharing has become more prevalent, three pillars - archives, standards, and analysis tools - have emerged as critical components in facilitating effective data sharing and collaboration. This paper compares four freely available intracranial neuroelectrophysiology data repositories: Data Archive for the BRAIN Initiative (DABI), Distributed Archives for Neurophysiology Data Integration (DANDI), OpenNeuro, and Brain-CODE. The aim of this review is to describe archives that provide researchers with tools to store, share, and reanalyze both human and non-human neurophysiology data based on criteria that are of interest to the neuroscientific community. The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) and Neurodata Without Borders (NWB) are utilized by these archives to make data more accessible to researchers by implementing a common standard. As the necessity for integrating large-scale analysis into data repository platforms continues to grow within the neuroscientific community, this article will highlight the various analytical and customizable tools developed within the chosen archives that may advance the field of neuroinformatics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper centers a three-year research project into community-based archives and the power of their naming practices. Expanding the idea of naming practices to further consider how the archives itself is defined and understood by the creators, donors, and communities that are represented therein, the co-authors consider the emergent focus on origin stories told about the founding of community-based archives. The lead author attends to the community/institution dichotomy to consider how such relationality insists on a both/and understanding wherein the language of the origin story is centered in relations and informs how archives continue to become. Through auto-ethnographic and intimate theorizing and analysis, the lead author offers a self-critique on naming practices and self-identification to account for the shape of the archives over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital scholarship is ubiquitous, where even the most Luddite of scholars use some form of digital technology in their research. Differences in the level of technology use have become a question of degree not kind. Currently in the second wave of Digital Humanities, Presner (2010) argues that Digital Humanities 2.0 introduces entirely new-born digital paradigms, methodologies, and publication models not derived from print culture. This new wave is "deeply generative, creating the environments and tools for producing, curating, and interacting with knowledge that is 'born digital' and lives in various digital contexts" (Presner 2010, para. 13). Using the case study of a Digital Humanities project called "The Waterford Memories Project", this paper will consider both the role of born digital survivor testimony in confronting a difficult and disputed past in Ireland and, more broadly, how we create and access knowledge in this contested space. The Waterford Memories Project is an oral history driven study in digital humanities, publicly documenting survivor narratives of the Magdalene Laundries and Industrial Schools in the South-East of Ireland. The last Magdalene Laundry in Ireland closed in 1996. These institutions formed part of a system of coercive confinement, which incorporated a wide range of historical institutions used to confine both children and adults whose "crimes" were to act against the strict and punitive moral codes of the period, poverty, or mental illness. This paper will examine the role of born digital data in public humanities (in the form of the audio-recorded survivor oral histories), and frames the Waterford Memories digital humanities project in the technoculture and minimal computing literature, emphasising the overall need for a human-centred approach to technology at all stages of the research. Cultural stories can become fossilised and continue to perpetuate the silencing of survivors; it is therefore essential to consider how the openly available digital testimony contributes to the framing of cultural discourse around our history of coercive confinement in Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently introduced into the archival sphere, 'paradata' is a conceptual framework for defining the character of information resource processing. (Davet J, Hamidzadeh B, Franks P, Bunn J (2022) Tracking the functions of AI as paradata & pursuing archival accountability. In: Archiving 2022: Final Programs and Proceedings, 7-10 June 2022. Society for imaging science and technology, Springfield, VA, USA, pp 83–88) While it need not be applied exclusively to artificial intelligence-based automated systems, paradata can be, should be, and is currently used to explicate the function of AI in the archives. The use of paradata in relation to AI can help ensure that archival ethical principles continue to be honored in an age of increasing automation. This paper summarizes the theoretical background of paradata, documentation created during recent experiments with machine learning-based AI which gestures toward the varieties of paradata already being collected by researchers, and some of the factors which condition paradata's use. A few currently available data structures for the representation and display of paradata are evaluated, with an eye toward their suitability for different stakeholder groups. Future directions for theoretical and practical research are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accountability, human rights and social justice are inextricably linked. Rights cannot be defended and upheld, and inequalities cannot be highlighted and challenged in the absence of accountability. In recent decades, recordkeepers have increasingly emphasised the role of archives and records in facilitating accountability, upholding rights and exposing instances of social injustice. This paper assesses the twenty-first-century recordkeeping literature as it relates to the ethical issues of accountability, human rights and social justice in public sector recordkeeping. While there is some consensus on the role of recordkeeping with regard to accountability and human rights, there is less agreement regarding social justice, which remains a contested and poorly defined concept in the literature. The debates around accountability, human rights and social justice impact