The collector as saviour or devastator

There is a current movement amongst zine archives toward collaboration and the standardization of policies and practices. As a relatively new area of archival collecting, zine archives are progressing through core archival issues at a rapid pace; this progression provides an opportunity for them to redefine traditional archival practices in relation to their specific needs. The community-based nature of their collections compel zine archivists and librarians to include their unique audiences in the mapping of traditional practices onto the organic structures of their largely grassroots organizations: they are translators and interpreters between archival theory and this grassroots practice. Ideally, this results in a symbiotic balance by which the archives invite and sustain community involvement, while the community benefits from the formal organization and resulting accessibility provided by established, time-tested library and archival traditions. The following paper discusses the new movement within archival practice that is arising to support the community-inclusive and decentralized work going on in zine archives and libraries around the country, focusing on the Zine Archive and Publishing Project (ZAPP) in Seattle; the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC) in Portland; and Barnard Zine Library in New York City as examples. It reviews the special challenges that zines, as a form, present for the archivist, and considers the opportunities for reflection and redefinition that these challenges present for more traditional archival communities. The research included draws on interviews with zine library and archive staff, zine community documentation about the process of archiving zines, and traditional archival scholarship and theory.

The principle of provenance is one of the most important milestones in archival practice and theory from the time its establishment grounded the scientific dimension of archival discipline in the nineteenth century. Since then, provenance and document context have supported the organization of archival knowledge (especially through classification and description procedures). Such relationships were gradually refined over the years and from different experiences between European archives and their classification and ordering systems. Historically, the principle of provenance is a pivotal moment in the development of archival theory, crucial to understanding the nature of records and archives. However, in archival theory, the principle of provenance still does not correspond to a single term or a single definition and scarce normalization terminology remains one of the problems of archival science, which leads to a lack of consensus about the division between the two principles of provenance and original order. Recently, the concept of provenance has been addressed by many other disciplines (law, library and information science, computer science and visual analytics) and applied to different domains (cloud-based storage, preservation of digital records, digital evidence, digital humanities, e-science, open data, linked data, knowledge organization and indexing. As the use of provenance reaches new domains it is no longer just an organizing principle but also a means of reaching for authenticity and reliability of data and objects in digital environments or museums or to reestablish the original organic relationship in library collections.

