Program

This paper discusses the importance of relational accountability when researching Indigenous archives in an Australian context. Barlo, et al., (2021) describe the Yarning methodology as a protected space where relationships exist in research between Country, Ancestors, data, history and Knowledge. Further, Geia, et al., (2013) contextualise Yarning as an approach to embed unique Indigenous research perspectives and standpoints aligned with practices of Aboriginal storytelling.  

This paper shares how Yarning was utilised as a key research methodology to frame the research Unclasping the White Hand: Reclaiming and Refiguring the Archives to Support Indigenous Wellbeing and Sovereignty (Thorpe, 2022). The Yarning approach was vital in the process of engaging with research participants to explore whether the current dominant approaches to archiving and managing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges support the wellbeing of Indigenous people and recognise Indigenous sovereignty in an archival context. Yarning enabled relational accountability in the research process by establishing participatory research practices and protocols built on trust. This was critical in order to surface the stories of participants on topics related to the contested nature of the archives and the level of agency that Indigenous people have to control and own their archives.

This paper will share insights on the use of Yarning as a methodological approach and demonstrate its value as a culturally appropriate method for investigating Indigenous priorities in archival studies. Overall, it will show the importance of developing ethical and reciprocal research approaches that connect research to the mind, body and spirit.

This short paper discusses the greater consideration across archives and archival research regarding respectful and reverential ways in which to discuss Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ancestors and ICIP held in collecting institutions. The paper will outline the background, findings and methodological approach for the PhD research ‘Hair Samples as Ancestors and Futures of Community-led Collection Care’ (Booker, 2023). The research investigates the settler colonial context and white possessive logics (Moreton-Robinson, 2015) of acquisition and the ongoing institutional retention of Ancestors’ hair across the GLAM sector, questioning the lack of visibility of the histories of hair sampling as a racist research practice in Australia, the legislative and ethical ‘grey area’ and futures of community-led care for Ancestors’ hair as discussed with an interdisciplinary First Nations led research participant group

This paper will assert First Nations people’s Right to Know about both the history and the current location of Ancestors’ hair and related records, as well as the right to determine use, access and repatriation. Furthermore, the paper will also raise the need for First Nations voices leading the decision making and research to enable truthtelling that is self-determined, informed and respectful. This paper will take the opportunity to reflect on the methodological approaches of the PhD research, including Indigenous Women Standpoint (Moreton-Robinson, 2013), Yarning (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010; Atkinson, Baird & Adams, 2021), Indigenous Storywork principles (Archibald, 2008) and the Refusal as methodology (Simpson 2017). Overall, this paper will illustrate the clear priorities of Indigenous self-determination, care and truthtelling needed for Ancestors’ hair held off-Country.

As the lowest level administrative unit in China, rural areas have undergone earth-shaking changes in recent years under the “rural revitalization strategy” and the construction of “new countryside”. More and more attention has been paid to rural archives and rural memory retention. Rural archives refer to the historical records formed in the daily work and life of rural organizations in different forms and carriers of preservation value, such as text, chart, audio and video. As the largest developing country and an ancient civilization with a long history, China’s rural archives have distinct regional characteristics and cultural flavor. At the same time, rural archives, as the product of China’s top-level design, is adopting the idea of “co-construction”

“Co-governance” and “sharing” archives to build rural archives into more high-quality management resources and more common public products under the background of the shift of governance focus and the expansion of service scope.

This paper focuses on three questions, which are: What role does rural archives play in China's grass-roots governance? The Development Status of Rural Archives in China? What impact will rural archives have on rural development in China? In order to answer the above questions, field investigations were conducted in Pinggu District of Beijing, Chengdu City of Sichuan Province and Chengde City of Hebei Province in December 2022. Questionnaires were issued to investigate the construction of township archives in five typical villages, and face-to-face interviews were conducted with six archivists engaged in rural archives work. It is found that China's rural archives play the role of textual research, auxiliary management and retention of memory in the grass-roots governance. After a development process from start-up to recovery and then to acceleration, it has formed some characteristic experiences,

such as three-level organization management network, digital form filing, “village style memory project” and “local tourism industry”. “The 14th Five-Year Plan for Promoting Agricultural and Rural Modernization” points out that in the future, Chinese countryside will comprehensively promote the strategy of rural revitalization based on the regional characteristics of rural areas, and move towards realizing the modernization of agriculture and rural areas. The archives work will have a profound impact on maintaining social order, improving the cohesion of villagers, and promoting the development of economic and cultural industries.

This research begins with refection upon a couple of now commonplace observations about archival description. First, creating archival finding aids requires substantial judgment and interpretation, and is therefore inevitably influenced by the positionalities—the perspectives, personal histories, and social identities—of the archivists. Second, finding aids sometimes need revision, sometimes for fitting a new data standard, but also to correct errors, reduce bias, and remove harmful language. Hence, the positionalities of its authors and its revision history constitute significant information about a finding aid and, consequently, may affect the user’s understanding of the collection it describes. Important questions, then, are whether and to what extent this information should be recorded and to whom it should be available.

The paper has two parts. First, it offers an argument, that, all else equal, it is desirable to record and publish metadata for finding aids, particularly data about their authorship and revision history. This argument draws on the history of archival finding aids and recent work on reparative description, bringing into focus the circumstances under which finding aids are revisited and revised. The argument then explores the significance of archivist positionality, drawing on feminist work in the philosophy of science, especially views developed by Sandra Harding. The upshot is a constructive response to recognizing the untenability of postures of detached neutrality in archival description.

Second, the paper will report on a small study of the readiness and willingness of archivists to provide and manage metadata about the revision and authorship of finding aids. As of the writing of this abstract, currently underway is a survey of archivists at state archives in the United States. The survey begins by taking stock of current practices for managing data about the creation and revision of finding aids, and then queries archivists’ attitudes about having their identities and positionalities linked to the finding aids they create. Survey results will be interpreted in light of the theoretical case for attending to metadata about finding aids.

Professional identity is a set of beliefs about one’s professional role that related to how we perceive ourselves within our occupational context and how we communicate this to others. With a set of factors have changed the framework for archives management and restructured the professional practice in the digital age, the archival profession is going through an identity crisis all around the world. Professional identity is based on the result of work activities which are constructed within a socialization process, like a story. The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented global crisis that has already been declared as modern history’s gravest health emergency. In the face of the global crisis, many international organizations, including UNESCO, as well as ICA, emphasize the value of documenting and call archivists to action. The way the archival profession is responding to this crisis will be part of history books, and it will definitely affect the way archivists doing their work, as well as how they perceive themselves. In the above context, this paper focused on two research questions, they are: Has the professional identity of Chinese archivists changed after COVID-19 pandemic? How COVID-19 pandemic affects the professional identity of Chinese archivists? In order to answer all these questions, field surveys and interviews were carried out in July 2021 at Wuhan city, where the COVID-19 pandemic first broke out in China. We conducted field surveys on Wuhan Archives and Hubei Provincial Archives, and had an interview with 4 archivists who deals with the archives related to COVID-19 pandemic. The study found that the professional identity of archivists interviewed has been significantly improved during the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. How could this happen? Based on the analysis of survey data, we concluded that such improvement is based on the specific work environment and work activities during the pandemic, and mainly comes from the results that great attention of superiors, emergency rules making, effective outreach activities and perceived social approval effect comprehensively.  

