Archival Perspective Research Articles

Content-based video retrieval in historical collections of the German Broadcasting Archive

The German Broadcasting Archive (DRA) maintains the cultural heritage of radio and television broadcasts of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). The uniqueness and importance of the video material stimulates a large scientific interest in the video content. In this paper, we present an automatic video analysis and retrieval system for searching in historical collections of GDR television recordings. It consists of video analysis algorithms for shot boundary detection, concept classification, person recognition, text recognition and similarity search. The performance of the system is evaluated from a technical and an archival perspective on 2,500 h of GDR television recordings.

Narrating Palestine: The Palestinian Oral History Archive Project

The Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA) project, based at the American University of Beirut (AUB), was launched in 2011 to digitize, index, catalog, and provide access to over one thousand oral history testimonies by first-generation Palestinian refugees residing in Lebanon. The interviews and other recorded statements provide a valuable lens through which to examine a defining moment of rupture in Palestine's modern history from an underrepresented social and cultural perspective. This report highlights the methodological decisions that informed the planning and implementation of the POHA project as a grassroots digital archive that seeks to preserve the orality and immediacy of the refugees' narratives. The archive aims to engage scholars interested in Palestine studies, in particular, and Middle East studies, in general, within the broader framework of a person-centered archival perspective, with a view to furthering a dialogical ethnographic methodology and producing a narrative of the Nakba “from within.”

Rejonowy Ośrodek Pracy Partyjnej w Radzyniu Podlaskim (1982-1989) – element struktury organizacyjnej PZPR, aktotwórca, zespół archiwalny

Local Party Labor Centers were created in January 1982, in connection with reorganization of assignments of the Polish United Workers’ Party in the new socio-political situation after the declaration of martial law in Poland. The article present this element of the complex bureaucratic structure, holding dictatorial authority in the party, by describing its political history and documentary legacy from the archival perspective. The laboratory example is the Local Party Labor Center in Radzyn Podlaski. The author set himself a task to describe what was the role of the Center in the Polish communist party – a formation so characteristic for the last decade of existence of the Party. The LPLCs were not elective statutory bodies of the PUWP, but they were a bureaucratic structure, that served an advisory and coordination function towards basic levels of the communist party. The LPLC in Radzyn Podlaski was one of four such formations created in the Bielsk Podlaski Voivodeship, and its area of action were counties from the period before the administrative reform in 1975. The scope of the Center were district committees of the PUWP situated in Czemierniki, Drelow, Kąkolewnica, Komarowka Podlaska, Miedzyrzec Podlaski, Ulan, Wohyn; the Town Committee in Miedzyrzec Podlaski and the Town-Distric Committee in Radzyn Podlaski. Archival materials of the LPLC in Radzyn Podlaski were transmitted on September 2, 1992 with documentation created by the County, the District, the Town and the Town-Disctrict Committee from 1950 to 1989. The materials were scattered. In 2007–2008 fonds of this documentation were recognized and in 2011 the materials of the LPLC were arranged and described in the State Archive in Lublin, Branch in Radzyn Podlaski.

“Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story”:The Use and Representation of Records in Hamilton: An American Musical

ABSTRACT Hamilton: An American Musical has been the focus of much theatrical and historical praise, critique, and commentary since its off-Broadway premiere in February 2015. The discussion has only intensified since the show opened on Broadway in August of that year. In September 2016, the musical's composer, lyricist, and star, Lin-Manuel Miranda; its director, Thomas Kail; and its historical consultant, Ron Chernow, were awarded the 2016 Records of Achievement Award from the National Archives Foundation, following the presentation of the Society of American Archivists' J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award to Miranda and Chernow the previous summer. Other prizes have included the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and eleven Tony Awards. The popularity and acclaim of the musical, as well as its use of historical documents to tell its story, merit an examination from an archival perspective. How are records used and represented in Hamilton? Taking as a foundation (though not as a framework) the “iconog...