Customary Law and the Nationalist Project in Spain and Peru

Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work is many things. It is a “tough love letter” (p. 16) addressed to archivists, scholars, and memory workers; a “rough blueprint” (p. 16) aimed at activating records to “interrupt cycles of hetero-patriarchy and white supremacy” (p. 64); and a “provocation” (p. 116) aimed at some of the most fundamental and “dominant Western archival theories and practices” (p. 35). Mostly, however, it is a well-cited, strongly argued cri de cœur from one of the leading voices in the archival studies field demonstrating the (urgent) need for major revisions to the ways that archives and archival practices are understood.Caswell, like her work, is many things: an associate professor of archival studies in the Department of Information Studies and an affiliated member of the Department of Asian American Studies, both at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Additionally, she is the director of UCLA's Community Archives Lab,1 the lead organizer of the Archivists Against Collective2, and the cofounder of the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA).3 Each of these organizations contributes to Caswell's perspectives and arguments, and the examples she draws from them help to contextualize community archives to readers who may be unfamiliar with them.Many readers of this review will likely be familiar with Caswell's work, either through her multiple articles in American Archivist, her coedited special issue of The Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies on critical archival studies, or her work on memory, public history, and social justice. Over the past decade, Caswell has risen to prominence as one of the leading thinkers in archives, as her previous book, Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia, and several of her coauthored articles received awards from the Society of American Archivists and the Association of Canadian Archivists. For a generation of younger archivists and archival studies students, Caswell's work as a staunch defender of archival studies4 is well known, but in Urgent Archives and other recent work5, she has taken a more conciliatory approach toward humanists, “hop[ing] to bridge the two disciplines and heal what has been an unproductive rift. . . , [so] that we begin to speak to rather than across each other” (p. 15).Caswell's approach also aligns with the vision of the Routledge Studies in Archives series to which her book belongs. Edited by James Lowry (an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at Queens College in the City University of New York), the series serves as “a platform” for “work in support of memory, identity construction, social justice, accountability, legal rights and historical understanding” and aims to promote the “intellectual history of archival science, the internationalisation of archival discourse and the building of new archival theory” (p. ix). Scholars and students in archival studies will be pleased to know that this series is proceeding at a rapid clip, and two additional publications are expected in 2022. The series manages this iteration by peer reviewing proposals rather than final manuscripts; final manuscripts are then edited by Lowry and the Routledge editor and only (re)sent out for peer review if they feel something contentious or potentially erroneous would benefit from review by a topic specialist.6 The goals of this series and its authors are ambitious, and we will see in the coming years if they succeed in their objectives. But it is especially impressive to see the development of another publication venue for archival, library, and information science topics alongside Litwin Books and Library Juice Press.Excluding paratextual elements, Urgent Archives is around 120 pages long (similar in length to other titles in the series), but the page count feels deceptively short, as each chapter forms a strand in a tightly woven argument. Readers who are altogether new to Caswell's scholarship or the topics of community archives and critical archival studies will be well served by a thorough reading of the introduction, “Community Archives: Assimilation, Integration, or Resistance?” (25 pp.), as it is a demonstration of the author at her best. Through a series of vignettes centered around SAADA and the “racist context of the society in which it was created” (p. 1), Caswell viscerally demonstrates the emotional and historical importance of community archives. The examples she uses are so poignant that when she asserts that archives empower individuals to “see themselves in a new light across space and time . . . [and] then catalyze this new self-reflection into action, motivating users into activism beyond their personal contexts” (p. 6), she makes it seem a logical rather than a radical departure from the principles of Muller, Feith, Fruin, and Schellenberg.The succeeding chapters make this departure much more explicit; indeed, chapter 1 (“A Matter of Time: Archival Temporalities,” 17 pp.) is a sustained critique of the concept of “time” as it exists in Western archival and societal contexts. Drawing upon Hindu, Indigenous, Queer, and Black literatures and scholarship, Caswell argues that the way time is perceived in a Western context (in a linear manner, descended from Christian and Greco-Roman notions of progress) is a barrier to achieving the liberatory potential of archives. To describe how traditional Western archival theories and practices cause harm to minoritized communities, Caswell introduces the concept of chronoviolence. This chapter is heavily theoretical, and readers new to the concepts or literature that Caswell draws upon will benefit from a slow reading or multiple rereadings. Nonetheless, the section is important for understanding the resultant discussion and forms the core of Urgent Archives' contributions to archival studies and the archives profession. Despite the chapter's heavy engagement with marginalized scholars and perspectives, Caswell does not draw upon work on crip time from disability scholarship, a concept that is relevant to Caswell's argument.7 This is a critique that could be (and has been8) applied to other works in the Routledge Studies in Archives series and is one that is likely to be addressed soon by the work of Gracen Brilmyer and others in forthcoming First Monday and Litwin Press texts.Some readers might find subsequent chapters more concrete, as they narrow the focus to specific case studies. For example, chapter 2, “Community Archives Interrupting Time” (18 pp.), documents the work that Caswell and her research assistants undertook following a 2016 Institute of Museum and Library Services grant aimed at investigating whether the emotional impact of archives documented at SAADA is “more broadly applicable to other minoritized communities and community archives” (p. 49). Additionally, the grant provided for the development of a toolkit for fund-raising and marketing efforts aimed at community archives. Altogether, the chapter reports the early findings from conversations with La Historia Society, an archives founded in 1998 to document the Mexican American farmworker community east of Los Angeles;9 the Little Tokyo Historical Society, founded in 2006 to document Japanese American history before and after their forced removal and incarceration during World War II;10 the Lambda Archives, founded in 1987 to “collect, preserve, and share”11 the history of LGBTQ people in San Diego and its environs; and the community-centered Southeast Asian Archive at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), founded in 1987.12 This chapter is essential reading for those interested in the practices and beliefs of marginalized community archives and how they have developed practices that align with or oppose traditional archivy. However, while these four community archives “might be seen as sources of as-of-yet unrealized potential for political resistance” and liberatory memory work, Caswell argues that their “full potential to serve as ‘politically generative spaces' [has not yet been] completely realized” (pp. 64–65). To understand what Caswell sees as a more realized form of liberatory memory work, readers will need to turn to the following chapter, “From Representation to Activation” (20 pp.). This chapter narrows the focus further, using SAADA as a demonstration of some of Caswell's concepts in practice. In discussing how SAADA has responded to political events, Caswell argues that the archives “interrupt[s] white time” by “activating” records “to stop cyclical oppression in the now” (p. 70). In rereading these chapters, I couldn't help but wonder if the four organizations discussed in chapter 2 would share Caswell's conception of “activation” or if they would see their missions as divergent; it would be very interesting to read follow-up discussions.The final chapter, “Imagining Liberatory Memory Work” (16 pp.), and the concluding coda, “Liberation Now!” (5 pp.), bring together the arguments of the previous chapters to “reposition the archivist as a liberatory memory worker, activating records for the liberation of oppressed communities” (p. 93), via a “two-pronged strategy of simultaneously dismantling oppressive practices and building liberatory practices” (p. 22). However, Caswell notes that she does “not know exactly what liberatory archives will look like yet” but believes that “community archives are getting us one step closer to the archival world we need” (pp. 108–10). An uncharitable reading of the final sections would argue that Urgent Archives is unfinished—but this would be too simplistic, as Caswell herself says that she does not think she should be the “sole architect.” Instead, what Caswell is “offering here frees [the readers] to envision and enact new liberatory worlds even as we dismantle old ways of being and doing. Records, if conceived of and activated for liberatory aims, have the power to change ourselves and the world” (p. 116).Like the work that it calls for, Urgent Archives is not perfect, but it does not attempt to be. Some of it, such as chapters 2 and 3, is immediate and proximate; these parts will have the greatest impact on contemporaries but risk being dated by current events.13 Others, like the introduction and chapter 1, are timeless and bolster Caswell's reputation as one of the most significant (re)thinkers of archivy and memory work. Educators will find these sections especially useful as Caswell's summarization of the history of community archives is unparalleled. Additionally, the book's dense bibliography is a remarkable asset, and perusing it is a highly rewarding endeavor—it feels like a rare opportunity to peer into the private library of a scholar whose work continues to define the field. As a whole, Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work is a remarkable and useful work that deserves immediate elevation to the archival studies “canon.”

