Archival Collections Research Articles

Naturalizing Sugar in the American Diet: Agribusiness, Science, and the Propaganda Arts

ABSTRACT This article traces the refined sugar industry’s post-World War II efforts to promote sugar as a necessary dietary component through an examination of its selective use of science and engagement with innovative documentary film making. It begins with the sugar industry’s efforts to promote sugar consumption in the early twentieth century, the period when nutrition science emerged and was popularized. It then moves on to analyze the evolving interplay of scientific knowledge and discursive practice in the sugar industry. The Sugar Research Foundation, Inc. (SRF), a group founded in 1943 by sugarcane and beet sugar business interests, provides the empirical case. The analysis focuses on the period from the SRF’s founding through World War II and its immediate aftermath. Evidence for the analysis was gathered from three archival collections. The article documents how the SRF developed “sponsored films” for mass audiences that employed scientists and scientific concepts to discursively construct refined sugar as a natural and necessary part of the American diet. The SRF combined state-of-the-art documentary film making and distribution with selectively chosen scientific findings to successfully defend its product against public health efforts to reduce consumption. The article makes the case that investigating the history of the refined sugar industry’s efforts to shape consumers’ food habits is an indispensable step toward understanding today’s challenge to address metabolic syndrome in public health.

Maria Adriana Prolo and Museo Nazionale del Cinema Collections

This issue of the ‘Archival Notes’ column describes two richly intertwined archival collections, one personal and one institutional. Both are held at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin (MNC, Italy) and house documents pertaining to the activities of MNC’s founder and film historian Maria Adriana Prolo (1908–91). The column provides a brief personal profile, details her personal and professional challenges – which led her to compare notes with Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque française – and sheds light on the plans, accomplishments and never-realized projects of Italy’s first (and for decades only) woman film museum director.

Development of Digital Collections In Libraries and Archives In The Development of Economic Science In Bandung

With the rapid advancement of technology, libraries can now be accessed digitally. A digital library is an online or digital-based library that provides access to various types of books, journals, articles and other reading materials. Digital libraries provide services that allow users to read, download, or even search for specific materials they need without having to go to a physical library. Digital libraries can be accessed from anywhere and at any time, as long as there is an internet connection. In recent years, digital libraries have become increasingly popular due to their practicality and easy access to information and knowledge. The aim of this research is to develop library collections digitally; Facilitate access to information and knowledge from anywhere and at any time. Providing more effective and efficient library services using digital technology. Increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of library collection management.

Primary sources on the trajectories of Polish-Jewish refugees during World War II at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives

The Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University has become an international hub for research and documentation. With more than a million volumes and 6,000 archival collections on war, revolution, and peace, it serves as one of the biggest knowledge repository worldwide. The holdings contain the most extensive and comprehensive documentation related to modern Polish history outside of Poland. Among them are rich and unique collections of primary diplomatic, philanthropic, memoiristic, visual, and other sources. The article outlines the most valuable sources and their collections on the trajectories of Polish Jewish refugees during World II. The very brief presentation of the up-to-date unexplored sources indicates that the growing research on Polish and Polish Jewish war refugees still has the potential to be expanded.

Activating Displaced Radio Archives: The German ‘Loot Collection’ (Kořistní Fond) At Czech Radio

This paper examines the obstacles to studying and using displaced radio archives, taking as a case study a collection of historic recordings from Nazi Germany that is held at the Czech Radio archive in Prague. This so-called ‘Loot Collection’ (Kořistní fond) occupies an awkward position between established categories and is confronted simultaneously by the challenges common to historic sound archives, and those specific to collections which have been displaced from their point of origin. The paper shares some early analysis of the history and content of this collection, and argues for a transnational approach to ‘activate’ other overlooked archival collections whose history and relevance spreads across contemporary national borders.

Knowledge Graph Visualization Interface for Digital Heritage Collections

Digital heritage portal interfaces are generally similar to digital library and search engine interfaces in displaying search results as a list of brief metadata records. The knowledge organization and search result display of these systems are item-centric, with little support for identifying relationships between items. This paper proposes a knowledge graph system and visualization interface as a promising solution for digital heritage systems to support users in browsing related items, understanding the relationships between items, and synthesizing a narrative on an issue. The paper discusses design issues for the knowledge graph, graph database, and graph visualization, and offers recommendations based on the authors’ experience in developing three knowledge graph systems for archive and digital humanities resources: the Zubir Said personal archive collection at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore; Singapore Pioneers social network; and Polyglot Medicine knowledge graph of Asian traditional and herbal medicine. Lessons learned from a small user study are incorporated in the discussion.