Archives in Libraries: What Librarians and Archivists Need to Know to Work Together. By Jeannette A. Bastian, Megan Sniffin-Marinoff, and Donna Webber. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2015. Pp. v+137. $69.95 (paper). ISBN 1-931666-87-3.

<i>Archives in Libraries: What Librarians and Archivists Need to Know to Work Together</i>. By Jeannette A. Bastian, Megan Sniffin-Marinoff, and Donna Webber. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2015. Pp. v+137. $69.95 (paper). ISBN 1-931666-87-3.

Distant reading the history of Swedish film politics in 4500 governmental SOU reports

Abstract Using computational methods, digitized collections and archives can today be scrutinized in their entirety. By distant reading and topic modeling one particular collection – 4500 digitized Swedish Governmental Official Reports (SOU) from 1922 to 1991 – this article gives a new archival perspective of the history of Swedish film politics and policy-making. We examine different probabilistic topics related to film (and media) that the algorithm within the topic modeling software Mallet extracted from the immense text corpora of all these Official Reports. Topic modeling is a computational method to study themes in texts by accentuating words that tend to co-occur and together create different topics. Basically, it is a research tool for the discovery of hidden semantic structures, exploring a collection through the underlying topics that run through it. Hence, our article captures a number of film discourses and trends within the SOU material. In conclusion, we argue that topic modeling should be recognized as a method and research aid for gathering an overview of a major material; as a way to pose new and unforeseen research questions; and as a kind of computational support that makes it possible to apprehend major patterns more or less impossible to detect through a traditional archival investigation.

Writing social history of socialist Yugoslavia: the archival perspective

It was not until recently that we could talk about a noticeable trend in research focusing on the social components of the 45-year-long history of socialist Yugoslavia (1945–1991). Possible research topics might include the history of social relations, structures, labor, workers’ self-management, industrialization, social stratification, class conflict, housing, mass culture and consumption. In socialist Yugoslavia most of these topics inspired ongoing debates, especially in the fields of sociology and philosophy. Historians participated briefly in those debates during the 1980s, but as the country disintegrated in the brutal conflicts of the 1990s, institutionalized humanities developed a negative stance toward the recent socialist past. In the new millennium, with the revival of social history and the constant state of crisis in the existing system, a new generation of historians began to explore Yugoslav socialist society. This paper argues that if this research movement is to be placed on solid ground through the use of primary sources, the first task for archivists should be to identify these sources. Based on an analysis of records applying social history methodology as a structural approach to the broad spectrum of human experience and social processes, it identifies several major categories of records relating to government, local self-government, judiciary, economic enterprises, political organizations and the trade unions and attempts to determine their current state. It concludes with general observations on some possible solutions for preserving relevant records as well as for the change in the appraisal strategies.

French Diplomacy and the Run-up to the Glorious Revolution (1688): A Critical Reading of Jean-Antoine d’Avaux’s Correspondence as Ambassador to the States General

The purpose of the present research note is to offer a new reading of Jean-Antoine d’Avaux’s correspondence for the year 1688 and a more refined interpretation of the reasons why William III of Orange’s fateful crossing of the Narrow Seas in November 1688 caught the French Crown by surprise. In particular, it will shift emphasis away from a French-centered view toward a broader archival perspective on Louis XIV’s European policy in late 1688. It doing so, it will at least partly resolve the reasons behind the French Crown’s lack of military and naval intervention in November 1688. The considerable attention required by the war in the Rhineland and the potential conflict with the papacy brought about by the affair of Cologne have long been considered the main reasons for Louis’s inability to preempt William’s invasion of England. This article argues instead that the French Crown’s misreading of William’s intentions, informed as it was by d’Avaux’s reports from The Hague, was to have a fatal effect on the deployment of France’s military resources in the Low Countries. Working within the tradition of source criticism, the article uncovers for the first time some significant textual variations between d’Avaux’s