This article is a reviewed version of a lecture read in 2008 in Argentina. It tries to explore the archival process of appraisal, from the point of view of its underlying interactions with the power systems interests. First, we outline a short definition of the notions of power and system, and tentatively explore how power systems and documents systems could interact. However, the core of the article is to re-visit the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s classic text The Order of Discourse, where the author articulated a reflection on interrelationships between power and discourse. We try to apply the Foucault’s template to current archival practice and theory in Spain, basically by suggesting reasons underlying old practices and understandings. We propose a different, Foucaldian approach to contemporary archival practice and theory. Finally, we propose some conclusions, for further research.

A tension exists between traditional notions of archival theory, and indeed the nature of theory itself, and the global diversity that CITRA seeks to recognize and promote in archival practice. Traditional archival theory, that arose out of a particular cultural and historical milieu of nineteenth-century European bureaucracies, may work against diversity, overlook local community needs, and fail to appreciate the historical contingencies inherent to practice. Canadian archival theory and practice, perhaps first, reacted against this approach; Canada has celebrated diversity, and sought archival concepts, strategies, and methodologies that encouraged multiple views, and cooperation through diversity. Examples explored include total archives, new descriptive standards, a national archival network, inclusive macroappraisal, convergence of libraries and archives, and the postmodern archive. These concepts are useful models for other countries in forwarding the ICA agenda of achieving greater diversity in the...

This important and first-of-its-kind collection addresses the emerging challenges in the field of media art preservation and exhibition, providing an outline for the training of professionals in this field. Since the emergence of time-based media such as film, video and digital technology, artists have used them to experiment with their potential. The resulting artworks, with their basis in rapidly developing technologies that cross over into other domains such as broadcasting and social media, have challenged the traditional infrastructures for the collection, preservation and exhibition of art. Addressing these challenges, the authors provide a historical and theoretical survey of the field, and introduce students to the challenges and difficulties of preserving and exhibiting media art through a series of first-hand case studies. Situated at the threshold between archival practices and film and media theory, it also makes a strong contribution to the growing literature on archive theory and archival practices.

This paper provides a historical overview of Korean archival practice and introduces historical changes in archival traditions over the course of Korean history. This will identify the unique characteristics of Korean archival practice, which are based on the ideological and political changes that have happened in Korean history, in terms of Confucianism, Modernization, Colonization, and Westernization. The different historical eras shaped archival traditions in Korea in different ways, according to their own ideologies. By identifying archival practices in history and connecting them with social and political ideologies, the paper concludes that archival practice actively interacts with ideological and social needs within its historical context. For this, the paper presents: (1) an overview of traditional compilation between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries; (2) a discussion of the modernization efforts in the Joseon administrations of the nineteenth century; (3) some observations on the introduction of colonial archival practice under Japanese occupation in the early twentieth century; and (4) a review of post-colonial archival practice in the Republic of Korea.

California is home to multiple queer community archives created by community members outside of government, academic, and public archives. These archives are maintained by the communities and are important spaces not only for the preservation of records, but also as safe spaces to study, gather, and learn about the communities’ histories. This article describes the histories of three such queer community archives (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society Lavender Library, Archives, and Cultural Exchange of Sacramento, Inc.; and ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives) in order to discuss the role of activism in the community archives and implications for re-examining the role of activism to incorporate communities into the heart of archival professional work. By understanding the impetus for creating and maintaining queer community archives, archivists can use this knowledge to foster more reflective practices to be more inclusive in their archival practices through outreach, collaboration, and descriptive practices. This article extends our knowledge of community archives and provides evidence for the need to include communities in archival professional practice.

