Archival Recovery Research Articles

Reflections on The Remember Me Project: Queen’s University’s Black Past and the AfroWomanist Sankofa Archive to Our Future

How does one endeavour to recover history that has been intentionally hidden, erased, and forgotten? In what ways can the ethics of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) be applied within archival processes? In this article, I highlight the work I recently completed under the supervision of the Director of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Indigeneity (EDII) at Queen’s University as an “Afrofuturist” Graduate Research Fellow in a project titled The Remember Me Project: Black Historic Lives and Our Future(s) at Queen’s University. I focus on one poem from my collection titled, “Alfie or Did I Really Do Alright?” I problematize the now infamous figure of Alfred “Alfie” Pierce, a Black male employee of Queen’s Athletics department to problematize the ways Black stories are forgotten, lost, and devalued within academic institutions. In simultaneously speaking back to the politics of whose stories are worthy of remembrance at Queen’s, the horrors of “Alfie’s” story, and the difficulties involved in Black archival recovery, I introduce my intervention “the AfroWomanist Sankofa Archive” as an interdisciplinary framework constructed as a guideline for African-heritage peoples to utilize while navigating dis-empowering research material involving African archival information. I end with some recommendations for our Afrofuture.

Exile from Eden: Miron Grindea’s <i>ADAM International Review</i>

ADAM International Review was the longest-running literary journal published under a single editor in Europe in the twentieth century. Edited by Miron Grindea from 1936 until his death in 1995, the magazine promoted ‘active humanism’ and ‘comparative’ or ‘world literature’ as the grounds for cultural re-evaluation and international collaboration, following the brutalities of Nazism and faced with the existential threat posed by the Cold War. This article examines Grindea’s unique species of ‘eclectic’ editorship, using ADAM as a case study to highlight the significant role played by individual magazine editors in forging and sustaining open, capacious international literary networks. Grindea was idealistic about his editorial mission, but as the twentieth century wore on found himself increasingly out-of-step with the times, instead seeking consolation in the past. This prompts a series of questions. How effective is a magazine when the editor prioritizes archival recovery above the discovery of new work? How useful are international cultural commitments when ‘internationalism’ has been curated by an individual? And what becomes of a magazine when the personality of its editor dominates?

Mexican American Educational History: A Moment of Recognition

Mexican American educational history has become a vibrant field of study since the late 1980s. In the last seven years, however, it is notable that this research has inspired community-based efforts to preserve and publicly commemorate challenges to unequal education. In this commentary, we discuss the archival recovery of the Francisco Maestas et al. v. George Shone et al. case in Alamosa, Colorado; the excavation of El Colegio Altamirano in Hebbronville, Texas; the complexity of memorializing the Mendez v. Westminster case in Orange County, California; and the implications of archival and oral history research connected to the Soria v. Oxnard School Board of Trustees case in Oxnard, California. These examples illuminate the highly contested spaces that public schools held for Mexican Americans and the role scholars and communities can play in acknowledging those moments. We see public schooling as a place where liberation and hope can occur and where scholars and communities can engage together. This is a call to continue to create relationships that lead to the recognition of past struggles and acknowledge the enduring quest for educational equality.

EPISTEMIC WOUNDED ATTACHMENTS: RECOVERING DEFINITIONAL SUBJECTIVITY THROUGH COLONIAL LIBRARIES

ABSTRACTPostcolonial theorizing on empires and subjects focuses on governance and infrastructure as relevant geographies of relation. However, when governance‐driven knowledge production migrates from colony to metropole, what postcolonial subjectivity formations are recovered from colonial archives, particularly if these archives are structured by epistemic difference? We theorize a wounded attachment to a colonial library, or the construction of subjectivity through colonial archival recovery, as a means of transforming a colonial library of governance into an academic discipline. Through the case study of Sikh studies, a discipline originating out of colonial governance of Sikhs, we argue that epistemic difference is transformed into epistemic distancing as a tool by which scholars pursue legibility to the Euro‐American academy. We contextualize the ongoing investment in measures of academic legibility (for example, objectivity, distance, and validity) as how area and region are tied to the production of universal knowledge; these measures result in the elision of embodied knowledge as a valid framework for intellectual pursuit.