on perceptions of the role of the archivist and have led to a strong trend towards more activist interpretations, with increasing calls for greater inclusion and the development of participatory recordkeeping models. Despite this trend, implementation remains a challenge, and the gap between theory and practice needs to be continually addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, Multi-Objective Harris Hawks Optimization (MOHHO) is proposed based on strengthened dominance relation (SRD) to solve multi-objective optimization problems. Specifically, MOHHO uses an additional population archive to store the best non-dominated solutions generated so far by the exploration process at the aim to maintain the elitism concept. Moreover, the leader's solutions are selected from the external archive to guide the main population of Hawks to interesting search regions. Furthermore, the strengthened dominance relation is adopted to provide a good compromise between coverage and convergence of the obtained Pareto set. The proposed algorithm is validated via five bi-objective and seven three-objective test functions, and it is compared with three well-known multi-objective meta-heuristics. The experimental results show that MOHHO algorithm outperforms its competitors by providing better convergence behaviour with more diversified solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video retrieval methods, e.g., for visual concept classification, person recognition, and similarity search, are essential to perform fine-grained semantic search in large video archives. However, such retrieval methods often have to be adapted to the users' changing search requirements: which concepts or persons are frequently searched for, what research topics are currently important or will be relevant in the future? In this paper, we present VIVA, a software tool for building content-based video retrieval methods based on deep learning models. VIVA allows non-expert users to conduct visual information retrieval for concepts and persons in video archives and to add new people or concepts to the underlying deep learning models as new requirements arise. For this purpose, VIVA provides a novel semi-automatic data acquisition workflow including a web crawler, image similarity search, as well as review and user feedback components to reduce the time-consuming manual effort for collecting training samples. We present experimental retrieval results using VIVA for four use cases in the context of a historical video collection of the German Broadcasting Archive based on about 34,000 h of television recordings from the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). We evaluate the performance of deep learning models built using VIVA for 91 GDR specific concepts and 98 personalities from the former GDR as well as the performance of the image and person similarity search approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RDF compression and querying are consolidated topics in the Web of Data, with a plethora of solutions to efficiently store and query static datasets. However, as RDF data changes along time, it becomes necessary to keep different versions of RDF datasets, in what is called an RDF archive. For large RDF datasets, naive techniques to store these versions lead to significant scalability problems. In this paper, we present v-RDF-SI, one of the first RDF archiving solutions that aim at joining both compression and fast querying. In v-RDF-SI, we extend existing RDF representations based on compact data structures to provide efficient support of version-based queries in compressed space. We present two implementations of v-RDF-SI, named v-RDFCSA and v-HDT, based, respectively, on RDFCSA (an RDF self-index) and HDT (a W3C-supported compressed RDF representation). We experimentally evaluate v-RDF-SI over a public benchmark named BEAR, showing that v-RDF-SI drastically reduces space requirements, being up to 40 times smaller than the baselines provided by BEAR, and 4 times smaller than alternatives based on compact data structures, while yielding significantly faster query times in most cases. On average, the fastest variants of v-RDF-SI outperform the alternatives by almost an order of magnitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Email archives are important historical resources, but access to such data poses a unique archival challenge and many born-digital collections remain dark, while questions of how they should be effectively made available remain. This paper contributes to the growing interest in preserving access to email by addressing the needs of users, in readiness for when such collections become more widely available. We argue that for the content of email to be meaningfully accessed, the context of email must form part of this access. In exploring this idea, we focus on discovery within large, multi-custodian archives of organisational email, where emails' network features are particularly apparent. We introduce our prototype search tool, which uses AI-based methods to support user-driven exploration of email. Specifically, we integrate two distinct AI models that generate systematically different types of results, one based upon simple, phrase-matching and the other upon more complex, BERT embeddings. Together, these provide a new pathway to contextual discovery that accounts for the diversity of future archival users, their interests and level of experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) are striving to retain audience attention to issues related to cultural heritage, by implementing various novel opportunities for audience engagement through technological means online. Although born-digital assets for cultural heritage may have inundated the Internet in some areas, most of the time they are stored in "digital warehouses," and the questions of the digital ecosystem's sustainability, meaningful public participation and creative reuse of data still remain. Emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), are used to bring born-digital archives to light, aiming to enhance the public's engagement and participation. At the core of this debate lies both the openness of data and issues of privacy. How open to the public should born-digital archives be? Should everything be open and available online, and what does it take to achieve balance between openness and privacy, especially through AI initiatives? The study is