In Chateaubriand's Voyage en Amérique et en Italie, we read: “In Gothic languages, Scandinavia was called Mannaheim, which means ‘country of men,’” and what the Latin of the sixth century has translated with vigor by these words: “the factory of the human race.”2 This extract, as an echo of Jordanes's vagina nationum, demonstrates the growing interest for Scandinavia in French intellectual life during the nineteenth century, and especially for Iceland, described by Chateaubriand as “the Norse historical archive.” Just as MacPherson's Ossian had at the end of the preceding century, the discovery of Ari Thorgilsson or Snorri Sturluson (“the Herodote of the North” for Chateaubriand) further opened a new field of research for French scholars.In fact, this field had been opened up from at least the middle of the eighteenth century, when Montesquieu fantasized about a mythicized North as a homeland of freedom (in opposition to the South) and saw it not only as factory of mankind but as the “factory of instruments that break the iron forged in the South” (Montesquieu 1973, EL, XVIII:5; Mohnike 2016, 18; Davy 2010, 96–7). Reviving Montesquieu's historical approach, the French scholars of the nineteenth century saw the North as a well that drew its waters from many streams.Legal historians did not hesitate to tap into it (Sturmel 2002, 90–121; Audren and Halpérin 2013), testifying to their own curiosity, but more generally to the scientific interest of French lawyers and historians for Scandinavia. This was demonstrated when the academician Louis-Jean Koenigswarter wrote in 1853: “The ancient customs and laws of Scandinavia have real advantages for those who study the antiquities of European laws over the first written customs of the barbarians.”3 This interest of French historical, legal, or geographical sciences for Iceland is reflected also in the superlatives used to qualify the Nordic island. For Jean-Marie Pardessus, Professor at the Faculty of Law of Paris, Iceland is, of all the parts of Northern Europe, “the most remarkable by its civilisation, its literature and its laws” (Pardessus 1834, 45). For Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent, geographer and politician, the Icelandic nation “is one of most intelligent from all over the world,” and “no one is more faithful to its own traditions’ (Bory de St-Vincent and Lacroix 1840, 251–8). For Henri Prentout, Professor at the University of Caen, Iceland is “the most interesting country to have a picture of the Scandinavian society in [the] 9th century” (Prentout 1911, 206). Pardessus's judgment about Icelandic singularities reads as follows: I could say that Iceland is almost more Scandinavian than Norway, because alliances and invasions [that] came from Europe have quickly altered the pure Scandinavian race in Norway. . . . That is so true that historians who wanted to study mores, customs, laws, and Scandinavian literature have always focused on Iceland.4Such an affirmation by a French scholar in the middle of the nineteenth century is not surprising because the North had become the home of a myth a few centuries earlier, dating back perhaps to the reception in France of Olaus Magnus's Historia om de nordiska folken in the middle of the sixteenth century (Davy 2019, 12), or to Rudbeck's Atlantica sive Manheim, a work that so influenced Montesquieu and Chateaubriand (Wolfram 1990, 2) in its confusion of Plato's Atlantis story and Virgil's Ultima Thule, and which managed to trace the homeland of all civilizations back to Scandinavia (Anttila 2014, 245). Thus, what Xavier Marmier writes in the middle of the nineteenth century is significant: Beyond the Baltic Sea, we leave our science. A wall of fog hides the surroundings and Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Lapland, Spitzberg, Finland, and also Russia appear behind this wall with their imprecise forms and confuse themselves with our imagination. It is here our Thule; here is this country half fabulous and half historical of Ancients, this foggy kingdom whose customs we cannot identify and position with precision, and on which we are told so many strange things. (Marmier 1840, 95)In fact, since the beginning of the early modern period, Thule seemed to embody a sort of original sanctuary where the origins of peoples and of their laws could be found, the birthplace of the world. Why should it not, therefore, also be the fons et origo of the homo juridicus? Certainly, French scholars were not unanimous in assimilating Thule to Iceland. But such an assimilation was often made by many of them, and it contributed to this mythical approach and the quest for the origins of Europe's nations there.At the beginning of the nineteenth century, John Pinkerton reminded everyone that famous and talented scholars had based their research on the “imaginary hypothesis” of a Scythian migration from Scandinavia outwards. In their minds, he says, the language, mythology, and morals of the Scythes had been preserved in the “Icelandic desert” intact, such that the Scythian advance through Scandinavia has become “a very curious object of study” (Pinkerton 1804, 247). A few years later, in 1822, Fabre d'Olivet believed that he had located the source for the first Mexican legislators in the Atlantis, and in the Borean race, “whose peregrinations have led it from Iceland to America” (Fabre d'Olivet 1822, 188). The belief was repeated by the jurist Ernest Glasson at the end of the same century (1889, 12). Here, we find ourselves on the threshold of a larger Indo-European perspective, amply exploited since the beginning of the nineteenth century by Malte-Brun, for example, who envisaged “one great family from the banks of the Ganges River to the shores of Iceland” (Malte-Brun 1828, 400), but also by Frédéric Eichhoff (1853, 11–2) and Adolphe Pictet (1859, 3).Furthermore, since the days of Montesquieu, there was no doubting that the North had been, long ago, a country of freedom. This was an idea that became widespread through to the end of the nineteenth century. Ernest Nys (the famous Belgian promoter of the study of international law), for example, envisaged the Far North as “the liberty's servant and defensor which fought for the independence of men versus despotism” (Nys 1896, 125). Iceland embodies this topos through the memory of the Norse migrations, Norsemen being forced to flee the tyranny of Harald Fairhair (Haraldr inn hárfagri) at the end of the ninth century. Land of freedom, founded on an anti-monarchical legacy, Iceland is also described as the land of equality, that being, as Henri Prentout pointed out, a dominant trait in old Scandinavian society (1911, 206).Following in the footsteps of Paul-Henri Mallet, who called Iceland “the Athens of the Ice,” several French historians in the nineteenth century presented Scandinavia as the “paragon of democracy.” “Common misfortune had brought them together,” wrote Georges Depping, “all equal, and no one could impose their own domination on others.” And, after enumerating the powers of the assemblies and the “lavmand” (i.e., lawman, lögmaðr/lögsögumaðr, who presided over the Althing), he added: Here was the simple and democratic government of this small Free State, separated from Europe by the boreal seas, and seated between the rocks, volcanoes, and ices of Iceland.5Various scholars made the small step that transformed Iceland into the antecedent of the Parliamentary system. Charles Hertz saw medieval Iceland as a Parliamentary republic (1879, 336); Gabriel Gravier located Iceland as the origin of Parliaments (1887, 171); Joseph-Louis Ortolan attributed a Norse origin to the word “Republic” (1831, 373); and Ernest Nys depicted Iceland as the “mother of England and grand-mother of United-States” (1896, 100).All these historical and legal reflections attest to the evidence of a relationship woven in fantasy between Iceland and the French scholarly world from the end of the eighteenth century until the end of the following century. There are therefore questions to be asked about the stance of French legal historians in that period toward Iceland, and