Silencing Voices: Indigenous day schools and the education section of the 1958 Hawthorn report for British Columbia

In 1954, the Department of Citizenship and Immigration commissioned anthropologist Harry Hawthorn to investigate problems faced by Indigenous people in British Columbia. This article focuses on Hawthorn’s report, The Indians of British Columbia (1958) and compares its recommendations with the original source questionnaire responses found at the University of British Columbia’s Archives and Special Collections. The responses examined, collected near the peak of day school enrollment in British Columbia, offer new insights directly from educators about their perspectives on the problems faced by Indigenous children attending day schools, and more broadly Indigenous communities as a whole. Key changes apparent in the questionnaire responses and 1958 report showcase the absence of Indigenous voices in any of the questionnaires and a lack of interest from educators in the communities, though such interest is claimed in the report. Both the questionnaires and Hawthorn’s resulting report recommend a consistent antithetical juxtaposition of Indigenous versus western, the discouragement of family ties, and the limitation of formal education to school-aged children. Such findings work to balance Hawthorn’s status as an advocate of Indigenous rights with the damaging realities indicated through and supported by his report. Through this analysis, we aim to further understandings of the impact of day schools on communities in British Columbia, and to view kinship within a reality of resilience and survival.

А.В. Луначарский и Е.К. Малиновская: к истории взаимоотношений руководителей советского искусства

The article examines the relationship between the two prominent leaders of Soviet art — head of the Russian SFSR People’s Commissariat for Education A.V. Lunacharsky and E.K. Malinovskaya who managed the Moscow academic theatres in 1919–1924. Based on the material of six archive fund collections, the author of the article shows the complex dynamics of the relations influenced by their long-standing acquaintance from pre-revolutionary times, their personal artistic tastes, and the situation that developed around academic theatres in the early 1920s. In his letters to Malinovskaya, Lunacharsky often acted as a leader and patron, which appeared natural from the point of view of subordination. However, being not only a high-ranking official but also a prolific playwright interested in a special relationship with the theatrical world, in the matters that concerned the staging of his plays, he sometimes turned into a petitioner. Despite disagreements with Malinovskaya, sometimes significant, Lunacharsky appreciated her business qualities and deep involvement in the affairs of the theatre department, especially those of the Bolshoi theatre, where Malinovskaya, in addition to the general management of the academic stage, held the post of director. However, being passionate about her business, by 1924 she had managed to make a large number of enemies, which stopped Lunacharsky from further defending his “energetic employee” in the government service, and he decided to accept her resignation.

Case study: Accessioning and describing digital archival acquisitions using encoded archival description crosswalks

In 2021, the University of Southern California (USC) Libraries migrated to a new digital asset management system, Orange DAM, to administer its digital collections. The USC Libraries used this migration as an opportunity to improve its workflows for describing and enabling access to born-digital archival acquisitions. This case study examines the strengths and weaknesses of the USC Libraries’ past and current workflows for accessioning born-digital archival material. The case study focuses on the Libraries’ current workflow, which uses an Orange DAM export feature in conjunction with ArchivesSpace — an archives management application — to create and link the description of born-digital archival collections across USC’s discovery systems. The current workflow, created by the USC Libraries’ accessioning archivist in 2023, involves exporting metadata in an Encoded Archival Description (EAD) format from Orange DAM, editing the EAD using regular expressions, and then importing the description into an ArchivesSpace finding aid. While the current workflow prioritises expedited access over detailed description, it significantly improves the discoverability of new acquisitions of digital archives compared with previous workflows. Despite some duplication issues arising from the lack of built-in system integrations, this workflow strikes a balance between process efficiency and descriptive detail, aligning with the USC Libraries’ current operational limitations for managing digital archives.

From Mammy to Big Mama: Caring for Collections on Our Own Terms

Hallie Q. Brown Community Center (the Center) began as a settlement house in 1929. It has and continues to serve the predominately Black neighborhood, commonly known as Rondo, in Saint Paul, MN. I am the first professional archivist hired by the Center and, as such, I was the first to establish workflows, implement standards, and provide easy access to the Center’s archival collections. Yet, I was trained to be an archivist by white people at predominately white institutions and have learned over time that not all the frameworks, ideas, and expectations impressed upon me apply in community archives which serve Black people. In this paper I will discuss the underappreciated social and emotional labors involved in being a Black woman in charge of a community archive, which serves a historically Black community, and was initially led by Black women. I will explore aspects of internal colonialism, catalog description, and efforts in community collaboration and outreach as it relates to collections entrusted to the Hallie Q. Brown Community Archives (HQBCA). This paper will offer a vignette into the journey of a professional serving the majority as a minority in collections care, to serving an underrepresented community as a fellow member of a marginalized group.