The archival profession has codified its opposition to unpaid internships on the grounds they foster inequity and de-value student labor. In response, library science programs and schools of information studies where many archival programs reside are beginning to drop required internships in favor of additional classroom studies or optional practicum experiences. The impact on the profession is three-fold: 1. Institutions that previously used interns to complete valuable or even essential projects and functions must now consider how to secure funding for paid positions, or how to function without this labor pool 2. Students may graduate without any hands-on experience, reducing the opportunity for them to develop basic processing skills under guided conditions, which both leaves them less prepared for a processing position and makes it more difficult for them to determine if this career path is a good fit for them, 3. Hiring managers will begin to receive applications from recent graduates that are no longer guaranteed to include 150 or more hours of field work, making comparisons to experienced applicants more challenging and increasing on-the-job training needs. While professional standards set forth by the Academy of Certified Archivists (ACA) are underpinned by theory, they demand an understanding of the practical application of archival methodologies as a litmus test for professionalization. Each of the seven Domains covered by the ACA’s certification exam are broken into tasks, which denotes the practical nature of archival work and the need to understand the functions of this profession.

This paper offers as a case study a course in arrangement and description of archival collections offered through the School of Information Studies (the i-School) at Syracuse University. IST 628: Arrangement and Description of Archival Collections provides crucial and in-depth practical experience alongside foundational theory, without increasing fees or time commitment incurred for a typical 3 credit course. A symbiotic relationship is established between the IST 628 students and the Special Collections Research Center, wherein the student’s practicum learning is embedded. Student learning results in processed collections and completed finding aids for SCRC, without the added burden of supervising 12 individual interns. The success of the program is evident in improved student outcomes and increased student satisfaction. Multiple iterations of the course have been presented and subsequently analyzed to improve and streamline the course, with the data showing that greater time spent on the practical methods of archiving is resulting in higher quality assignments and increased student satisfaction. If library science and archival studies programs no longer mandate internship experiences, there is room within targeted course curriculum to incorporate in-depth practical learning experiences that build from the theoretical instruction already offered, and produce students well prepared for the professional practice of archiving.  

Digital scholarship is relatively an emerging aspect in the archives and records management (ARM) profession. The curriculum is South Africa have gaps and redundancies as far as digital scholarship is concerned. The content of digital scholarship is either in or not in the ARM curriculum depending on the LIS school’s specialization. This study aimed at exploring the incorporation of digital scholarship into the ARM curricular in South Africa. Some of the constructs from the Wolf curriculum development framework informed this study as a conceptual underpinning.  The study adopted a constructivist paradigm using a qualitative approach. A multiple case study design through semi structured interviews was used to collect data. Ten LIS schools that houses ARM courses were targeted for this study however, only five responded. Ten participants comprising of heads of departments and digital scholarship lecturers participated in this study. The study revealed that digital scholarship contents were infused in some LIS schools as far as ARM was concerned and in others were not there. Those that had contents on digital scholarship generally lacked the practical component of digital scholarship. Those that had no digital scholarship content, their course objectives were not aligned with digital scholarship content. Recurriculation of the content was underway through consultation with relevant stakeholders in some LIS schools as they have realized that they will render graduates that are irrelevant for the ARM job market. There were gaps, redundancies and opportunities that were identified from LIS schools that had contents on digital scholarship.  The study concluded that most LIS schools had no contents on digital scholarship. Those that had contents had gaps and redundancies such included the lack of practicum in the courses. Recurriculation was recommended for most LIS schools and some of them had already embarked on the process. Consultation of all the relevant stakeholders in the ARM profession was recommended for LIS schools. It was recommended that LIS schools should be reciprocal to the needs of the ARM sector. The study recommended that LIS schools ensure that content on digital scholarship should be evident through the entire bachelor’s or Honours in ARM qualifications.   

Austria has a history of academic archival education dating back to 1854. Since then, the Institute of Austrian Historical Research has been an esteemed training institution for archivists renowned for its highly selective admission procedures. In the twenty-first century, however, curriculum reforms have transformed the education programme while digitalisation has changed the professional landscape. First, the Bologna Process initiated the turn of an era by transforming the selective postgraduate course into a regular master’s degree which is open to anyone holding a BA in a historico-cultural discipline. Second, the relationship between the institute and the archival sector underwent significant change. In contrast to the old system, current students do not undergo their academic training on the job but depend on the degree in order to get a job.
 

Whereas previous generations of Austrian archivists relied on a linear education pathway, today’s students experience an entirely new mode of learning. This aspect is most evident in the new archival curricula as of 2006 in the form of a mandatory working placement. The quality criteria have been intentionally kept vague in the past as the institute does not assign the placement but leaves the entire organisation to the students. Due to increasing student numbers and the retirement of those responsible for accreditation, however, they have recently become a frequently discussed topic. In theory, the placement is just a module of the archival curriculum. In practice, however, it involves conflicting interests among stakeholders, such as the university, archival educators, archives, and students, requiring expectation management. 
In my presentation, I provide an overview of current practices and hurdles in the organisation of student placements in Austria. Moreover, I aim to reflect on the role of professionalism in education and practice by placing them in national debates on archival curricula and current working conditions.

Yvette Ramírez, Tam Rayan, & Nazelie Doghramadjian

In this workshop, each facilitator will begin by briefly discussing their respective projects and issues they are grappling with in using archives made by Bolivian, Palestinian, and Armenian diaspora communities. We define diasporas as communities that have been displaced, live in exile, or cannot easily return to their ancestral homes. Each example will serve as a case study to provoke discussion amongst workshop participants. We will build an ethical framework in the form of guiding principles for archival scholars using diaspora archives in their research. We believe this is an important endeavor given the lack of ethical research guidelines for archival scholars. As such, this workshop is specifically geared towards archival scholars with a background or an interest in researching and engaging diaspora communities.

Diaspora adds a specific space-bound context to cultural identity which impacts information practices given its varied spatial and temporal characteristics. By bringing together three distinct diasporas and their respective relationships to archives and recordkeeping, this workshop aims to work with participants to both discuss and collectively co-write guiding principles around researching diaspora archives alongside their respective communities. The Palestinian, Armenian, and Bolivian communities pose unique case studies in which to frame the ethical dimensions of researching diaspora archives because of their culturally specific oral, aural, and kinetic traditions that have remained as components of their personal and community recordkeeping. We define diaspora archives as materials that document the epistemologies and experiences of forced migrants and their descendents, moving with them to support community formation in their ongoing displacement (Lopez, 2017).