about what it meant. On the one hand, it allowed them to renew their approach to their indigenous legal culture by locating in unknown (or hitherto ignored) sources the origins of their own national law elsewhere than in Roman law or in those law-codes that they termed “barbarian.” On the other hand, this allowed them to retain the notion of a civil law-code whilst avoiding the risk of an ever more perilous “Germanism.” When it comes to meaning, the use of Icelandic sources gave to many of these scholars of a liberal disposition (almost all of them from 1830s to 1840s) a sort of historical base from which their own political opinions could flourish.It even gave birth to a “Norse school” in French universities, a “school of legal history with a Scandinavian wing.” This school focused, on the one hand, on discovering (or rediscovering) Icelandic sources of law (see section I below) and, on other hand, on modeling those sources as a way to discover the distant origins of French law (see section II below).At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Noël de la Morinière, interested in Scandinavian antiquities in Normandy, admitted to the widespread contemporary ignorance of Norse texts: “They are not familiar to French people,” he said. “These documents seem to us like as Boreal forests which we only know from the sea littoral but in whose milieu we dare not penetrate” (Morinière 1799, 28). And when Domenico Alberto Azuni, a Sardinian jurist summoned to Paris by Napoleon Bonaparte, published his treaty on maritime law in 1810, he managed to ignore Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and, of course, Icelandic laws. When Jean-Marie Pardessus presented his monumental Collection des lois maritimes in the Themis review of 1823, he disregarded Scandinavian laws on the subject before the fifteenth century. In 1839, Édouard Laboulaye, member of Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres and Professor at the Collège de France, wondered out loud: ‘Who knows the name of Gragàs [sic], that curious law-code of the Icelanders?’ (Laboulaye 1839, 49). So we need to step back and review how the interest of French scholars in Icelandic sources took shape.The corpus of old Icelandic texts in France became known less through the writings of the early French pioneers of Icelandic studies in the seventeenth century (Isaac de La Peyrère or La Martinière) than through the authors of the eighteenth century, such as Jean-Baptiste Des Roches de Parthenay and Paul-Henri Mallet. The former, with a presentation of the Edda and a few sagas, such as the Eiríkr saga rauða (Saga of Erik the Red), in his Histoire du Dannemarc (1730), showed how French intellectuals begin to become acquainted with the wealth of this hitherto unknown culture (Des Roches de Parthenay 1730, lii–lviii). Mallet rooted the Icelandic medieval corpus within the domain of European learning. Mallet analyzed the Edda, used the sagas and the Grágás, and joined together the three elements of the poetic, narrative, and legal triptych in Icelandic patrimony (1755). For this Swiss scholar, these sources are the tabernacle of an immemorial culture (Davy 2022). A century later, Frédéric Eichhoff, a linguist and philologist, after translating Völuspá (sometimes called a “mythological code of the old Scandinavians” [Cordier de Launay de Valéri 1806, 168]), wrote as follows: How not to recognize in [this patrimony] the vigorous and true picture of the ancient Scandinavia's beliefs, the same as that in the Germania, the same as that across barbarian Europe before the Middle Ages; these latter fade into obscurity before the Gospel light, cast like a late spine-chilling gleam on the frozen rocks of Iceland?6Mallet and Eichhoff both follow in the path of Giambattista Vico and his hope that poetry and myths will help to unravel the mystery of ancient cultures (Gianturco 1977, 93–4). The philological development of fables and legends becomes a “literal mime of history,” and the mythological corpus becomes “its articulated discourse” (Schefer 1977, 172). In French universities, the reading of Vico offered a challenge to the exegetic school that gradually influenced the small band of legal historians such as Lerminier, Klimrath, or Laferrière (Audren and Halpérin 2001, 4). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the influence of Vico's New Science opened up two lines of thought.On the one hand, we know how, via Vico and through Mallet, the members of the Coppet group draw inspiration from Icelandic poetry for their own approach to liberalism. For Germaine de Staël, to take an example of someone whose influence on the destiny of legal history in France remained important during the first half of the nineteenth century (Gaudemet 1998, 109), the North seemed “naturally metaphysic” and a national “soul,” a “genius,” and a “spirit.” These are the lessons that she derived from the Icelandic sources that she discovered through her reading of Mallet (Berthier 1977, 206). With Mallet, as Sismondi repeated in 1807, the study of Scandinavian customs, laws, religion, and liberty became paramount, “not only for Scandinavian peoples, but for all Europeans too” (Sismondi 1807, 17). This would have notable consequences on the works of some French jurists such as Henri Klimrath (Audren 2006, 123). And, at the end of the nineteenth century, Charles Ginoulhiac, Professor at the Faculty of Law in Toulouse, affirmed nothing less when he wrote that “because German and Frankish peoples, as Gauls before them, kept, in their own poetry or their songs, the memory of the important events of their founders, it is hardly surprising that they should preserve by that same route the legislation that they adopted” (Ginoulhiac 1884, 151). In other words, for many lawmen or historians of the French nineteenth century, Icelandic poetry was the to discovering the of old the other hand, the texts were also a source for ancient famous and that Icelandic legal were to the democratic de la These to Klimrath, as a of the legal Frédéric de at the sagas in the same In his they are the of the Scandinavian first For some jurists in the nineteenth century who the origins of French laws, the sagas which Iceland has a were fables and that a that allowed one to For them, this was no an and their about the legal an behind which was to human destiny through to discover the origins of through the of and also and In at the Faculty of Law in Paris and the of in the ancient that he would take the most ancient texts of barbarian by to the Edda and the saga on which Jean-Marie Pardessus that the wrote “a that the civil and political of his A few later, would a of this famous saga on two Danish and as “the true picture of ancient Scandinavian de la 1896, to in his about the in French law from sagas were written they us with on the law of Scandinavian peoples because they ancient customs (1879, These French scholars did not the about the of the texts on which they those of Mallet, who on the of between and in sagas because of their for the and fabulous or those of who that no one should ignore the that the sagas are of On the many French jurists of the period wanted to the between sagas and and to name but a Grágás, the of which was by in of to have remained unknown during a of the to be used in French historical in the of the nineteenth century. Pardessus, who in with the Danish of the that of the sagas would we had the our very A of for de la a sort of of to the French for (1879, the could not, be as laws or to Pardessus, because the had not been (Pardessus such many French jurists of the nineteenth century this as a of “the most ancient Scandinavian as Koenigswarter it 188). For the in his at the Faculty of Law of Paris in of all the old laws, the Icelandic customs most For the is the Scandinavian most ancient For at the Collège de the only to the century, but it a law So it becomes to the as the of ancient customs, which is how the legal and Henri would it in the first of the century the late of the was not as because jurists and historians had in the by sources that to the laws before