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Increasing interest in indigenization, decolonization, community archives, and the recent adoption of the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials (PNAAM) by the Society of American Archivists, offer opportunities for archivists to reflect on the application of “reciprocity” in archives. This article examines reciprocity as a concept in the archival field and shows how current reciprocal practices in archives with Native and Indigenous holdings can inform the wider field and its practice. The authors chart the emergence of reciprocity as an archival responsibility and to create fieldwide change through meaningful, community-based partnerships. They posit a continuum of institutional reciprocity, as well as how reciprocity might be seeded into the core functions of archives to bridge distances between communities and archival institutions. Inspired by recent scholarship in museum studies, the article concludes with a vision of “otherwising” to explore alternative possibilities that can be realized when we adopt reciprocity as an archival practice.

This paper discusses the potential role of the Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records (CoPAR) in the context of contemporary developments in anthropological research and archival practice. Despite many efforts, there are no discipline-wide, agreed-upon best practices for making or keeping anthropological records, and no central space where such conversations are taking place. Founded in the 1990s, CoPAR aims to convey the value of anthropological records, to encourage anthropology practitioners and institutions to preserve the field's records, to identify and locate primary anthropological materials, and to promote the use of records in the discipline. While CoPAR led efforts to preserve records of anthropologists in the 1990s, it became inactive by the early 2000s. Since then, the shift to digital field records and the increased digital access of archival records has exposed new concerns for the field's archival records. This article explores the outcomes of a 2015 meeting on this topic and identifies new gaps and challenges for anthropological records, joining this work with current archival perspectives. The article makes a case for a revitalized CoPAR that will encourage life-cycle data thinking and more community-driven approaches to archival stewardship.

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.

This article explores the rich history of social justice as a concern in archival studies and delineates future lines of inquiry for the field. We begin by examining how social justice has been defined in the archives literature and its implications for archival studies. Next, we draw forth five major strands of archival thinking in relation to social justice. We identify prominent areas in the archival literature that highlight the relationship between archives and social justice. We also identify critical questions in the relationship between social justice and archives and propose new research trajectories that we deem necessary to advance the archival field in general and its scholarship in particular. Finally, we argue for the importance of research that strengthens the tenets of social justice as a central principle in archival scholarship and practice.

It is not uncommon for archival photographs to appear in multiple copies, versions, or formats. Photographs of the same provenance are often found in various locations or housed in several institutions. Format diversity, duplication, and dispersion pose profound challenges for archivists attempting to represent photographic images scattered across many institutions. This article identifies four dimensions of archival dispersion—geographical, temporal, provenancial, and material—that simultaneously act as barriers for providing consolidated representation of dispersed photographs. Understanding the context and nature of dispersion is key to effective representation of photographs in archival custody. "Archival Diaspora" explores the complicated nature of distributed collections.

Virtual reunification is the strategy of reassembling physically dispersed heritage collections to produce a consolidated, digitized representation of scattered artifacts, literary and artistic works, and/or archival records of a single origin or common provenance. Scholars of digitization predict that interest in virtual reunification projects will continue to grow among heritage institutions, particularly in cases where dispersed collections present geographic, material, and political challenges that can more easily be overcome in the digital realm. This article highlights key characteristics of virtual reunification efforts taken from existing reunification projects and available literature on the topic, and it also offers ways to frame and approach virtual reunification. While available literature on virtual reunification focuses on specific project details and technical considerations, this article presents models that help to understand organizational and management challenges that virtual r...

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.