Building from the facilitators’ work in their respective diaspora communities, this workshop seeks to build participant-based knowledge on the following themes shared across diaspora recordkeeping: 1) How to identify archival needs for different communities of the same diaspora. Each locale has varying conditions underlying the reasons for their displacement and differences in how they are situated in the host land, impacting their expression of identity and culture. How do archival scholars understand the particular diaspora consciousness of each community and engage in culturally specific archiving? 2) How to acknowledge contesting forms of memory work and documentation which may embody varied values, cultural contexts and historical colonial interventions. This can include records that may not be traditionally recognized as archival but created and experienced through day-to-day lived experiences. 3) How to approach diaspora records when navigating practical and theoretical issues of ruptures, discontinuity, loss, trauma, and dispersion. Many forced migrants experience multiple migrations to two or more foreign places after being dispersed from an original center. This impacts the continuity and comprehensiveness of their documentary heritage as records are lost and scattered on their journeys. How do we, as archival scholars, push against conventional archival theory and praxis to make space for the creation of unconventional records used to fill these gaps? The guiding principles created with this workshop will provide the foundation for a post-workshop blog post or short article to document and highlight the knowledge production and reflection process.

Time is of the essence when natural disasters, unrest, and/or armed conflict upend civilian life. Provisions and legal arguments asserting the obligation to protect cultural heritage date to the Roman period, convoking the heritage professions alongside judiciary and law enforcement agencies at the per country and international levels. UNESCO marked the 2018 European Year of Cultural Heritage and the early 50th anniversary of its 1970 Convention by then publishing a valuable toolkit for the latter two authority communities that now has by its very use, demonstrably made good on the aim to secure and safeguard heritage from the threat of illicit trafficking. Two new translations underpinned UNESCO's January 18-20, 2023 Warsaw workshop training over 35 representatives to counter the looting and destruction of Ukrainian cultural property. The workshop arrived in response to already incalculable losses of life and human rights, obviously the first priority in a collective response, and of protected cultural property including archives, historic sites, and their complete contents. The two are in fact linked, as stated in several international legal instruments including for Indigenous people, thus guiding efforts to re-establish peace and stem further losses of identity and history. Our AERI presentation will incorporate an analysis of the above recent use of UNESCO’s toolkit among a lineage of awareness-raising efforts intended to: recast the authority communities’ role as first responders, establish shared goals and definitions, comprehend the actor dynamics and economics that connect forged and plundered art to war crimes, identify opportunities and roles for combatting the continued displacement of artifacts from countries of origin, and make use of special or open educational resources to fill knowledge gaps. Provenance-researching archivists interact with the $64 billion global art market every day, and their restorative work can bring about the spiritual and psychological healing of people who have been impacted by conflict. When peace prevails, the unifying presence of cultural property will hasten communities’ ability to regain their lost sense of place.  

Diary methodology remains underutilized in qualitative research in the social sciences. Yet, diary studies have the potential to capture unique insight unavailable through other research methods due to their longitudinal, spontaneous, and highly contextualized nature. Solicited diaries have been used in affective examinations of labour relations (Tschan et al 2005; Poppleton et al. 2008; Holman 2016), workplace bullying (Rodríguez-Muñoz et al. 2022), work-related stress (Bono et al 2007; Clarkson & Hodgkinson 2007; Sonnentag et 2008), emotional exhaustion (Portoghese et al. 2017) and unfair events (Barclay & Kiefer 2019; Matta et al. 2014). Few, if any, diary studies have endeavored to study the workplace from the perspective of archivists. As a result of increased awareness around the emotional and traumatic aspects of archival work, and after initial research into this area, we embarked on a three-year, SSHRC-funded project (PIs: Wendy Duff and Cheryl Regehr) to better understand the emotional responses of archivists when working with records, researchers and donors. The research team conducted one-time, in-depth interviews in addition to a solicited diary study.

This presentation will use the project’s solicited diary and interview research as a case study to contrast and compare the data which emerges from studying the same subjective phenomena through differing methodology. The day-to-day diary entries made explicit everyday stressors and tensions that were less apparent in interviews focusing on major emotional events. Comparing the emotions and experiences captured through the different methodologies enriches and widens our understanding of archivist’s emotional responses to archival work. The presentation will also explore the ethical implications of using diary methodology to study difficult emotions; the diary’s potential benefit to participants should be balanced against the diary’s potential to harm. Ethical research practice works to reinforce rigour by developing a relationship of trust and collaboration between researchers and participants. The presentation will finally reflect on the project’s commitment to a reflexive, slow and proactive research process, which necessarily involved relinquishing researcher power and control, to prioritize respect for the rights, privacy and well-being of research participants.

My research aims at investigating practices of remembrance in grassroots lesbian archives, focusing on these archives’ practices and their relationship to memory-making, community-building, and activism. The research also delves into theoretical discussions about memory, heritage, remembrance and oblivion, and the potentials and limitations of memory institutions for feminist and LGBTQIA+ struggles in contemporary societies. I am interested in how these archives create resistance and political engagement, and strengthen the senses of community and activism through practices of remembrance.

Initially, my intention is to frame the analysis focusing on two or three case studies. Two archives have already shown interest in collaborating with the research: Bay Area Lesbian Archives, in Oakland, and Archives Recherches et Cultures Lesbiennes, located in Paris.

The main question guiding the research is: how do these lesbian archives produce counternarratives and resistance through their collections and practices? The subquestions address 1) their archival strategies to gather, preserve, index, and make the records accessible to the public; 2) how the issues of remembrance, silence and oblivion tackled by these archives; 3) what these archives can tell us about lesbian history in their countries; 4) how they articulate discussions about gender and sexuality into broader political debates and activism, and how their connections with other organisations for this purpose are established.

In regards to the methods, I intend to use semi-structured interviews, participatory observation, and archival research, conducted during periods of fieldwork in the archives.

Since I am in the first year of my PhD, I believe I will not have many results to share on this occasion. My plan is to start my data collection this fall, once I have gotten the approval from the ethics committee of my university.

My intentions in taking part of the 2023 Archival Education & Research Institute are to present my research in its current state, and to share my ideas and plans for the next years of my doctoral studies. I am sending my registration to “Research/work in progress” and “Lighting talk” as I think that both opportunities would be extremely beneficial to improve my research. I would be thankful for the opportunity to connect with researchers and practitioners interested in similar issues and discussions, to get feedback/suggestions on my work, and to be able to contribute to the development of other researchers’ works.