the century Pardessus and or because one had to the of an by the of the that it into Scandinavian laws could not the whilst “the most laws in of their of are the in of their other words, the philological of discovering a corpus of texts that had been hitherto had a of when it came to Iceland, a that European nations were to at is what Ernest Nys Icelandic our and life is based on that most the of This them with remarkable which a to the modern world. It is to them, that we on the subject of the most interesting of the Scandinavian the Norsemen the some of the first It is to them that we to know so many about customs, and was and it was with those Icelandic sources in that a of the French legal was the half of the nineteenth century, In Scandinavia we find the ancient Germania, the morals and that had no by the of and they have been altered or through this the simple did French jurists and historians discover through their interest in old Icelandic the first many legal historians of the period a of history that the as the barbarian invasions of the century. The origins them, perhaps more Gothic than of all these peoples from a of the North as a of as Koenigswarter it It was from ancient Ortolan that “the old us the of Gothic who to other their own (1831, 45). This approach both of that of late and that of the reflected that in the middle of the century. here the approach of a of history that several French such as to “In the and sixth Scandinavian was the same as that of the who not to the great wrote Ernest the national of the the when they focused on ancient laws, many French legal historians on through what medieval Scandinavian sources to For the law of Scandinavian the with law as by In de was to the notion that Scandinavian law and what and us about and barbarian laws in the century” between what the legal historians about old barbarian laws and what they about ancient Scandinavian laws is Louis-Jean Koenigswarter pointed out, what had been on the of ignorance was by some research on ancient Scandinavian laws, which have been to have with the and customs of German peoples, hitherto described by the modern world as when they on the historical on the of this legal many authors Icelandic sagas as a way to ancient barbarian laws The of Frédéric de on this is “The law-code was not a of barbarian laws but the of customs, as not only in Icelandic and the and the but also in the and the Scandinavian sources could be a to old Europeans laws. This was one of the lessons in the works of the academician on medieval The study of the history of Scandinavian law and customs one of the sources from which modern Icelandic and the Grágás, us the example in modern that had not been transformed by and the Edda, that great whose is a the the and its us back to the customs, the and the through which we in the and of our Middle the until the end of the nineteenth century, French scholars barbarian laws in the of Icelandic texts For the French the to that of ancient Scandinavian it is they take with the So that in the have a Nordic origin in the word in Icelandic law one that in the of Montesquieu, the origins of many French scholars in the nineteenth century, Iceland as the sanctuary of the culture of that an ancient brought together “the from a The discovery of legal Icelandic sources through that Koenigswarter into his history of French law as a of its origins a in the of our ancient and allowed modern legal to the Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish us of some new to they will help us to the study of the of laws in their and to approach to Icelandic one which “the of the old was not, its at the University of it as he that the study of Icelandic law in the century the interest of an ancient and based on the of but not influenced by the and very to the other Norse laws of the years earlier, Louis-Jean Koenigswarter had also written that the Scandinavian race is nothing than the race in its ancient is But he that the myths and of ancient Scandinavia could on antiquities than the barbarian laws written in Latin and influenced by the 4). he “one on which all European scholars is that they the customs, religion, and law from Scandinavian and cast on the between religion, customs, and law in both French ancient Icelandic law was because of its to and Roman in to the laws, which all from the of the on them the pointed out, the laws written during the century cannot an idea of laws because and had the life and of the Roman Thus, Icelandic it became to study old laws in their original forms Norse culture was therefore in to a medieval Europe after had been to the political and legal of And it was a of by their very the most of scholars many to for the origins of European laws in Icelandic That is what a of law at the University of in his study of French law The old Scandinavian documents are the most important source of the legal That is not only because they are and more than other but also because they are written in the through which to us added: The first them, that is to say those of Iceland, law to us in its and from for the of Icelandic law-codes was historical and geographical which many scholars pointed to the and de it is to their boreal that the the of their national de Ganges presented in the Grágás, the and academician to us a hitherto the world In his in at the Faculty of Law in Paris, seemed in his affirmation that on the were the of the influence of the on ancient On the many French jurists in Iceland an original and legal In that they an that a to and history in the of ancient law 2001, 17). pointed out, the was an original code that had not been by It is a law from all repeated a national law-code to Laferrière This was the of French legal historians in the and For Louis-Jean law remained to Norse and only Scandinavia many centuries after other European peoples had been to Iceland into a Scandinavian Iceland That is where there are the most of Norse and Norse Icelandic laws, as we them, are not than those of Sweden, or Norway, but they are more by the of the ancient de la culture had been altered in or Sweden, their own customs and their intact, writes Eichhoff (1853, used by French scholars in the nineteenth century to attest the original of Icelandic law-codes was to on the in which they had been preserved over many barbarian laws transformed by out Icelandic law has an (1853, 4). In the same Laferrière writes that “Icelandic law . . . had been in the of the a long before it was written at the beginning of this law was by the of called the of This sort of the interest of French jurists and historians in on the as evidence of legal In Icelandic law is of a widespread are in Iceland, And this of gradually came to on the (Davy the remained example, the in a study published in in the they the interest in the the for the was the for written laws are the of his he was of civil French jurists saw the as the of the “Icelandic legal The interest of French legal scholars in Iceland should not be In many the Icelandic legal to historians and jurists a to find an but political and on which to their about the origins of European laws and and the origins of their own But such an approach was on a of only some of which out to be was a in a that has to be was this “Norse school” in French a Certainly, it was a hope that a of liberal jurists Klimrath, influenced by legal It had a on the following which had to in the of and the of the in The to Icelandic sources to through a sort of political which Laferrière until or the to through Norse history the origins of French laws from those of laws of of were of to a into French The political and of its also have to its before the the of Edda, of the sagas and of the Grágás, was as new and Scandinavian works became into French The sciences also a real in France at the of the nineteenth and between the quest for the New and its of new scientific and the influence of other on how to the national law of ancient It was the end of an we should on the of by when to further back than the century in of the origins of the law of de la en Paris, could on not in some