The Hans Kramer Collection at the National Library, Cape Town: an archival perspective on Jewish patronage of music in 20th-century South Africa

Hans Kramer (1911–2002) was important for two reasons: he owned the Home of Music, a unique music store in Cape Town, and he founded the Cape Town Concert Club, which hosted regular concerts by international artists. Rather than constructing a biographical narrative, the present article focuses on the contents of the Hans Kramer Collection at the National Library in Cape Town with the aim of uncovering and considering the importance of certain Jewish individuals’ contributions to music patronage in South Africa during the second half of the 20th century. Keeping music at the centre of the investigation, the archive allows a window into Jewish relational nexuses with different local communities and institutions, on the one hand, and international artists and organisations, on the other.

Preserving Jeremy Blake's Archives

Jeremy Blake (1971-2007) was an American digital artist most well known for his animated video installations, &#x201C;time-based paintings&#x201D; and large-scale digital C-prints. Blake's evocative work combined 8mm film, vector graphics, and hand-painted imagery to create a distinctive aesthetic: color-drenched, atmospheric and even hallucinatory. His acclaimed work was a defining example of new media art. The artist worked primarily with Adobe's Photoshop software, saving his work in its native PSD format. Working from an archival perspective in collaboration with technologists, curators, and individuals familiar with Blake's artistic process, this paper highlights the challenges, as well as the opportunities, for preserving and creating access to complex born-digital formats like PSD.

Ação Educativa e Educação Patrimonial em Arquivos: a oficina “Resistência em Arquivo: Patrimônio, Ditadura e Direitos Humanos” no APERS

ABSTRACT: In this article we present the workshop Resistance in the Archive: Heritage, Dictatorship and Human Rights, designed and run by the Heritage Education Program, developed in partnership with the State of Rio Grande do Sul Public Archives (APERS) and the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. Presented from the Public Archives perspective and included into its educational activities and dissemination of its collections, the workshop is related to the historical context and the changes experienced by archival institutions and the Brazilian society in recent decades. In addition, the workshop works with sensitive documentation on civil and military dictatorship, which register recent history of resistance as well as such regime of exception and, at the same time, life histories marked by human rights violations.

Preserving the Voices of Revolution: Examining the Creation and Preservation of a Subject-Centered Collection of Tweets from the Eighteen Days in Egypt

In 2011, Hosni Mubarak abdicated his position of president-for-life after peaceful protests across Egypt. Demonstrators in these protests used social media platforms like Twitter to communicate directly with a global audience, but tweets are ephemeral and there are no standards or best practices for their collection and preservation. Using the revolution in Egypt as a case study, this paper serves as a guide to collection developers who are interested in collecting subject-centered collections of tweets. We will discuss how to collect tweets using Twitter's application programming interface (API) as well as collection development issues related to Twitter's role in the Egyptian revolution. These issues include determining the scope of the collection, quantitative and qualitative collection methods, separating signal from noise, and navigating vernacular and formal languages. We will consider the Twitter platform from an archival perspective and discuss best practice in archiving a collection of tweets. To...

New Methods for the Visualization of Incommensurately Modulated Structures

While the theory of incommensurate structure and composite crystallography is well established, methods for the visualization of modulated and composite crystal structures are few.[1] At the same time, databases featuring such structures have arisen [2], and there is a growing need for web-based tools that allow users to interactively explore such structures. This presentation is by the principal developer of Jmol, an international open-source collaborative molecular visualization project. It will focus on recent developments that have been made in this area. Jmol provides a flexible and crystallographically rich suite of functionality, including depiction of specific symmetry operations and selective sets of unit cells, selection of specific modes of modulation, use of color to show long-range low-frequency modulation components, and the depiction of relative modulation phasing through animation. From an archival perspective, Jmol development has been an opportunity to test the basic ontology of the IUCr msCIF standard [3], and a number of issues relating to this standard will be discussed, particularly in relation to multidimensional modulation. From an general educational perspective, Jmol for the first time allows easy access to a wide variety of examples of incommensurately and commensurately modulated structures and composite structures. Being accessible on virtually all platforms and within all major browsers, Jmol offers a novel mechanism for the wide-spread dissemination of understanding of this important class of crystal structure.