Homeless services systems provide unhoused individuals access to emergency shelter, subsidized housing, and other life-sustaining resources. In this paper, we present a qualitative study that draws on the experiences of fifteen social service workers to examine how recordkeeping practices sustain homeless services systems and unite a tangled web of institutions and actors, including public housing systems, nonprofit agencies, and local governments. We address the following research questions: How is the infrastructure of homeless services sustained by recordkeeping? How are social service workers affected by increasing recordkeeping demands? In what ways do social service workers work against or ‘find the play’ in this system? To address these questions, we collected interviews and conducted artifact walkthroughs with our study participants. We analyzed the data using an infrastructural lens and found that current recordkeeping practices within homeless services systems comprise an "infrastructure of last resort" that functions logistically, prioritizing efficiency and speed. In addition to tracing how recordkeeping practices function, we also considered the ways in which they break down, and how social service workers navigate a logistified infrastructure via tactics we term translation work.

We show that social service workers “speak back” to this logistification by working to make the infrastructure legible to their unhoused clients through revealing some aspect of its inner workings, or by mediating their clients’ narration of their life experiences in order to achieve better outcomes. The ubiquity of this mediating work, between the categories and ways of knowing imposed by the system and the lived experiences of unhoused people, highlights the social complexity of recordkeeping processes and underscores how unhoused people’s life chances can hinge on minute detail. Our findings show how structuring recordkeeping in ways that privilege efficiency and speed disrupts social service work and interferes with social service workers’ ability to provide care for vulnerable individuals facing life-altering and life-threatening hardships. This discussion of logistification and translation work has important implications for the study and practice of recordkeeping within social service and care work. In the broadest sense, our participants’ narratives offer a compelling case for thinking critically about the function of social service bureaucracies. For any ecology of records, they ask us to consider, does this alleviate harms, or exacerbate them?

The role of volunteers in archival institutions are meant to be ones of mutual benefit: institutions are able to complete projects that require more work than their paid staff is able to accomplish, and volunteers are given the opportunity to contribute to an important historical project. But “power relations are inherent in every archival act” (Cifor, Caswell, et al, 2018, p. 85). Volunteer guidance documents emphasize the logistical and planning aspects of using volunteer labor; however, they give little attention to the treatment of their volunteers. Within larger institutions, volunteers enter into a hierarchy in which they are valued as processors, unless a skill valued by the institution is uncovered. A hierarchy of power and expertism create expectations placed upon the bodies of volunteers. This power is circulated and enacted through bureaucratic structures, surveillance, and standardization. Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor (2016) argue for radical empathy in which “archivists are seen as caregivers, bound to records creators, subjects, users and communities through a web of mutual affective responsibility (p. 24), and this empathy should extend to volunteers. In order to put this empathy into practice, the individual goals and needs of each volunteer should be incorporated into the planning of the project, and this can most effectively be done by incorporating volunteers into project management. This paper identifies a disconnect between institutions and professional organizations and volunteers in the archive, and a call for extending radical empathy and an ethics of care to those necessary volunteers. An appeal like this is not without tension, as archivists must be prepared for “unaccustomed levels of professional humility…welcoming dispute and debate around the contents…[and] a new emphasis upon facilitation, dispersed community coordination, and emergent design” (Eveleigh, p. 222), and must also advocate for empathy in their institutions.

From 2020-2021, the Virtual Footlocker Project (VFP) held focus groups with nearly 100 veterans and active duty military personnel. The subsequent analysis identified their personal military records' unique preservation needs and concerns. Utilizing the backwards design model, the VFP developed two curricula—one for active-duty military and veterans and another for cultural heritage workers. The curriculum for active-duty and retired is designed to provide military personnel with the skills and knowledge to identify important personal records, prioritize items for long-term storage, apply basic strategies for organizing and preserving their records, and locate additional resources. The curriculum for cultural heritage workers provides attendees with a foundation in the key challenges of personal military records, how to implement best practices when working with veterans, how to utilize the VFP veterans curriculum, and how to design and implement community-based projects focused on veterans. This presentation will summarize the development of the curricula content and website, and the results of the initial in-person and virtual workshops held during the past year.   

Shifting practices and scholarship in the archival field is moving towards what has been termed a “reparative turn” (Sedgwick 1997), defined by the Society of American Archivists as the “remediation of practices or data that exclude, silence, harm, or mischaracterize marginalized people in the data created or used by archivists to identify or characterize archival resources" (SAA Dictionary of Archives Terminology). While this work is gaining traction in “mainstream” archival spaces, in Native and Indigenous archival work, decolonizing frameworks, Indigenous data sovereignty, Tribal archives, and community archives are driving the development of specific knowledge organizations, ontologies, and platforms that reflect Indigenous knowledges and epistemologies, and which are often locally or regionally tailored (Littletree and Metoyer 2015; Christen 2020; Smith 2021). These Indigenous knowledge ontologies and descriptive practices reframe core Western archival principles. Aligned with these reparative and decolonizing approaches, there are movements toward Indigenizing theoretical frameworks. Indigenizing, as defined by the University of Canada Alberta:

…is a collaborative process of naturalizing Indigenous intent, interactions, and processes and making them evident to transform spaces, places, and hearts. Indigenization benefits not only Indigenous students but all students, teachers, staff members, and community members involved or impacted by Indigenization. 

While the concept of Indigenizing has not gained as much traction in archival spaces, examples of Indigenizing work includes work that focuses on communities’ needs and priorities such as reparative descriptions, working towards archival material return, or engaging with communities to build out projects that center and benefit community needs. 

This panel seeks to highlight new work and research in archival spaces seeking to Indigenize archival concepts, systems, collections, or wider practices. We are looking to highlight the work particularly of those who are engaged in Indigenizing practices, in their own institutions or partner repositories, and scholarship that engages with these ideas through examining theoretical, pedagogical, and methodological perspectives. 

Audrianna Goodwin (Red Lake Nation) and Ellen Holt-Werle will discuss the processing project Goodwin is undertaking of the Helen Parker Mudgett papers, which is a continuation of conversations that happened during the Towards Recognition of University Tribal Healing (TRUTH) Project. Mudgett, a white woman, was an assistant professor of history and also intercultural education in the University of Minnesota’s General Extension Division. In addition to broader work around human relations, her work focused on American Indian communities, and Ojibwe people in Minnesota. Her unpublished manuscript, The Ojibwe Chronicles, and some of her papers were donated to the University of Minnesota Archives.

What does it mean to have a citizen of a Tribal Nation process the papers of someone who researched and interviewed members of that community? What context and depth can be added to prioritize the agency of members of that community? While the collection is of the papers of a white woman, who was privy to and recorded ceremony, how can it be described to not only enhance respectful access, but most importantly, to reflect, acknowledge, and honor members of the Tribal Nations she interacted with?

Natália Tognoli, Forget Chaterera-Zambuko, Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Rebecca Frank, Jamie A. Lee, Ana Roeschley, & Ashley Todd-Diaz

This workshop will be led by archival faculty and instructors from a variety of institutions, who will facilitate discussion about teaching archival courses across several delivery types (face-to-face, online asynchronous and synchronous, and hybrid) at multiple institutions. The role of the course syllabus in successful courses will be interrogated at length. Workshop facilitators will share lessons drawn from their own experiences, offer possible solutions to challenges encountered, as well as discuss and share the syllabi they have crafted, modified, and delivered. The workshop will offer a discourse on the elements of a presumed good syllabus. These include but may not be limited to overall course rationale, defining the course learning outcomes, outcome-driven assessment, grading methods, student responsibilities, reading material as well as the teaching philosophy.