This paper analyses how postmodern historiography and the “archival turn” have co-evolved and influenced history and archival studies theoretically and practically. It examines the epistemological affinity between modern positivist historiography and archival theory, and explores how postmodernism’s critique has transformed the concept and practice of archives. Furthermore, it explores how this archival turn intersects with postmodern historical writing and co-evolves within the contemporary context. Specifically, it analyses the points of intersection between the two through three axes: the constructivist turn in history and archives, the convergence of sensation, affect, and materiality, and the practice of non-narrative and polyphonic memory. In conclusion, it argues that archives and historical writing have not merely undergone parallel changes but have achieved theoretical expansion and practical transformation through a mutually constitutive relationship.

Record-Making and Record-Keeping in Early Societies

Documentation strategy is an analytical approach to archival appraisal that looks not at individual records, but at the overall universe in which such records exist. It recognizes the inherent problem of volume with modern records, and provides a way for records creators, custodians, and users to work together to create a plan for which documentation will be preserved. Since it was first introduced in 1984, documentation strategy has met with mixed reactions from the archival profession, and has received its most theoretical examination from the Canadian archival community. With a role in the worlds of both archival theory and archival practice, documentation strategy can be applied to the appraisal of architectural records with the development of broad goals for documenting architecture through the coordination of records creators, custodians, and users, and through the creation of institutional archives.