qualitative and builds on the rationale of grounded theory. The role of AI development is critically investigated in relation to opening up born-digital archives online, by considering privacy and ethics issues. Grounded in the context of the author's PhD research, the paper proposes a human-centred approach to AI development for democratising its development towards fairness and social inclusion, contrary to the stereotypical cliché of blackboxing, allowing space for the plurality of born-digital archives to flourish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to data is seen as a key priority today. Yet, the vast majority of digital cultural data preserved in archives is inaccessible due to privacy, copyright or technical issues. Emails and other born-digital collections are often uncatalogued, unfindable and unusable. In the case of documents that originated in paper format before being digitised, copyright can be a major obstacle to access. To solve the problem of access to digital archives, cross-disciplinary collaborations are absolutely essential. The big challenges of our time—from global warming to social inequalities—cannot be solved within a single discipline. The same applies to the challenge of "dark" archives closed to users. We cannot expect archivists or digital humanists to find a magical solution that will instantly make digital records more accessible. Instead, we need to set up collaborations across disciplines that seldom talk to each other. Based on 21 interviews with 26 archivists, librarians and other professionals in cultural institutions, we identify key obstacles to making digitised and born-digital collections more accessible to users. We outline current levels of access to a wide range of collections in various cultural organisations, including no access at all and limited access (for example, when users are required to travel on-site to consult documents). We suggest possible solutions to the problems of access—including the ethical use of Artificial Intelligence to unlock "dark" archives inaccessible to users. Finally, we propose the creation of a global user community who would participate in decisions on access to digital collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) was published in 2007. By posing a right to self-determination, the UNDRIP opens a path to redefining Indigenous peoples' place in the international community. This paper considers how public archives in Canada can address the implementation of the UNDRIP and engage with Indigenous peoples to find new pathways to reanimate and promote the cultures and identities of Indigenous peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B Correction to: Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology b https://doi.org/10.1007/s00210-022-02307-2 Due to an oversight by the Publisher during the publication process, the paper has been published prematurely. The Publisher apologizes for this error. Publisher's note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. [Extracted from the article]

This paper examines how privacy measures, such as anonymisation and aggregation processes for email collections, can affect the perceived usefulness of email visualisations for research, especially in the humanities and social sciences. The work is intended to inform archivists and data managers who are faced with the challenge of accessioning and reviewing increasingly sizeable and complex personal digital collections. The research in this paper provides a focused user study to investigate the usefulness of data visualisation as a mediator between privacy-aware management of data and maximisation of research value of data. The research is carried out with researchers and archivists with vested interest in using, making sense of, and/or archiving the data to derive meaningful results. Participants tend to perceive email visualisations as useful, with an average rating of 4.281 (out of 7) for all the visualisations in the study, with above average ratings for mountain graphs and word trees. The study shows that while participants voice a strong desire for information identifying individuals in email data, they perceive visualisations as almost equally useful for their research and/or work when aggregation is employed in addition to anonymisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working outside traditional bureaucratic structures, animal activists have a long history of creating, managing and using records in radical ways to bring the suffering of animals to society's attention. Today's online platforms enable animal activism on a networked scale, with unprecedented reach and immediacy of impact, but also with risks and challenges. This article presents findings from a critical case study of the radical recordkeeping of Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), a US-based animal liberation group. The case study explores the performative role recordkeeping plays in the group's animal activism and advocacy, and the challenge of ensuring the longevity of an archival record of its activities and their impact. It is framed by Records Continuum Theory and illustrates the benefits of applying a Records Continuum lens to researching radical recordkeeping contexts. The paper reports on the research findings of the case study, including the vital role recordkeeping plays as a form of "strategic witnessing" for the activities of DxE, as well as in developing the DxE community and communicating its mission to the public. It discusses the challenges faced by DxE in preserving their archives into the future through integrating archiving into their current radical recordkeeping processes, Continuum-style, and addressing the risks associated with using online collaborative platforms for recordkeeping and archiving. Overcoming these challenges will ensure that current recordkeeping plays its part in DxE's animal activism, and that in the future records of continuing value take their place among the multiple narratives of society in the archival multiverse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Records from a popular series at The National Archives were found to bear warning labels that they have been bound using a 'poisonous insecticidal solution'. Research into historic sources suggested that the agents used by bookbinders in the early twentieth century were mercuric chloride, copper sulphate, and beechwood creosote; these may