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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.

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.

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 field of web archiving provides a unique mix of human and automated agents collaborating to achieve the preservation of the web. Centuries old theories of archival appraisal are being transplanted into the sociotechnical environment of the World Wide Web with varying degrees of success. The work of the archivist and bots in contact with the material of the web present a distinctive and understudied CSCW shaped problem. To investigate this space we conducted semi-structured interviews with archivists and technologists who were directly involved in the selection of content from the web for archives. These semi-structured interviews identified thematic areas that inform the appraisal process in web archives, some of which are encoded in heuristics and algorithms. Making the infrastructure of web archives legible to the archivist, the automated agents and the future researcher is presented as a challenge to the CSCW and archival community.

The 2013 Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Memo on federally-funded research directed agencies with research and development budgets above $100 million to develop and release plans to increase and broaden access to research results, both published literature and data. The agency responses have generated discussion and interest but are yet to be analyzed and compared. In this paper, we examine how 19 federal agencies responded to the memo, written by John Holdren, on issues of scientific data and the extent of their compliance to the directives outlined in the memo. We present a varied picture of the readiness of federal science agencies to comply with the memo through a comparative analysis and close reading of the contents of these responses. While some agencies, particularly those with a long history of supporting and conducting science, scored well, other responses indicate that some agencies have only taken a few steps towards implementing policies that comply with the memo. These results are of interest to the data curation community as they reveal how different agencies across the federal government approach their responsibilities for research data management, and how new policies and requirements might continue to affect scientists and research communities.