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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 introduction defines critical archival studies and summarizes the articles including in the special issue.

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 chapter focuses on the impacts of anthropology’s digital data, and the particular challenges anthropological and ethnographic data held in archival repositories present for anthropologists, information scholars, and institutions. Over the past 20 years, the field of anthropology has changed dramatically, as have the records anthropologists produce. Today, the preservation and stewardship of anthropological records face new challenges as anthropologists create records in a wider range of formats, the reuse of these materials changes, and both researchers and repositories shift their ethical attitudes. We share new research as well as applied approaches to understanding the impact of these shifts drawing on two current research projects and an interdisciplinary Wenner-Gren–sponsored workshop held in June 2016 to revitalize the Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records (CoPAR). This chapter has two parts. First, we discuss two research projects tracking trends and impacts in reuses of anthropological data in digitized archival collections: “Valuing Our Scans: Understanding the Impacts of Digitized Native American Ethnographic Archives” and “Researching the Digital Turn: Documenting the Impacts of Digital Knowledge Sharing in Indigenous Communities.” Second, we highlight our applied work to revitalize CoPAR and how CoPAR aims to address the challenges outlined in our research by creating professional consensus around data access and reuse.

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.

Evolving institutional structures and missions affect the metadata and digitization efforts of a cultural heritage institution. This article discusses the institutional challenges the National Agricultural Library (NAL) faced as it gathered contemporary and historical federal dietary guidance publications into a digital collection. The Library has over time used a variety of descriptive subject and classification schemes as well as a variety of encoding mechanisms, each in response to the administrative as well as technological changes and challenges in the repository. As the Library began compiling content for its Historical Dietary Guidance Digital Collection (HDGDC), it confronted an array of records dispersed across various series and collections with heterogeneous metadata, which are legacies of centuries-long institutional evolution. The authors consider the implications for archives and special collections in creating subject-based digital collections from items dispersed across institution...

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.

This paper reports salient findings of a yearlong study that aimed to understand the impacts of digitized ethnographic collections. We discuss the barriers and challenges to understanding, assessing, and communicating the impact of ethnographic digitization projects. We then discuss the implications of our findings for collection practice and development and advocate for cultivating a culture of assessment for digitization projects using the systematized collection of impact stories.

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...

This is a critical moment for those who care for Native American and Indigenous archives. After much discussion, debate, and years of tireless advocacy, the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials has finally been endorsed by our leading professional organizations. The Association of College and Research Libraries, following the request of the Rare Books and Manuscript Section (RBMS), endorsed the Protocols in August 2019. In 2018, the Council of the Society of American Archivists unanimously endorsed the Protocols, accompanied by an apology for the many years of inaction. Following these endorsements, the next step for us is not only to continue its promotion and implementation, but also grow our understanding of what it means to be responsible stewards of items in our care. The Protocols articulate foundational concepts for our professional practice, including notions of cultural sensitivity and reciprocity. We can further expand our thinking and practice in this area by engaging with the works of prominent thinkers. Among these is Anishinaabe cultural theorist, writer, and scholar Gerald Vizenor’s most recent book, Native Provenance: The Betrayal of Cultural Creativity.

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.

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.

Purpose The purpose of this chapter is to delineate a number of factors unique to archives that problematize commonly accepted rhetoric in library and information studies (LIS). Methodology/approach This study reports on an analysis of several core concepts in archival studies (evidence, access, and power) and delineates how such concepts differ from dominant conceptions in the study of libraries. Findings Our research shows how archives call into question three dominant discursive tropes in LIS: the primacy of informational value (as opposed to evidential value in archives); universal access as a professional and ethical obligation; and the assumption that information institutions are universally benevolent. Although such tropes have been increasingly challenged by growing numbers of critical LIS scholars, we argue that they remain dominant discursive formations in LIS and reflect key areas of divergence that differentiate archives from libraries and distinguish the professional ethos of archivists and librarians. Originality/value This is the first chapter to delineate how archives differ from libraries in regard to human rights concerns and will spark discussion about such differences between the fields.

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.

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.

This article seeks to raise consciousness within the field of archival studies in order to foster a generative discussion about how descriptive practices might be expanded, approached differently, or completely rethought. It brings together crosscutting theoretical issues and provides practical examples of mediation in order to mobilize these records in support of human rights work. It first problematizes the foundational archival precept of respect des fonds and its sub-principles of original order and provenance. It then analyzes the necessary transformation of institutional policies and standards in order to foster trust and transparency and identifies structural or system wide strategies for ameliorating past abuses.