have been replaced by organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) mid-century. Analysis by X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy confirmed the presence of mercury in labelled, bound items. A number of OCPs were detected using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GCMS) including DDT, gamma-hexachlorocyclohexane (Lindane, γ-HCH), Dieldrin, pentachlorophenol (PCP), dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene (DDE), and 1-chloronaphthalene (1-CP). Tests confirmed the presence of these agents on all items tested regardless of format (e.g. tagged files and bound volumes) or period of creation, suggesting the OCPs were introduced to the items after the binding process. An occupational hygienist (OH) consultancy was engaged to carry out in-situ air monitoring during production, digitisation, and general handling of the items. Risk assessments were developed based on the results, allowing readers and staff to once again access the collection with safety measures including the use of personal protective equipment (PPE). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basic prerequisite for records, archives and information to be open to the public one day is that their own status must be public. Selected examples from the United States, France and Germany demonstrate a trend in the development of the relationship of advanced democratic societies to records of mostly official origin, especially the top representatives of public political power (presidents, government ministers and secretaries, chancellors). Civil society increasingly shows an interest in access to records that testify to the actions of their top representatives. States are gradually enforcing the interpretation of "their" records as public and not private. However, these representatives still demonstrate a strong feeling that society is not quite entitled to these records. The USA, France and Germany all deal with this matter in different ways. A top politician, especially in the performance of his role or entrusted office, is not a private citizen. Therefore, there should be much stricter and more thorough public scrutiny, and a requirement for transparency. Controversial records, perceived to be on the border between public and private status, should always be treated as public. Top political and public officials have much less "right to be forgotten" than ordinary citizens and thus it is their "duty to be remembered". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a consequence, in the future, all clinical trials and large observational studies submitted to Archives of Virology must be accompanied by the raw data files so that the underlying data can be assessed on trustworthiness. A recent retraction of one of those RCTs (Dabbous et al. 2021) shows the importance of assessing the trustworthiness of the underlying data, for example by examining the randomisation of the participants and the statistical analysis at the review stage. [Extracted from the article]

Co-authored by a Computer Scientist and a Digital Humanist, this article examines the challenges faced by cultural heritage institutions in the digital age, which have led to the closure of the vast majority of born-digital archival collections. It focuses particularly on cultural organizations such as libraries, museums and archives, used by historians, literary scholars and other Humanities scholars. Most born-digital records held by cultural organizations are inaccessible due to privacy, copyright, commercial and technical issues. Even when born-digital data are publicly available (as in the case of web archives), users often need to physically travel to repositories such as the British Library or the Bibliothèque Nationale de France to consult web pages. Provided with enough sample data from which to learn and train their models, AI, and more specifically machine learning algorithms, offer the opportunity to improve and ease the access to digital archives by learning to perform complex human tasks. These vary from providing intelligent support for searching the archives to automate tedious and time-consuming tasks. In this article, we focus on sensitivity review as a practical solution to unlock digital archives that would allow archival institutions to make non-sensitive information available. This promise to make archives more accessible does not come free of warnings for potential pitfalls and risks: inherent errors, "black box" approaches that make the algorithm inscrutable, and risks related to bias, fake, or partial information. Our central argument is that AI can deliver its promise to make digital archival collections more accessible, but it also creates new challenges - particularly in terms of ethics. In the conclusion, we insist on the importance of fairness, accountability and transparency in the process of making digital archives more accessible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The archival memory of the Caribbean is built on the documentary legacies of colonialism. From slave registers to plantation deeds, the shelves of Caribbean Archives are filled with the records of colonial conquest, enslavement and suppression. Yet within these former Caribbean colonies—now small independent nations—is the evidence of human triumph over adversity, pride in self-sufficiency and a fierce and persistence dedication to political and social independence. That evidence is manifest through political movements, oral narratives, heroic legends and through alternate, different readings of the colonial records. These alternate readings are among the issues considered in this essay as it addresses the rethinking of a history that foregrounds the marginalized and highlights a dignity that has been suppressed. A case study of a website from the small island-nation of St. Kitts and Nevis demonstrates how the web is proving its agility in responding to complex understandings of history by enabling the uniting of both tangible and intangible community knowledge and heritage as it also eases access to official archival collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Sheridan talks with Clare L E Foster, sharing some wider observations about the challenges of the digital transformation of The National Archives. (https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/our-role/executive-team/john-sheridan/). