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The 2016 US Presidential elections may have presented the most prominent illustration of email and recordkeeping in public perception, but they offer only the most recent and public story of emails as records. This article offers an overview of the development of email as a government record in the USA, as well as the evolving archival perspectives on email and political accountability. Archivists have been contending with email for over 30 years, and from its earliest days in the US political usage, email has presented a complex array of recordkeeping and archival challenges, and we trace the changing archival perspectives and regulatory situations around email as a record in the USA over the past three decades. In this investigation, we explore questions about how and why officials create or destroy email, how email records are appraised, and whether or not preserved emails can be meaningfully accessed. In light of these questions, we argue that the archival tenet of accountability is tenuous at best in the face of the changing technological and political challenges presented by email as a record.

Cultural heritage institutions leverage digitization to fulfill their mission to preserve, represent, and provide access to collections under their care. Despite their common interest in documenting the progress of digitization and online access, the library, archives, and museums (LAM) sector lacks a conceptual framework for assessing and demonstrating the impact of digitized ethnographic collections. Reporting the findings of a yearlong interdisciplinary study, this article underscores the importance of storytelling in articulating the value and impact of digitized ethnographic collections held in cultural heritage institutions. We begin with an overview of the literature on the assessment and describe the methods we employed in our study. Next, we identify and discuss the different ways that stories and storytelling are strategically mobilized in conversations about the impact of digitization. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for cultural heritage practice and collection development.

The concept of “collective” or “social” memory has assumed increasing prominence in the discourse of archivists over the past few decades. Archives are frequently characterized as crucial institutions of social memory, and many professional activities are considered forms of memory preservation. We present a systematic examination of the relationships between archives and collective memory as articulated in the English-language archival literature. We first identify the major themes regarding collective memory and categorize archival writings into four major threads. We then analyze citations extracted from 165 articles about collective memory published between 1980 and 2010 in four leading English-language archival studies journals. We identify the most influential scholars and publications and trace the evolution of the collective memory concept in that literature. By comparing the archival literature on collective memory to that indexed in Thomson’s Web of Science and in Google Scholar, we identify specific disciplines, authors, and works that archivists working on collective memory may find useful. We find that in general the archival literature on collective memory is fairly insular and self-referential and call on archivists to actively engage other disciplines when carrying out collective memory research.

Through the Treaty of Paris in 1898, Spain ceded to the United States all its colonial authority over the Philippines, including its other colonies. The Treaty also placed in American possession the Spanish records kept in the various agencies of the former colonial administration of the islands. Upon assumption of its role as the new de facto colonial regime, the American insular government initiated the process of collecting the Spanish colonial records to be housed in a central repository that became the nucleus of the National Archives of the Philippines. An important aspect of understanding the context of archives in post-colonial Philippines is to trace its early beginnings and to examine the archives’ association with former colonial powers. Established against the backdrop of the shift in the continuum of colonial regimes, the archive is undeniably a colonial creation and a manifestation of colonial domination. For the contemporary imagination, however, its very presence represents a common and collective past that consequently contributes to the formation of a “national consciousness” and ironically reinforces the idea of nationhood of the formerly colonized territory.