Making personal libraries accessible: the example of the Robert Menzies Collection

This paper describes an experimental project working with the Robert Menzies Collection at the University of Melbourne Library. This heritage collection comprises the books previously owned by Menzies, the former Prime Minister of Australia. Our paper describes the process of recording the contents of the collection and assessing the collection for significant signs of provenance. The article highlights a novel approach to making the contents of a personal library accessible to researchers by using non-traditional library technology. Instead of a straightforward catalogue or index, this project uses a relational database to map and connect the books in Menzies's personal library to his life and times. We consider the implications of this approach from library and archival perspectives and consider the challenges and opportunities presented by personal libraries.

Hacking Public Memory

This article uses a case study of the multiple arcade machine emulator (MAME) to insist that emulation is an important aspect of digital game culture that should not be dismissed due to copyright concerns. The author argues that emulators should be understood as ludic technologies produced by hacking practices that helped spawn and continue to permeate video game culture. Furthermore, while it may be tempting to describe the MAME as a “counter archive” that challenges institutional models of preservation, by drawing on the work of Coleman the author insists the project is better understood as a hacking practice committed to reordering “technologies and infrastructures” (p. 515). From this perspective, instead of rejecting institutional archival perspectives that view documents as truth-telling entities, the project hacks the traditional notion of the archive by treating platforms as contingent entities and game code as authentic artifacts.

Provenance and credibility in scientific data repositories

Despite a long history of rich theoretical work on provenance, empirical research regarding users’ interactions with and judgments based upon provenance information in archives with scientific data is extremely limited. This article focuses on the relationship between provenance and credibility (i.e., trustworthiness and expertise) for scientists. Toward this end, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with seventeen proteomics researchers who interact with data from ProteomeCommons.org, a large online repository. To analyze the resulting interview data, the authors apply Brian Hilligoss and Soo Young Rieh’s empirically tested theoretical framework for user credibility assessment. Findings from this study suggest that together with other information provided in ProteomeCommons.org and subjects’ own experiences and prior knowledge, provenance allows users to determine the credibility of datasets. Implications of this study stress the importance of the archival perspective of provenance and archival bond for aiding scientists in their credibility assessments of data housed in scientific data repositories.

Editor’s Note

This issue of RBM presents articles that offer a “special collections and archives perspective” on several themes permeating the larger library world. Matthew C. Reynolds surveys the state of bibliographic instruction in Association of Research Libraries’ special collections libraries. The importance of instruction in the unique environments we inhabit deserves attention and reflection, particularly since we are sometimes disconnected from efforts in our larger organizations. Todd Fell takes “hidden collections” initiatives into the map room with an examination of the challenges and rewards of exposing map collections. Projects like the one he discusses offer potential solutions to end our long . . .

Localizing Archival Memories of Spanish Language Education in California, Engaging with the Multilingual Histories of the Present

uccllt_l2_11991 Abstract: Focusing on Spanish in California, this article offers language educators a critical perspective into how the languages we teach have histories constructed in shifting memories of language,speakership, and education. This article builds upon the 2007 MLA report's vision for curricular reform that situates language study in cultural, historical, geographic, and cross- cultural frameswithin the context of humanistic learning. Cultural narratives and frames are connected to localized archives of histories and memories surrounding the learning and teaching of Spanish.Examining key texts and contexts, this article explores European and American imperial discourses surrounding language in education in connection to indigenous memories by the colonized or reduced Indians who were the among the first learners of Spanish in early multilingual California. This article advocates understanding archival texts as a step toward articulating an explicitly critical and historical component to recent reform movements in foreign language education. It is suggested that critical archival perspectives offer possibilities for rethinking and expanding the curricular space of history and memory in undergraduate and graduate Spanish programs, as well asin teacher education programs.