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study investigates which information is chosen for long-term retention in a municipality in Finland. The municipal Records Management Plan of the City of Helsinki was analyzed quantitatively to provide the research data. The results show that information pertaining to permanent or long-standing objects and phenomena, as well as those with long-lasting consequences (such as high-level decision-making, environmental factors, constructions, land use, and people), are more likely to have extended retention periods and may even be preserved permanently. According to archival literature, archival appraisal is a process influenced by theoretical considerations. However, the findings suggest that practical factors tend to guide the appraisal process more significantly. This raises the question of how appraisal decisions are made. The perceived value of information may depend on the level of detail provided about the functions and processes, as well as the knowledge possessed by the appraisers. However, the role that archival theory and other factors play cannot be understood without additional research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to offer an overview of Norwegian archival history in the early modern period (1537–1800). European archival history has been characterized by the experience of large and influential countries and little notice has generally been taken of the small nations on the continent's periphery. This article focuses on the development of archival repositories, archival thinking and user groups in Norway from 1537 to 1800. Norwegian archival history has much in common with the rest of Europe, but also some important distinctive features. The archives were primarily created and preserved out of consideration for legal and administrative need. In Norway, access rights were early and clearly formulated. Extensive appraisals were carried out in the early eighteenth century. Archival records were being explored for historical and cultural purposes from the early sixteenth century and onwards. However, we do not find traces of this within the archival institutions and archival management until the very end of the eighteenth century. The writings of historians and antiquarians, dating from 1500 to 1800, documents the historical and cultural use of archival records and see the archival repositories and institutions from the user perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Satellite range scheduling, a multi-constrained combinatorial optimization problem, is crucial to guaranteeing the normal operation and application of onboard satellites. Traditional methods are dedicated to finding one optimal schedule, having ignored the problem may process multiple high-quality schedules. To provide a set of alternative schedules while maintaining the solution quality, we propose a co-evolutionary algorithm with elite archive strategy (COEAS) in this article. In COEAS, two populations are evolved to solve the original and relaxed problem in terms of schedule quality and diversity, respectively. During the evolution, the populations maintain a weak cooperation and only share the information in offspring combination phase. Further, an elite archive strategy is derived to identify and preserve potential stagnated and optimal individuals. In this strategy, the promising individuals would further participate in parent mating and offspring replacement for the dual purpose of maintaining potential optima recovery and fine-tuning the population. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is better than comparison algorithms in terms of efficacy (obtaining higher quality schedule), diversity (locating more optimal schedules) and flexibility (providing better alternatives). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, grassroots movements have gained traction and significant numbers globally. Against longer histories of resistance and protest movements' mobilisation of documentation, mechanisation and digital technologies, this scoping literature review seeks to understand how resistance and social movements have drawn upon the participatory and easily accessible nature of social media and digital platforms to mobilise new generations of activists, create new archives, document activities and abuses, call for accountability and overwrite or challenge the narratives put forward by mainstream media outlets and state archives. We identify relevant projects, explore the activist potential and threats of the combination of digital technologies, social movements, and documentary or archival practice, before concluding by identifying open research questions in relation to digital technologies, social movements and archival practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a widespread notion that archives, especially national archival institutions, represent the nation's memory. Historically, archives have played an important role for history writing, thereby contributing to the construction of national master narratives and the strengthening of national identities. What the association between archives and memory actually means is however debated in archival literature. Taking the discussion on the relation between archives and memory as a starting point, this study examines how national archives in today's world present themselves to the public. The source material consists of mission statements collected from 138 webpages and 18 Facebook accounts all over the world. The first research question concerns the connection between mission statements and a national master narrative, the second asks where references to national memory and national identity are most pronounced, and the third asks whether self-images of national archives can be connected to historical experiences. The analysis shows that mission statements contain many allusions to history and heritage, while references to memory and identity are less widespread than expected. Some variations between continents, and between different groups of countries are identified, although relatively small. A possible explanation is that national archives are engaged in quite a lot of international cooperation, for instance in the International Council on Archives and UNESCO. Thus, they are likely to be as much influenced by each other as by the political environment in their own countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first high-resolution seismic study showing