Censorship of the Soviet Union in Kazakhstan

Relevance. The relevance of this article is condtioned upon the study of the mechanism of censorship of the Soviet Union as a factor of distortion of the historical reality of Kazakhstan during the Soviet period and the need in the conditions of independence of Kazakhstan to restore its authentic history. Purpose. The purpose of the article is to study the mechanism of censorship of the Soviet Union in Kazakhstan. Methodology. The leading method to study this problem is the ideographic method, which allows reconstructing the phenomenon of censorship in the Soviet period and to investigate it comprehensively, studying the mechanism of censorship simultaneously in the Soviet Union as a whole, and in Kazakhstan as one of its republics, in particular. Both in the theoretical and empirical part of the study, analysis and synthesis were used as necessary general scientific methods. To organise the information obtained during the analysis of archival documents, the method of systematisation was used. Results. The article suggested a classification of censorship by the type of information to which it is applied; the penalties applied to "violators" of censorship in the USSR are determined; 578 documents from four archival collections of Russia and Kazakhstan containing data on the period of development of Soviet censorship in Kazakhstan are selected and examined; the main directions that fell into the hands of archival sources are established under the censorship of the Soviet Union in Kazakhstan. Conclusions. The materials of the article can become the basis for further research in the field of history, political science, etc., devoted to the study of censorship in Kazakhstan, both exclusively during the Soviet Union, and when comparing various historical stages. The results obtained in the course of the study can be used in universities of Kazakhstan in the preparation of classes in history, political science, etc. Keywords: total control; totalitarian regime; prohibition; state ideology; archival data

Role of the National Archives of South Africa in promoting human rights

Purpose This paper aims to explore the role played by the National Archives of South Africa in human rights promotion and protection. The study examined the challenges that archivists encounter when undertaking archival functions, such as acquisition, appraisal and access provision, that contribute to forming documentary archives crucial for human rights promotion and protection. Design/methodology/approach A review of literature dealing with acquisition, appraisal and access was used in this research. It was supplemented with interviews. Findings This paper provides recommendations of benefits in the field of archives management with a focus on the areas of acquisition, appraisal and access. The transformational discourse in the jurisdiction of archives management challenges archival institutions to be active players in selecting historical and cultural archives’ significance that is significant in human rights protections. However, despite judicial requirements that recommend the importance of archives, there is evidence that archival functions such as appraisal, acquisition and access are not being fully used, resulting in national archives institutions that are subject to irregularities that contribute to an unbalanced archives collection. Research limitations/implications The paper was limited only to the National Archives of South Africa. Practical implications The paper makes practical implications concerning the acquisition, appraisal and providing access to human rights records. Social implications Sufficient funding resource allocation ought to be provided to advance human rights promotion. Originality/value This paper offers informed recommendations to address the challenges of acquisition, appraisal and access provision of archive materials. The availability of archives materials reinforces the community by aiding to protect legal rights and prevent human rights violations. It was, thus, necessary to establish whether the National Archives of South Africa is actively building the archives collections that are important for human rights promotion and protection.

Home movies as technologies of belonging and resistance

This article examines the significance of home movies as tools of resistance and belonging, particularly for African American families during the Civil Rights era. Focusing on archival collections from the South Side Home Movie Project (SSHMP), African American Home Movie Archive (AAHMA), and the National Museum of African American History & Culture (NMAAHC), the study reveals how African American families, through their cinematic documentation of visits to national parks and other leisure activities, challenged prevailing narratives of national identity. Despite encountering rampant discrimination, these families captured moments of joy and relaxation, highlighting their resilience and assertion of their rightful place within the American narrative. These historical home movies are profound testimonials of Black identity, resilience, and belonging in the face of adversity. Examining these films enriches our understanding of cultural memory, national identity, and the role of African American home movies in presenting a more nuanced American history.