This discussion will lead into a hands-on collaborative syllabi audit, as well as a chance to contribute syllabi to several collaborative research efforts (including the ArchiPrEd led by Sarah Buchanan and Ed Benoit, and the IMLS grant project led by Alex Poole and Ashley Todd-Diaz). Participants will collaboratively brainstorm what topics ideally should be covered in archival courses, suggest readings and assignments, as well as suggested best practices. This workshop is ideal for graduate students, early career faculty, and practitioners who are planning to start teaching or have just begun. Participants are welcome to bring in-progress syllabi for collaborative consultations and feedback.

As scholars Alice Fothergill and Lori Peek argue children “make important contributions and have many strengths, which are all too often misunderstood or overlooked altogether. In times of trouble, the fates of children are every bit as complex as those of adults” (Fothergill and Peek, 2015, pg. 4). Unfortunately, most scholarly conceptions such as the child resilience myth assume that many children just “‘bounce back’ quickly from the harmful effects of disaster” or the helpless victim myth which “casts children as powerless and fragile, depict youth as completely incapable of acting in the face of disaster” (Fothergill and Peek, 2015, pg. 4). Such misconceptions thwart deeper understandings of the history of children, the experiences of these vulnerable subpopulations, and the importance of using stories and records to both remember the past and make way for the future. But given the relatively short span of research and projects on children’s records and the general absence of a focus on the child as an archival subject, user, and creator of archival records (Carbajal, 2022) this panel brings together emerging archival work on this very topic.   

Bringing together a panel of archivists and scholars each working with records regarding children, childhoods, and both painful and joyous life experiences sets the stage for exposing the importance of this new archival area of study. The Find and Connect Australia project demonstrates growing attention towards foster care and out of home care records for Australians youth and their adult selves. The Children’s Photography Archive, one of the first of its kind, highlights records created by youth creators documenting a number of lived experiences through the perspectives of those directly living them. Finally, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition shares insights on their ongoing work towards cultural revival, healing, and resource sharing using archival records of children who lived through oftentimes difficult boarding school experiences in North America. Together, this panel features crucial intersections between the importance of introducing young record creators alongside their future user adult selves, descendants, or relevant communities.  

To build, sustain, and grow ethical human infrastructures for preserving the cultural record, we need to continue to improve and demonstrate our understanding of how to support and lift up archival workers. Grant-funded initiatives in the United States such as the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSR), the Archives Leadership Institute (ALI) and the Archival Education and Research Institute (AERI) have held capacity building as a central part of their outcomes. Often described as catalysts for support and belonging, these initiatives and many others have focused on fostering community and professional networks as a means for building capacity. However, deliberate analysis and scaffolding are important for avoiding replication of prior practices that may not be accessible or inclusive.

This paper will outline and discuss one phase of an ongoing research project about archival labor, care, and capacity. This short presentation will engage with the following research question, “What practices from capacity building initiatives in archives and cultural memory offer potential for replicability, ethical labor practices, and sustainable advocacy and growth?” with analysis and results from a qualitative pilot survey of documentation from projects on archival labor.

Appraisal is central to archival work as not everything can be kept, and decisions must be made on what to keep and what to pass on. A collection policy often guides such decisions; this is an official statement issued by libraries and archives that identifies the kinds of materials they accept and the conditions or terms that affect their acquisition. In archival literature, appraisal has been described as the most complex and intellectually demanding task. Much has been written about appraisal since the publication of the Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives in 1898. Nevertheless, how appraisal should be done and the role of the collection policy in the real world are not well understood, and the literature lacks empirical investigation.  

This study seeks to better understand the collection policy's role in appraisal by examining such policies. This is a preliminary examination of the first phase of research aimed at exploring appraisal practice within special collections at university archives and libraries. Special collections, which are composed of unique materials that are distinct and have intrinsic value to the institution, were chosen in this study because they often require special consideration in the appraisal process.  

In this study, special collections at Association of Research Libraries institutions in the United States served as the population of this study (N=103). The institutions' websites were first searched for a collection policy. If a policy could not be found on the website, a combination of Google searches was completed using the library's name and the terms "AND collection policy," "AND collection development policy," or "AND appraisal policy." A total of 59 (57%) out of 103 policies were located. The policies will be uploaded to NVivo, qualitative analysis software, for qualitative content analysis. The codes will be derived from the literature and tested on a smaller sample size. Any new codes that arise during the process will be categorized and added to the codes. Institutional information will be taken from the IPEDS data center to enable the researchers to analyze how institutional characteristics may be related to the policies at various academic institutions. Once the coding is finished, an intercoder reliability test will be done by comparing the results of both coders. The types of topics covered in the collection policy statements will be summarized. The implications of the findings in terms of special collection appraisal and acquisition will be discussed.

Libraries, archives, and museums have long shared similar missions: to collect and preserve items for future generations as well as ensuring that those items remain accessible to the public. However, they do not have a history of collaborating to achieve their goals. By working together, these memory institutions could achieve those goals by combining their often limited resources, as well as sharing expertise to provide new perspectives.   

The idea of collaboration has been discussed for years, but without any major developments in that direction. In 2008, the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) published what is still one of the most well-known and comprehensive reports on inter-institutional collaborations: “Beyond the Silos of the Lams: Collaboration among Libraries, Archives, and Museums.” This report, along with workshops, conferences, and other publications, sparked discussion of collaboration, though there has been little consensus on how to collaborate effectively.

Through a series of case studies, this project will analyze documentation and conduct interviews to examine past inter-institutional collaborations in order to discover the strengths and weaknesses of each attempt and develop a framework to guide and encourage future collaborations. The chosen studies are: The Jane Collaborative, Smithsonian Team Flickr, and the Museum and Online Archive of California. They each represent collaborations between several combinations of memory institutions (i.e. museum/library, museum/archive, library/archive/museum), as well as different goals in those collaborations. Smithsonian Team Flickr and the Museum and Online Archive of California both heavily feature an online component in their collaborations, while the Jane Collaborative involves collaboration through outreach.  

The challenge in this project will be to find a balance between the goals of each individual institution, the specific purpose of any collaboration attempt, and ensuring that any collaboration through digital means is as safe from obsolescence as possible.  

Forget Chaterera-Zambuko, Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Rebecca Frank, Jamie A. Lee, & Ana Roeschley

This workshop aims to fill a gap in the education of many doctoral and master’s students in archival and information studies programs, as well as practitioners who aim to teach - being able to identify and clearly articulate their own pedagogical style to compose an effective teaching statement. This workshop will bring together a group of presenters/leads with a range of types of experience who have all gone through the process of examining their pedagogical approaches and successfully crafting teaching statements to use in packages for applying to jobs and for promotion. This workshop will also bring in education faculty and pedagogical experts from LSU to provide further background and training on identifying what pedagogical style best matches each participant, and how to connect pedagogical practice to teaching statements. 