how the Chicxulub impact shaped the eastern slope of the Campeche Bank in the south-eastern Gulf of Mexico. The induced shock wave fractured Cretaceous strata causing the collapse of the upper slope and shelf over a length of ca. 200 km. Failed material was either transported downslope or remained in parts on the accommodation space created by the collapsed. In the Cenozoic, the East Campeche Plastered Drift developed within the created accommodation space, controlled by the inflowing surface current from the Caribbean, which forms the Loop Current. The internal reflection configuration of the drift shows that the closure of the Suwannee Strait in the Late Oligocene and the closure of the CAS in the Mid to Late Miocene controlled the variability of the southern Loop Current in time. Since the Loop Current transports heat and moisture from the western Atlantic warm water pool into the North Atlantic and further to NW Europe by the Gulf Stream, the drift represents an archive for controlling factors that influenced climate of the northern hemisphere. This first high-resolution seismic reflection study from the eastern Campeche Bank expands the understanding of destructive processes that a meteorite impact induces into the earth system. Furthermore, these data document that the East Campeche Plastered Drift bears the potential to understand the link between the climate variability of the northern hemisphere and oceanic processes in the equatorial western Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beeswax is a product of honeybees (Apis mellifera) and has been used extensively through time, especially as the primary component in medieval sealing wax for authenticating millions of documents. Today, these seals form large collections which, along with the historical information in the documents that the seals are attached to, could be a potential biomolecular archive for honeybees. Here, we investigate the possibility of obtaining biological information from medieval wax seals by performing a palynological and shotgun metagenomic analysis on eight medieval wax seal fragments. Our palynological results show that some pollen and fungal spores remain in the seals, albeit very little. Only one out of eight samples yielded enough DNA for sequencing. Moreover, only minor parts of the DNA reads could be taxonomically identified and were identified as plant and fungal DNA. These results demonstrate some potential for using wax seals as biological archives, but most importantly provides a framework for future studies, in addition to understanding further the degradation of seals as cultural heritage objects. We emphasize that future analyses should focus on other methodologies to retrieve data for historical context or alternatively improve molecular methods and screen sample collections broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zines are self-published, do-it-yourself booklets that have a long history as tools for activism in social movements. While archival studies has already explored the collection and preservation of zines as cultural artefacts, this article explores the capacity for zines to act as a form of community archive. The article examines See You at the Paradise, a zine co-created with Norfolk Island community members for a research project focused on Kingston and Arthur's Vale Historic Area. Drawing on Michelle Caswell's six principles of community archive discourse—participation, shared stewardship, multiplicity, activism, reflexivity, valuing affect—we analyse the extent to which zines and zine-making, as product and process, can be understood as community archive. In doing so, we propose collaborative reminiscence as a seventh principle. The article finds that zines, as community archive, work to strengthen the presence of marginalised voices in dominant historical narratives while also offering an important resource for community-building and political resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through documenting, preserving, and making local heritage accessible, digital cataloguing offers community archives significant potential benefits. But undertaking digital cataloguing in this context is not without challenges. Community archives depend on intermittent funding, have restricted access to digital connectivity and devices, and rely on elderly volunteers who often lack the digital skills required. Following Thomas and colleagues' digital inclusion framework, which considers the capacity for accessing, affording, and having the digital abilities to 'use online technologies effectively' (Thomas J, Barraket J, Wilson C K, Holcombe-James I, Kennedy J, Rennie E, Ewing S, MacDonald T (2020) Measuring Australia's digital divide: the Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2020. RMIT and Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, for Telstra, p 8), community archives can be considered digitally excluded. Through an ethnographic study of one community archive's use of Victorian Collections, an Australian digital cataloguing platform, this article examines the impact of digital exclusion on digital cataloguing outcomes via metrics of quantity and quality. These indicate limited cataloguing outcomes, with community collections obscured, rather than revealed. But these metrics disregard the opportunities for enhancing individual and archival digital inclusion that learning how, and continuing, to digitally catalogue present. By tracing one elderly volunteer's journey from digitally excluded non-user to capable cataloguer, I show how digital cataloguing offered an opportunity for enhancing this individual's digital inclusion, simultaneously improving that of the archive. In considering these unintended opportunities, this article contributes to our understanding of how digital exclusion impacts the digitisation of cultural heritage, and offers scope for determining how the process and practice of digital cataloguing itself can present opportunities for inclusion at the individual and archival level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article drives from the Israeli colonial archives and seeks to crack their structure, foundations and imagination. It wishes to establish a counter postcolonial/decolonial archive, based on colonial sources, while taking into consideration the specific condition of the Israeli colonialism and settler colonialism, and mainly the repressive administration of