Development of Open Education Resources to Teach Oral History: Perspectives of a Sports Heritage-Engaged Scholarship Initiative in Gauteng, South Africa

Gaps exist in archival practices, and developments are in progress to decolonise and transform archives by supplementing existing archival collections with oral history accounts. This is a recent development in the archival field, requiring archivists and records managers to become aware of how oral history collections should be undertaken to preserve testimonies related to socio-economic, sociopolitical, and cultural events not yet captured by South African public archivists. An open educational resource (OER) was developed in 2022 as part of an engaged scholarship initiative to instruct archivists on oral history research techniques and how to apply research ethics when undertaking such projects. The research paradigm for this study was a postmodernist qualitative study. Action-based research was used in the research design. Action research is a flexible methodology uniquely suited to research and support change. It integrates social research with exploratory actions to promote development. Action research outcomes are both practical and theoretical. The knowledge it generates directly and continuously impacts the changing practices of the participants. Data from participants were collected through recorded project workshops and meetings. The content for the OER was developed from observing online videos showcasing oral history interviews, consulting literature on OER development, and discussions with archivists and heritage collectors at the South African National Film, Video and Sound Archives, the South African National Parks Board, and the Gauteng Provincial Archives. The OER was developed to enable collaboration to ensure that the oral narratives of postcolonial Africa, particularly post-apartheid South Africa, are not lost but captured by the public archives’ services for the benefit of South Africans and other interested stakeholders.

Presence as Absence: The Homely and the Unhomely in Jewish Photography under Nazism

This article traces the change in practice and the transition of meaning in the photographs taken in Jewish homes in Germany under the Nazi regime. It draws on the ontological duality of absence and presence embedded in the medium of photography to analyze examples of such photographs selected from numerous archival and private collections, discerning a move away from the practice of interior photography as a tool of social affirmation in the late Weimar Republic toward its attestation of absence and loss shortly before emigration from Germany. Employing the Freudian term uncanny in its original spatial connotation as “unhomely,” the analysis contextualizes the latent presence of the inhabitants in images of vacant interiors through a discussion of the historical change in the domestic life of Jews in the face of the increasing Nazification of the public space. Focusing on the commemorative and mnemonic function of the photos, the article concludes by addressing their constitutive role in personal narratives as a private lieu de mémoire and as the generator of future postmemories.

Exploiting the untapped functional potential of Memento aggregators beyond aggregation

AbstractWeb archives capture, retain, and present historical versions of web pages. Viewing web archives often amounts to a user visiting the Wayback Machine homepage, typing in a URL, then choosing a date and time significant of the capture. Other web archives also capture the web and use Memento as an interoperable point of querying their captures. Memento aggregators are web accessible software packages that allow clients to send requests for past web pages to a single endpoint source that then relays that request to a set of web archives. Though few deployed aggregator instances exist that exhibit this aggregation trait, they all, for the most part, align to a model of serving a request for a URI of an original resource (URI-R) to a client by first querying then aggregating the results of the responses from a collection of web archives. This single tier querying need not be the logical flow of an aggregator, so long as a user can still utilize the aggregator from a single URL. In this paper, we discuss theoretical aggregation models of web archives. We first describe the status quo as the conventional behavior exhibited by an aggregator. We then build on prior work to describe a multi-tiered, structured querying model that may be exhibited by an aggregator. We highlight some potential issues and high-level optimization to ensure efficient aggregation while also extending on the state-of-the-art of memento aggregation. Part of our contribution is the extension of an open-source, user-deployable Memento aggregator to exhibit the capability described in this paper. We also extend a browser extension that typically consults an aggregator to have the ability to aggregate itself rather than needing to consult an external service. A purely client-side, browser-based Memento aggregator is novel to this work.

Modernization of the basic gravimetric control network Polish Geological Institute – implementing a modern international gravimetric system and relationship with the historical Potsdam system

Abstract The project of the gravimetric database reambulation from the collections of the Central Geological Archives set itself the goal of ending the era of gravimetric bases dualism and transferring both databases: gravimetric base and archival gravimetric semi-detailed measurements to the modern frame of gravity reference, consistent with ITGRS/F definitions and realizations. This will strengthen the interpretational potential of gravimetric data and will open the possibility of fully integrating Polish gravity data with international databases of this type, and will also allow for the performance of modern works in relation to the modern gravimetric control network, i.e., in relation to the highest possible precision of the reference definition of gravimetric measurements in the country. Whenever the article refers to the units in which the gravity vector is determined, milliGal [mGal] is used, and the relation to the SI system is as follows: 1mGal = 10–5ms–2 or microGal [µGal] where 1µGal = 10–8ms–2.