The Archival / Preservation Education SIG session offers pedagogical insights on master’s-level information science and archival education. Five ten-minute individual presentations and audience discussion elucidate educators’ roles in developing competent new professionals; presenters bring perspectives from multiple states. “Curricular Integration of Audiovisual Archiving and Preservation” by Sarah Buchanan explores connections between coursework and professional experiences completed by MLIS graduate students. Students actively contribute to curriculum maintenance through their digitization and documentation activities, metadata creation, and perhaps most significantly community-based dialogues around project progressions and expert input – collectively ensuring the preparedness of today’s archivists to address technical challenges. “Operationalizing the Value of Legacy Research Data” by Gretchen Stahlman and Inna Kouper explores the need for a more systematic understanding of legacy research data efforts and the value of legacy data as perceived by various research, library, and data communities. To illuminate relevant considerations, two legacy data preservation case study sites are analyzed, further situating the socio-technical processes and impact of working with and curating legacy data, as well as the role of equity, fairness, and justice. “The Need for Archival Triage” by Jeff Hirschy and Jessica Herr demonstrates how new archivists and educators could benefit from expanded mental models of archival workplace realities. The presentation emphasizes the values of flexibility and adaptability on the part of new archivists and educators, as they strengthen tenuous connections between “perfect” archival theory (in settings with full funding and full staff), professional problem-solving, continuing education, and the definitions of preservation and oral history. “Bridging Gaps between Archival Studies and Social Justice Scholarship: Training of Community-Embedded Paraprofessional Archivists Who Are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color” by Bharat Mehra, Robert Riter, and Ron Harris highlights ongoing experiences in bridging gaps between archival studies and social justice scholarship via curricular development/implementation, strategic collaborations, and project design in the IMLS-funded “Archival Studies Social Justice Master’s Scholarship Program (SJ4A).” SJ4A addresses current gaps in diversifying the workforce and operationalizing the how-to’s of social justice in archival practice while proposing systematic, intentional, action-oriented, community-engaged, and impact-driven education. “AI and the Future of Archival/Preservation Education” by Suliman Hawamdeh and Manar Alsaid discusses the types of training, competencies and practices which need to be integrated into archival and preservation education to harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and yet protect the authenticity and originality of archival material. Generative AI natural language tools and chatbots such as ChatGPT have the potential to enhance archival education and research by identifying sources, gathering and processing large amount of historical material / data in a timely manner, and assisting with methodological problems and computational tasks. The recent issues concerning document classification of presidential records and gaps in the National Archives’ tracking of information highlight the magnitude of spaces where AI could be the sword with two sharp edges. The moderator will facilitate Q&A within and across the presentations.

Social media is an increasingly prevalent method of communication. The information disseminated through these platforms is by nature ephemeral and at risk of loss. This has led institutions to build social media collections for posterity. The value of preserving social media for research purposes is increasingly important, yet significant legal and ethical issues must be addressed to make such collections viable.While there is ample scholarly discourse on legal issues in web archiving, the same is not true for the newer sub-field of social media archiving. Absence of statutory provisions and direct judicial precedent defining the legality of such collections led us to survey the potential legal and ethical issues that institutions may encounter when preserving social media for long-term access. We will present a poster showing some of the legal and analytical research we have done, focusing especially on the various Terms of Use for each social media platform, legal transfer documents such as Deed of Gifts and general archival theory and practice. Three issues were found to be most pertinent: (i) Copyright (ii) Privacy and (iii) Access. While copyright is solely a legal issue, privacy and access also have ethical paradigms to them.Any institution building a social media collection must bypass the legal hurdle of copyright. Risk assessment would vary depending upon the nature of the social media content being harvested. For this, platform specific analysis for Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr was undertaken due to the varying level of creativity of content uploaded to these platforms. Applicability of the fair use exception was also ascertained. Our research on privacy delved into whether institutions had a right to harvest social media content simply because it was found in the public domain. If they did, were they required to impose any access restrictions to these collections? Analysis of judicial precedents indicates that users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy on their publicly posted social media content. Hence, we inferred that harvesting it for research purposes was legally permissible. However, the ethical conundrum transgressing into the sphere of archival theory and practice prevails.Specific legal needs of archives related to harvesting deleted social media content, access in contravention of Terms of Use and long term preservation were also ascertained.Our research indicates that while the legal framework for creating a social media archive is strong, ethically it is on murky grounds calling for all stakeholders in the community to brainstorm.This research has been supported by the National Historical Publications and Records grant funded project to develop Social Feed Manager (SFM) – an application developed by the George Washington University Libraries to collect and preserve social media records. However neither are the findings of this research endorsed by the University nor do they reflect the University’s official policy on building a social media archive.