Workshop leads will share examples from their own work and portfolios, as well as samples shared from other archival faculty at various stages of their careers. Participants will have the opportunity to workshop their in-process teaching statements or begin crafting one for the first time, with guidance and feedback from the workshop leads and fellow attendees. By the conclusion of the workshop, participants will be able to create stronger teaching statements, provide better feedback to peers on their own statements, and have greater insight into their preferred teaching style.

This paper presentation focuses on the topic of the archival subjugation of vulnerable populations, specifically youth. Given the lack of scholarship on children and adolescents and archival recordkeeping, few archival theories grapple with questions on how archival records are shaped and interact with populations of youth as users, subjects, and creators of records. Archival collections may include records recalling an adult’s childhood through oral histories or records created by children but collected by adults such as parents or notable figures like presidents. The child rarely gets noted as a contributor and most times will exist as a subject of observation or participation. In most archival collections of records, “children as subjects remain part of a larger whole of ignored or harmed populations such as women and domestic abuse survivors” with many being portrayed as helpless victims or passive observers. (Carbajal, 2022) Few collections exist that document, preserve, and provide access to records created by youth, for youth users, and about youth subjects as active agents in the historical narrative.

Feminist social theory questions a number of existing biological theories positioning human beings according to race, ethnicities, religion, biological sex, class, and of course age. Using these hierarchies, human societies across time, space, and groups have asserted power and control over others or have faced this domination with various degrees of resistance or acceptance. The proposed term of archival subjugation draws from a number of feminist scholars and theories including the making of the savage, norms and normalization, dynamics of subjugation, as well as obligation, relations, and care (Heidi Stark, 2016; Dean Spade and Craig Wilse, 2015; Spade, 2013; Luna, 2020). While additional research must be conducted to fully understand the entire scope of children’s archival recordkeeping and use, this presentation looks to first understand the issue of positioning children as archival subjects. This positioning not only represents the majority of today’s focus on children’s records, but it also highlights a feminist framing of the child as a subject to be monitored and controlled. Children as a whole already represent a vulnerable population, but there exist even more marginalized and hyper documented youth subpopulations such as the case with those in the foster care system.

Establishing a relationship between youth and records requires critical interrogation of the ways records created by foster care institutions and agents surveil, document, study, and control this subpopulation of children. While some policymakers and advocates of the foster care system will praise the use of a heavily involved recordkeeping system as a mechanism for social care and protection, these systems also hold extensive power over the subject without providing many vehicles for subject control. As archival subjects studied through a limited understanding of their lives, children become what Jacob Breslow frames as the “figure of the child” rather than examples of “real” lives of “actual” children (Breslow, 2021, pg. 5) For foster care youth living through difficult and at times disastrous moments, how can present and future record balance finite and biased historic representations and understandings of the child with more complex representations of children and their varied and complex lives?

What are records? Are they merely objects? Or are they something more intersected with human activity and meaning? This presentation poses several arguments based on the idea that records are representative of human activity (records management practices), human thought (recorded information) and human perception (integrity and authenticity). Records managers are tasked with creating tools to support and supervise practices to manage organizational records and information. At a time when government organizations work to meet increasing demands for improved access to information, information technology continues to innovate. The implementation of electronic records management systems (ERMS) in government organizations presents an opportunity to leverage the knowledge and expertise of information professionals, while presenting new risks.

This presentation argues that records, or recorded information in any format, are co-created as a result of activity. This collaborative-creation is evident when we engage in process mapping activities that result in records creation. The records are evidence of the activity – and in turn, tell the story of actions in moments in time. While not all of these stories may be terribly exciting, they each have meaning to the individuals about whom they pertain.

RMPs are in a unique position to observe how records users behave, as well as their attitudes towards managing records. The challenges of privacy breaches, improper records storage, destruction and poor information security are, in part, the outcome of poor records management practices. As part of my doctoral dissertation study, this presentation draws from my adaptation of Braun and Clark’s (2006) Thematic Analysis (TA) methodology. The data was collected through semi-structured telephone interviews with twelve participants represented different Canadian Federal Government departments and agencies. Thematic analysis is a method used to identify, analyze and report patterns (themes) and describes a data set in detail. Thematic analysis also uses specific vocabulary, which is useful for consistent reference and meaning. The purpose of thematic analysis is not necessarily to develop theory, but to discern themes that may contribute to theory building in future projects. This presentation includes several themes resulting from my doctoral study.

Human-centeredness in documentation holds interest for information professionals. This paper reports preliminary findings on qualitative content analysis research exploring documentary practices evident in the official transcripts of oral histories at the Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. Documentary practices in the oral history genre not only serve the purpose of discovery and access; they attest to the social contexts of plural stakeholders who produce an information resource.

Qualitative content analysis techniques are appropriate for textual analysis and human interpretation of static texts. The research question centers on analyzing the social production of oral history documentation through the lens of human information behavior in library and information science research. I focus LIS-HIB sensitizing concepts in the literatures of information practice and information work, joined with communities of practice concepts on lifelong learning in informal environments, as analytical tools. My use of sensitizing concepts aligns with qualitative LIS studies of human information behavior and the social construction of knowledge.

Research design specifies three units of analysis: the sponsoring and-or funding entities of oral history projects, official transcripts of individual oral histories within projects, and bibliographic documentation of official transcripts in the institution’s library. In line with the case study approach in qualitative methods, the Science History Institute’s location in Philadelphia sets a geographic boundary. Data collection began in September 2022 using the institution’s online platform for Digital Collections and filters to refine the census’ and purposive samples’ quantitative and qualitative data. Research design is emergent. Data are coded through my use of NVivo and Excel spreadsheets, and data analysis relies on inductive reasoning inspired by constructivist grounded theory. Triangulation is aided by the use of quantitative analysis of the samples and reference to Oral History Association Principles and Best Practices https://oralhistory.org/principles-and-best-practices-revised-2018/. Limitations include uncertainty of authorship in static texts and the researcher as sole coder. Member-checking with the research communities of information professionals mitigates researcher bias and enhances trustworthiness.

Analyzing official transcripts in the samples, statements found in the front matter document the interests of the original project entity, the funder, and the rights holder. Using sensitizing concepts to analyze information use as the social production of documentation, oral histories feature multiple agents who conceptualize, produce, and contextualize resources through documentation. As stakeholders, multiple agents range from oral history project originators and funders to the numerous interviewers and interviewees who effectuate specific oral histories. Additionally, bibliographic documentation connects the “works” of an oral history project to the institutional library through the agency of librarians, archivists, and information professionals who provide access points to holdings and reference services for users. Whereas documentation in oral histories is attributed to stakeholders, however, documentation in archival and library science tends to anonymize metadata creators’ intellectual contributions.