A organização da informação arquivística em arquivos de arquitetura do núcleo de pesquisa e documentação da faculdade de arquitetura e urbanismo – UFRJ

Esse artigo analisa a aplicação de técnicas e metodologias arquivísticas no tratamento de arquivos de arquitetura custodiados pelo Núcleo de Pesquisa e Documentação da Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Aponta as reflexões teóricas e iniciativas da comunidade arquivística nacional e internacional em torno dos conceitos e especificidades dos arquivos de arquitetura. A partir da perspectiva da arquivologia, e levando em conta as peculiaridades dos documentos arquivísticos originários das funções exercidas pelo arquiteto, enfoca problemas e dificuldades na realização da organização e recuperação de informação. Discute a aplicação dos princípios arquivísticos de respeito à ordem original e proveniência em arquivos de arquitetura.

&lt;i&gt;From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition Diana Little (bio) From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition; BY Giovanna Fossati ; Amsterdam University Press, 2009 The rapidly encroaching shift to digital in motion picture production, archiving, and projection increasingly inspires rhetoric focused on either the overwhelming problems that technological changes create or the magnificent [End Page 109] opportunities they provide. From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition, Giovanna Fossati's cool-headed study of films and how we watch and take care of them at this moment in technological history, manages to balance these reactions. An archival perspective on the film-to-digital transition has thus far largely been tackled in journal and technical magazine articles, blog posts, and symposia, but with the exception of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences report The Digital Dilemma, 1 this is the first book-length consideration of the topic. It is a thorough and perceptive examination that leaves few theoretical and practical stones unturned. Fossati endeavors early and often to remind her reader that technology changes rapidly enough to require a constant revision of the discussion points addressed here. The nexus of the transitional period under examination is the decade preceding the book's 2009 publication date, and a year out, it does not yet feel dated, though one can imagine that reading it ten years from now would be a different experience. From Grain to Pixel's relatively spare and slightly perplexing table of contents becomes more useful once the book's structure has been explained, and luckily this happens in the first pages. The book is organized into four chapters that are split between two parts. Part 1 offers a well-studied discussion of how the current transition to digital is shaping the techniques used both in film production and in archiving and enumerates parallels in the two worlds. Within Part 1, chapter 1 looks at the practical impact this transition is having on how we create and use motion pictures, while chapter 2 gives an overview of some theoretical perspectives that the reader can use to help understand the transition and how it affects the way we view film (literally and figuratively). Part 2 takes a deeper look at the ideas explored in Part 1 by considering real-world examples of archives and restorers grappling with the digital transition. The first chapter of Part 2, chapter 3, associates specific archives and restoration labs with frameworks and concepts introduced in the first half of the book by analyzing each institution's general approach to dealing with archival film. Chapter 4 uses restoration case studies to break down the ethical, artistic, and technological decisions made by these institutions. This last section is the most concrete and specific but continues to make use of the theoretical work introduced in chapter 2. Fossati begins by looking at how the current digital mania might affect the day-to-day and larger choices made in film archives. She illustrates how, historically and currently, archival practice is influenced by, parallels, and diverges from film production and post-production practice. Developments in digital technology may first affect the way new motion pictures are made and presented, but the influence quickly trickles down to the archives. For example, advances in digital effects and the strong trend toward the use of digital intermediates in feature film postproduction have facilitated the development of tools that allow restorers of older films to repair the ravages of time and neglect to a degree that was barely imaginable in an analog past. An excellent overview of the digital restoration process provides the necessary background to understand the case studies described later on. Though issues surrounding digital restoration increasingly dominate the conversation as the book progresses, the discussion of various modes of digital access in chapter 1 will be more relevant to staff of institutions holding smaller film collections, as they may find this to be the area where digital technology most affects their work, at least for the moment. Chapter 2 explores how film and new media theory can be used to shape thinking about motion pictures in the...