the colonial archives. While colonial bodies and archives erase the indigenous history and past, the counter archive aims to return them to their original population and to the pubic-sphere, calling for democratization processes. It will be established on the ruins of the Israeli colonial archive, will tell the story of the Palestinian villages that their population was uprooted and exiled (before and after exile), the story of the Palestinian population who remained in Palestine under military regime, strangers in the house; the erasure and attempt to control Palestinian historiography and culture to support official Israeli narrative. The decolonial archive will also gather indigenous materials in colonial archives, point out the physical and interpretative forces exerted on them, cleanse them of their biased interpretation and focus on structuring a reading that differs from the original colonial designation. It will restore them to indigenous history, enabling the construction of an alternative multi- layered database, different from the one-sided characteristic of colonial archives. The proposal then is to turn the Israeli colonial archive–corrupt, oppressive and destructive, into a more autonomous site–not only the materials themselves but also the way they are contextualized, read and interpreted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing interest in the use of pteropods as potential archives of past changes in ocean chemistry. However, pteropods have rarely been used in studies of millennial-scale sedimentary records, especially in shallow-marine environments. This study obtained core data for the last 16 kyr from the Northwest Shelf of Australia (NWS). Changes in the carbonate saturation state were assessed based on the carbon isotope ratios (δ13C) of shells and the Limacina dissolution index (LDX) measured on the planktonic pteropod species Heliconoides inflatus. In addition, the calcification depth of the pteropods was estimated based on oxygen isotope values (δ18O) of pteropod shells and seawater. Our findings indicate that H. inflatus calcifies at a depth of 95–140 m. This confirms that H. inflatus records a shallow-marine signal on the NWS. The δ13C values of the pteropods record a notable decrease in carbonate ion concentrations after 8.5 ka. This decrease is associated with the post-glacial onset of humid conditions on the NWS. The studied pteropod shells are pristine throughout the 16 kyr section and have low LDX values. Therefore, the LDX proxy appears to lack the sensitivity to be applicable in this highly supersaturated, shallow-marine environment. Until this study, proxies derived from H. inflatus have been exclusively utilized in open-marine settings. Our results indicate that the δ13C values of H. inflatus also represent a useful proxy for carbonate ion concentrations in shallow-marine environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linked data (LD) have the capability to open up and share materials, held in libraries, archives and museums (LAMs), in ways that are restricted by many existing metadata standards. Specifically, LD interlinking can be used to enrich data and to improve data discoverability on the Web through interlinking related resources across datasets and institutions. However, there is currently a notable lack of interlinking across leading LD projects in LAMs, impacting upon the discoverability of their materials. This research describes the Novel Authoritative Interlinking for Semantic Web Cataloguing in Libraries (NAISC-L) interlinking framework. Unlike existing interlinking frameworks, NAISC-L was designed specifically with the requirements of the LAM domain in mind. The framework was evaluated by Information Professionals (IPs), including librarians, archivists and metadata cataloguers, via three user-experiments including a think-aloud test, an online interlink creation test and a field test in a music archive. Across all experiments, participants achieved a high level of interlink accuracy, and usability measures indicated that IPs found NAISC-L to be useful and user-friendly. Overall, NAISC-L was shown to be an effective framework for engaging IPs in the process of LD interlinking, and for facilitating the creation of richer and more authoritative interlinks between LAM resources. NAISC-L supports the linking of related resource across datasets and institutions, thereby enabling richer and more varied search queries, and can thus be used to improve the discoverability of materials held in LAMs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiments with recognizing sensitive data in email message corpora have demonstrated the importance of context in such models. The temptation to use AI to perpetuate an obsolete principle Faced with the reality of the uncontrollable flow of born-digital records, archivists have pinned their hopes on AI-powered appraisal. It is high time we started developing humanity's long-term digital memory. [Extracted from the article]

This article considers that reasoning over archives is a joint enterprise between archivists and researchers and that both groups are increasingly using machine agents to assist them in it. It starts by considering the processing of archivists, researchers and machine agents separately. Using the different perspectives this brings to highlight different aspects of that processing, as a process of sense-making, as scholarly research activity, as practices that realise and achieve data for the drawing of further inference, it reasserts the argument that archives cannot be regarded as raw data to be reasoned over, but must be seen as the result of multiple representative and interpretive acts, of iterative realisation and activation as 'data' potentially involving many, many additional actors. It then goes on to consider how the involvement of machine agents fits into and potentially alters this picture by providing more detail about the basis on which they currently perform such acts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mass digitisation and the exponential growth of born-digital archives over the past two decades have resulted in an enormous volume of archives and archival data being available digitally. This has produced a valuable but under-utilised source of large-scale digital data ripe for interrogation by scholars and practitioners in the Digital Humanities. However, current digitisation approaches fall short