Finding the Marginal in Marginalia: The Importance of Including Marginalia Descriptions in Catalog Entries

Marginalia have been created by many varied readers across the centuries, transforming texts into personal artifacts and offering valuable insights into many varied socio-cultural contexts and communities. However, the tendency to record marginalia only where it pertains to bibliographical data has often privileged some voices over others, skewing the historical narrative available to researchers using archive and special collections catalogs. This article explores the importance of recording marginalia (both its presence and its function) in catalog entries in order to allow traditionally marginalized voices to be heard. It provides a brief overview of projects using marginalia to tell unheard stories of marginalized figures challenging authority before questioning the reluctance of catalogers to include detailed descriptions of marginalia, concluding by offering some recommendations as to how marginalia could be cataloged to better represent the myriad of voices as yet unheard.

Abstract A068: Proteomic analysis of keratin 17 positive cells from laser-capture microdissected pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma

Abstract Introduction. Although patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) have one of the lowest survival of all carcinomas, there is considerable variation in survival and disease progression, even when accounting for factors such as age and pathologic stage. Our group identified keratin 17 (K17) as a negative prognostic and predictive biomarker in PDAC. Patients with high K17 expression in their tumors have shorter overall survival as well as decreased response to chemotherapeutic agents, including gemcitabine. K17 has also emerged as an established biomarker of the basal molecular subtype of PDAC. In this study, we aim to identify proteins which correlate, directly or indirectly, with K17 expression via a combined approach using immunohistochemistry (IHC) followed by laser capture microdissection (LCM) and mass spectrometry. Methods. We selected 5 PDAC cases of low K17 expression and 5 PDAC cases of high K17 expression from the archival collections from the Stony Brook Cancer Center Biobank. A modified indirect immunoperoxidase approach was performed on sections mounted on LCM-compatible membrane slides. Carcinoma cells that were either K17 positive or negative by IHC were precisely dissected using LMD7 microscope (Leica) from 10-µM thick sections, followed by a modified tissue digestion and protein extraction protocol. Collision-induced fragment mass information and peptide abundance values were obtained by a liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). Spectral cutoffs were analyzed at both <5% and 1% false discovery rates. The human UniProt dataset was used for data alignment. Results. Mass spectrometry yielded over 1600 detected proteins with approximately 50 of which correlated strongly with K17 expression. Our preliminary results show that keratin 5, a known marker of basal-like PDAC, is positively correlated with keratin 17. Genes whose increased expression contribute to the Moffitt classification of basal molecular subtype of PDAC, such as S100A2, keratin 6A and keratin 7, also showed positive correlation with K17 in our study. The remainder of proteins associated with K17 expression include those involved with cell adhesion, cell-extracellular matrix interaction and smooth muscle contraction pathways, with specific types and classes being identified, pending in-depth analysis. Proteins with inverse relationship to K17 expression included those involved in intracellular organelle trafficking and apoptosis pathways. Conclusion. Our findings demonstrate the utility of mass spectrometry-based spatial proteomic analysis of microdissected cell populations from formalin-fixed, paraffin embedded samples. These methods have the potential to uncover complementary biomarkers to K17 that could enhance prognostic accuracy or serve as therapeutic targets and provide mechanistic insight into the mechanisms through which K17 drives tumor aggression. Citation Format: Ji Dong K. Bai, John D. Haley, Natalia Marchenko, Luisa F. Escobar-Hoyos, Kenneth R. Shroyer. Proteomic analysis of keratin 17 positive cells from laser-capture microdissected pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Special Conference in Cancer Research: Pancreatic Cancer; 2023 Sep 27-30; Boston, Massachusetts. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84(2 Suppl):Abstract nr A068.

Concepts of place in British womenswear advertising, 1880–1914

ABSTRACT The mass retailing of fashionable clothing is a practice which is bounded both by time, since each season’s new styles renders previous garments obsolete, and by space, as innovations are promoted as sanctioned by fashion capitals such as Paris, London, or New York. This study of fashion advertising in British national periodicals from 1880–1914 reflects on the historiography of retailing, from Jefferys to Breward and Stobart, which often makes strong distinctions between London and the provinces. Case studies of two retailers with multiple branches, H.J. Nicoll and Alfred Stedall, and of two retailers selling through mail-order, John Noble and Pryce Jones, will examine the methods used to sell goods internationally, nationally and locally. These case studies will draw on unpublished publicity documents in the National Archives and other collections, and on advertisements in national and local newspapers. An analysis of discourses of place in fashion magazines will investigate the ways in which magazines acted as virtual spaces in which readers could both receive and offer information. This will lead on to a consideration of Appadurai and Augé’s concepts of space, place and non-place in consumption, and the applicability of these to earlier periods.