In sum, preliminary findings indicate that the human-centeredness of documentation in oral histories and oral history projects contrasts with anonymized documentation limited to the purposes of discovery and access. Next steps include refining analyses and implications for greater recognition of human-centered stewardship.

Archival practitioners and academics concur that metadata and description are at the basic and core to discoverability, including access of archival materials in variety of ways. Therefore, the archives and record management sector require archivists who are highly skilled and motivated to perform metadata duties with sets of metadata competencies. This suggests that archival education and training programmes should produce graduates with the requisite skills to perform right away on their first jobs. Additionally, archival institutions are mandated to provide access to oral history content in variety of formats. While oral history content does not fit properly in archival standards for description, the practitioners also lack knowledge and skills to deal with the conceptual metadata required for oral history This qualitative study was focused on education and training of metadata and metadata creation in South Africa to determine the available training and the content scope covered by these programmes. The study also intended to contribute to the inclusion of metadata content and oral history in the education and training programmes. Data was collected using document analysis and interviews from archival practitioners, to determine the content of the education and training programmes with special reference to oral history content. The findings revealed that the archival education and training programmes do not cover metadata description on oral history content. The study also revealed that, despite oral history content being an integral part of archival collections, often education and training of oral history content are often offered separate from archival and records programmes. The study recommended collaboration between archives and record sector, and oral history sector. It also proposes guidelines to inform education and training of metadata and metadata standards and/schema.

The presence of a core theoretical and practical knowledge base distinguishes a profession not only by unifying it but by helping it accrue power (Bastian & Yakel, 2005, 2006). Examining a grouping of courses at a given school or department, analyzing the topics contained in syllabi, and scrutinizing the required and recommended readings in syllabi—all represented vehicles through which to gauge core knowledge.  

Bastian and Yakel (2005, 2006) analyzed introduction to archives course syllabi from 33 programs that specified weekly topics and readings. First, not one topic was covered in all the introductory archives courses; Bastian and Yakel (2005) therefore highlighted “the variety and inconsistency of archival knowledge across programs and across venues” (p. 110).

Second, Bastian and Yakel (2006) conducted a citation analysis of the 33 introductory syllabi that specified required readings. They ferreted out 2,393 citations representing 1462 unique titles. Scatter prevailed: no single reading was used in all 33 courses, a whopping 1,110 of those readings were used in only one course, only two of the eight most frequently used articles dated from after 1990, and instructors leaned heavily on books in the SAA Archival Fundamental Series, which Bastian and Yakel deemed regrettable. They characterized the core as weak and suggested that educators had yet to achieve consensus on core literature, much less on a standardized curriculum.  

This paper revisits Bastian and Yakel’s work. We analyze 43 introduction to archives syllabi (2018-2021), namely their learning objectives, weekly topics, readings, and assignments, to determine whether the scatter discerned by Bastian and Yakel persists—and what such a scatter suggests about the presence of a core knowledge base in Archival Studies.  

Engaged scholarship is described as the integration of education with community development. Research in such initiatives leads to collaboration, relevance, and the co-creation of knowledge. At the University of South Africa, engaged scholarship is firmly set within its vision of being the African University, shaping futures in the service of humanity. The Department of Information Science at this institution launched an engaged scholarship project titled ‘Decolonising archives: building an inclusive archive at the Gauteng Provincial Archives Repository’ in 2019. The project aims to work with previously disadvantaged communities in the province of Gauteng to transform their archives. This is done by collecting sports memories that are unfortunately missing in the provincial repository. Most black communities remain undocumented in public archival repositories in South Africa as a direct consequence of the previous undemocratic apartheid dispensation. Efforts by the government and other stakeholders towards transforming the public archives from 1996 till now have resulted in minimal changes. Through participatory action research, the researchers, in collaboration with the Gauteng communities and the provincial archives, are working towards building a sports collection reflective of all communities in Gauteng. This paper discusses how this engaged scholarship programme, through collaborative efforts, increased research, and engaging outputs such as collection at the provincial archives, capacitated communities in collecting oral history while also boosting the postgraduate programme and transforming the archival curriculum. Discussion on this shared experience could further strengthen the project and benefit similar postgraduate projects worldwide. It is concluded that through the relationships with local communities, the engaged scholarship enabled us to draw from the knowledge heritage of communities and learn from situated knowledge outside the academy. At the same time, the archives repository can also build its collection by including memories of those previously excluded. Members of the community developed skills in collecting oral history. Engaged scholarship can therefore be used to revitalise and transform the archival curriculum towards greater social justice and more effective corporate citizenship.

The rapid transformations witnessed on the digital landscape today have led to the increased generation of digital records, prompting the growing interest by universities to adopt sustainable digital archiving implementations to ensure the continued access of archives. This paper presents findings of a doctoral study concluded in 2022 at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa. The study investigated digital archives management practices in selected public universities in Kenya. The objective of the study was to develop a digital archiving framework for archival repositories at the institutions. The study sought to answer five research questions which were: what is the state of digital archiving readiness of public universities in Kenya? How are digital archives identified and administered in Kenyan public universities? Which legal and regulatory frameworks govern digital archives management in Kenyan public universities? Which risk factors are digital archives exposed to in these universities? What possible solutions can be adopted to mitigate the identified risks and support sustainable digital archiving implementations in Kenyan public universities? A mixed methods approach was used, albeit with a qualitative priority. The study was underpinned by the records continuum model, Open Archival Information System Reference model and the Archives and Records Management Association (ARMA) Records Management Maturity model which were triangulated to coin a conceptual framework for the study. Six public universities were purposively selected namely: the University of Nairobi, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Moi, Kenyatta, Maseno and Egerton Universities. Purposive sampling was also used to select 205 respondents from various categories to participate in the study. Data was collected using questionnaires, interviews, and document review. Quantitative data was analysed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and presented using inferential and descriptive statistics. Qualitative data was analysed thematically using NVivo and presented using charts, graphs and tables as applicable. Key findings of the study suggested that public universities in Kenya are not ready for digital archiving owing to the risk exposures for digital records in the institutions. The overall conclusion was that even though the institutions had instigated various approaches to mitigate identified risks, a lot needed to be done to improve the state of digital archives management in the universities. The study recommended a framework for digital archiving that brings into perspective a collaborative approach, whose core focus is to enhance d-archiving practices in archival repositories of collaborating institutions.

Given their power and ubiquity, a broad coalition has evolved within society that seeks to inculcate or train a sensitivity or a critical posture to algorithms as they live alongside information technology, computational culture, and the processes that involve data and calculation. Multiple governance frameworks, models, and community spaces now exist to scrutinize the social, technical, and regulatory challenges posed by algorithms, as well as the ways that these systems impact decision-making and its outcomes. Such initiatives run the gamut from the research-focused ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency to the policy-focused European Parliament Governance Framework for Algorithmic Accountability and Transparency, the human rights-focused Toronto Declaration, and the developer-focused Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) project.