of the requirements of digital humanists for structured, integrated, interoperable, and interrogable data. Linked Data provides a viable means of producing such data, creating machine-readable archival data suited to analysis using digital humanities research methods. While a growing body of archival scholarship and praxis has explored Linked Data, its potential to open up digitised and born-digital archives to the Digital Humanities is under-examined. This article approaches Archival Linked Data from the perspective of the Digital Humanities, extrapolating from both archival and digital humanities Linked Data scholarship to identify the benefits to digital humanists of the production and provision of access to Archival Linked Data. It will consider some of the current barriers preventing digital humanists from being able to experience the benefits of Archival Linked Data evidenced, and to fully utilise archives which have been made available digitally. The article argues for increased collaboration between the two disciplines, challenges individuals and institutions to engage with Linked Data, and suggests the incorporation of AI and low-barrier tools such as Wikidata into the Linked Data production workflow in order to scale up the production of Archival Linked Data as a means of increasing access to and utilisation of digitised and born-digital archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grasp estimation is a fundamental technique crucial for robot manipulation tasks. In this work, we present a scene-oriented grasp estimation scheme taking constraints of the grasp pose imposed by the environment into consideration and training on samples satisfying the constraints. We formulate valid grasps for a parallel-jaw gripper as vectors in a two-dimensional (2D) image and detect them with a fully convolutional network that simultaneously estimates the vectors' origins and directions. The detected vectors are then converted to 6 degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) grasps with a tailored strategy. As such, the network is able to detect multiple grasp candidates from a cluttered scene in one shot using only an RGB image as input. We evaluate our approach on the GraspNet-1Billion dataset and archived comparable performance as state-of-the-art while being efficient in runtime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last twenty years, anthropologists, archivists, and historians have dedicated increased attention to the study of archives as objects of research themselves. In so doing, scholars have predominantly examined the emergence and transformations of archives during the early modern age, focusing mostly on political and diplomatic depositories. They have tended to neglect financial archives, which is unfortunate, as—alongside judicial archives—they were probably the largest documentary repositories of the pre-modern world and those that first faced the problem of managing huge masses of documentation. This article discusses the formation and development of the Kingdom of Sicily's financial archives in the later Middle Ages, arguing that this repository evolved into a collecting archive by the early fifteenth-century, when it preserved not only the records and accounts produced by the central financial administration, but also those from a number of territorial officers and magistracies. This archival turn, I suggest, originated from the fact that the Crown of Aragon's rulers constantly needed increased incomes to fund bureaucracies and warfare and exercise patronage, and thus needed financial information organized, at hand, and under their control. After briefly discussing the emergence of the financial archive in the thirteenth-century, this essay traces the Crown's attempts to create a stable repository for storing financial records and accounts and its continuous struggles to prevent documentation from being scattered and dispersed. Finally, it examines the successful strategy that King Alfonso V of Aragon (1416–58), called the Magnanimous, pursued to organize financial documentation and concentrate records and accounts produced by financial administration into a stable building. The essay pays particular attention to the material aspects of preserving records, e.g., the restoration of buildings, construction of chests, and preparation of secure locks that were integral to the emergence of collecting archives for financial documents in the later Middle Ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Records designated as classified at the time of their creation form a very significant part of public records produced by state and public administration bodies in a broad sense. At the same time, they represent a significant part of historical source production a part of which should be permanently preserved in the relevant public archives. Their information content and informative value for future historical science is in many cases highly qualitatively superior. However, the phenomenon of classified records, including at least minimum possible access to them is also of fundamental relevance to contemporary society and the maintaining of a functioning quality democracy. Very often, however, what is missing is a deeper debate over records classification as such. For example, how do intelligence services manage their records? Are they being arbitrarily destroyed? Do they remain classified unnecessarily and for too long? The legal systems of most countries, including those with advanced democratic systems, now exert minimum real pressure on the declassification of once classified material. The following comparative study addresses the phenomenon of records classification and their declassification in some developed democracies with advanced archival systems; it also focuses on some of the features of the system's post-1945 historical development, particularly in the United States of America, the United Kingdom, partly also in France, Germany, Sweden, and adds a look at the situation in the Czech Republic representing one of the post-communist countries in Central Europe. The study uses the specific examples of the USA and the United Kingdom to demonstrate in what respects archives and historians can act as an important factor in the process of management and declassification of classified records, and how they can also be an important element of democracy in this sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]