The evaluative concepts informing this research and policy work have taken on different frames. A key frame, that of accountability, is coupled with the notion that there is an ongoing legal, moral, and ethical obligation for actors to acknowledge responsibility in the event of negative consequences brought about by algorithmic systems. Accountability carries with it the notion that actors should be held responsible for their actions, with controls to that effect coming from internal and/or external sources.

Administrative and political accountability is predicated on relevant actors creating and maintaining critical information about the actions taken. Taking onboard the premise that information management and governance (IG) is a key aspect of algorithmic accountability leads to questions about which actors are suitable to take on such a role and what information will be managed in that process. Drawing on our work as part of The University of Texas Good Systems project, our research sharpens the link between algorithmic transparency and data and recordkeeping requirements, creating an accompanying IG transparency framework in two parts. The first part identifies and describes the information and data governance issues within existing legal, regulatory, and policy frameworks for algorithmic accountability. Building on these insights, we also formally define the requirements for preserving algorithms and algorithmic systems for accountability and transparency purposes, in association with the various methods necessary to facilitate this preservation process.

Kenya Agricultural Research Institute through its research and related activities generates a lot of agricultural materials that are born digital and others that are the product of digitization. The information generated serves to improve and promote transfer of agricultural technologies, provide knowledge, inform the clientele, respond to demands and opportunities leading to the enhancement of agricultural production. Therefore, there is need to preserve these digital materials properly.  

The aim of the study is to assess the current practices and challenges in preservation of digital agricultural information at KARI with a view to proposing strategies and recommendations for promoting access to agricultural information. The study objectives are to: establish current practices adopted with regard to digital preservation of agricultural information at KARI and establish the types of digital records created, preserved and disposed of. Other objectives included examining existing policies at KARI pertaining to long term preservation of digital records; determining infrastructure for preserving digital records; establish the challenges encountered in preserving digital records and making recommendations for addressing the challenges identified by the study.  

The theoretical framework for this study is the National Archives of Australia Digital Recordkeeping Guidelines 2004. The guidelines comprehensively discuss issues pertaining to the creation, management and preservation of digital records. The guidelines cover the following areas namely importance of digital records, digital recordkeeping framework, creating digital records, creating information about digital records, determining how long to keep digital records and storing and securing digital records.  

A sample population of 32 respondents is purposively selected. The research is qualitative in nature and KARI was used as the case study. Data was collected by means of semi structured interview schedule, supplemented by observation and documentary evidence. Data was analyzed qualitatively. Tables are used to enter specific types of data and to show relations between variables.  

The study key findings are: KARI creates and preserves digital records, there are no existing policies and standards governing preservation of digital records, infrastructure in place is wanting, environmental conditions for digital records is not conducive, there is a digitization draft policy, security measures are in place and there is no disposition and retention schedules for digital records. Recommendations directed towards improving and promoting digital agricultural information preservation at KARI included: strengthening the institution networks; implementation of digital preservation policies and techniques;  coordination of digital preservation activities within the institute; development of institutional policies for acquisition, conversion, storage, and maintenance of digital records; and development of infrastructure capable of supporting distributed systems of digital records within KARI network.

Jessie Johnston & Rebecca D. Frank

Digital curation skills have become an important part of many archival education programs. Instructors use a variety of approaches to teaching digital skills, tools, and preservation or curation workflows, from hands-on media archaeology to software demonstrations to live coding. Yet, the pedagogical value and effectiveness of techniques such as these are underdocumented and often only learned by future faculty and teachers through trial and error. In this session, we will explore and critically reflect on current instructional approaches to teaching digital curation tools and skills, ranging from exploration of bit rot to file format analysis to preservation policy, and work with attendees to develop their own sample lesson plans for teaching technical tools and topics. This session is geared toward current or future educators and faculty members and will provide a space to observe, analyze, and learn about pedagogical approaches to teaching technology in the digital curation classroom.

The format of the workshop session will be as follows:

·         After a brief welcome and round of introductions participants will work through a hands on activity together that the facilitators have used in their own teaching practice.

·         This will be followed by reflection and discussion.

·         Participants will then develop lesson plans, learning modules, and/or assignments that they can incorporate into their teaching in archives, digital preservation, cultural heritage, or digital curation courses.

The goal of this session is to provide an interactive example of teaching digital skills/tools, and to create opportunities for participants to develop their own teaching materials in a collaborative and supportive environment. Participants who have done hands-on teaching with technology or developed curricular materials in this area will be encouraged to bring their materials to the workshop, but it is not required for participation.

Lunch and Learn: Musician Kid Ory and the birth of jazz + tour at the Louisiana State Archives

Biographer John McCusker spent over a decade researching the life of jazz pioneer Kid Ory. His findings reveal Kid Ory as an essential, generational link between the first jazz band leader, Buddy Bolden, and the city's ultimate jazzman, Louis Armstrong.

The presentation will feature recordings, videos, and ephemera from McCusker's personal archive. A raffle for copies of McCusker’s book Creole Trombone: Kid Ory and the Early Years of Jazz will take place at the end of the lecture, along with a book signing.

Afterward, explore artifacts from McCusker’s extensive archive and experience your choice of tours at the Louisiana State Archives. Guided tours include either the Accessions, Audio-Visual departments, and the Research Library or a curator-led tour of the current astrologically-themed exhibition, Written in the Stars, Celebrating 100 Louisiana Luminaries.

Visit the Louisiana State Archives website to learn more.

Zoom link.

Passcode:
LUNCH23#

Discover Louisiana's Rural Past

The LSU Rural Life Museum is dedicated to the preservation and exhibition of materials from the cultures of 18th and 19th century rural Louisianans.  Through the forethought and generosity of the Burden Family, the LSU Rural Life Museum remains intact for future generations.

The LSU Rural Life Museum holds the largest collection of Louisiana vernacular architecture and the most extensive collection of material culture items from the 18th and 19th centuries.  The museum includes 32 historic outbuildings that spread over 25 acres and are divided into four sections:  the Working Plantation, the Upland South Region, the Gulf Coast Region, and an Exhibit Barn.

Visit the Rural Life Museum website to learn more.

A compelling and authentic presentation of slavery on a Louisiana sugar plantation.

Whitney Plantation is the only former plantation site in Louisiana with an exclusive focus on slavery. Generations of Africans and their descendants were enslaved here to establish and maintain indigo, rice, and sugar crops. Visitors learn about this history through tours, exhibits, memorials, and artwork.

On this Guided Tour, visitors will be led through the grounds of the museum by a member of our team of Historic Interpreters. Each Interpreter is extremely well-knowledgeable about the history of our site as well as the history of slavery in Louisiana as a whole. They each come from a variety of backgrounds, but rest-assured that whoever is leading your tour, you will be in excellent hands.

Visit the Whitney Plantation website to learn more