DESIGN OF ELECTRONIC FILING SYSTEM USING IMAGEWARE SCAN MANAGER IN BANK BJB KCP SAMARANG

The archive system at Bank BJB KCP Samarang was initially not optimal, as evidenced by several problems that arise because of archives, such as the length of time for finding archives, archives are not neatly arranged, and there is no archive lending system. This can interfere with the work of employees. This project aims to design an electronic filing system at Bank BJB KCP Samarang using ImageWare Scan Manager. The work procedures carried out included applying for permits, interviews, identifying problems, designing programs, making programs, testing, evaluating, and finally making a manual for handling archives. The result of this archival system design is that the archive storage system used is a subject archive storage system based on the name of the credit lending category and a chronological storage system based on the year of the archive, as well as electronic archive storage using the four existing structures in the application, namely workgroups, worksheet templates, worksheets, and fields. For archive storage procedures there are four stages, namely login workgroup, open worksheet, index data, and import documents. Furthermore, the recovery of archives is carried out in four stages, namely requesting, searching, finding, and recording borrowed archives. Based on the results of tests using alpha beta testing, no errors were found and can facilitate archive discovery and facilitate work, so this application can be used as an alternative in archive storage.

Natural Post-Disaster Management Archive Model

As a country within the "ring of fire" geographical area, Indonesia is vulnerable to natural disasters. The impact of natural disasters is not only physical and human, but also relates to the records that are owned. This study strives to support efforts to save archives after natural disasters and develop a model for saving and restoring archives after natural disasters happens. The results of the research showed that there is no a standardized procedures to save and restore archive in times of disasters, therefore there shall be regulation to make the regional disaster agency, the regency offices, and library and archives agency coordinate and cooperate in a single task-force, based on our developed model.Keywords: disaster; archives; archive recovery

Race, Space, and Celebrating Simms: Mapping Strategies for Black Feminist Biographical Recovery

Lucy F. Simms was an educator who made the improbable possible for thousands of Black students in Virginia at the turn of the twentieth century, but she remains almost entirely unmapped in academic histories. This essay describes a community-university-K-12 partnership that produced a permanent exhibit and companion website that preserves Simms’ story, the school named in her honor, and the men and women whose lives were transformed by that space. It also explores the vitality of local spaces to the recovery of Black women’s lives and the value of digital and physical modalities in biographical and archival recovery projects.

DESIGN OF EMPLOYEE DATA ELECTRONIC ARCHIVES FOR VEHICLE MAINTENANCE BASED ON MICROSOFT EXCEL AT HR DEPARTMENT IN PT BETON ELEMENINDO PERKASA BATUJAJAR)

Electronic archive management has become a demand and need for every organization in the era of digital technology as it is today. Electronic records management is closely related to the use of computer technology, which can complete records management work more effectively and efficiently. The archive system in the HR Department at PT Beton Elementindo Perkasa, especially for employee archives, still uses the manual archiving method, this causes the recovery of archives to take quite a long time and there are some lost files. With the design of this archival system, it is hoped that some of the problems caused by the previous archival system can be resolved properly. The change from manual filing system to electronic filing system begins with analyzing data needs, tools and several other support systems, then continues with column creation and data input in Microsoft Excel and the last process is scanning documents as additional backup for this employee archive. After a direct trial, it is proven that with this archive system, the recovery of archives can be faster and the risk of loss of information due to damaged archives can be minimized. The result of this work is inform of a the file in the form of Microsoft Excel in which there is information about the personal data of employees of thesection vehicle maintenance which is equipped with a hyperlink to insert file attachments and passwords to access the data in it which aims to maintain the confidentiality of the data in it so that it is not misused. by the responsible party. It is hoped that this electronic filing system can be further developed in the future to facilitate and expedite the work in the HR Department at PT Beton Elementindo Perkasa.

16Science and Medicine

Abstract This review considers three monographs that use innovative archival recovery techniques to expand our understanding of the connections between the history of science and medicine and sociopolitical and cultural phenomena across the early modern period to the present. Divided into three sections, our review first considers Kalle Kananoja’s Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa: Medical Encounters, 1500–1850, which demonstrates the ways that Atlantic African healers resisted colonial influence and adapted their practices to reflect innovative uses of global plant-based medicines. Part 2 of this review, Black Reproductive Health, examines Sara Clarke Kaplan’s The Black Reproductive: Unfree Labor and Insurgent Motherhood, which, importantly, revises longstanding assumptions about the ways that we understand and document reproductive health and justice, especially in the American Black community. Part 3, ‘Healthy’ Eating, discusses Elizabeth A. Williams’s Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750–1950, which deconstructs the so-called connection between appetite and wellness in science and medicine. We have chosen to focus on these works both for the important new insights that they offer to the field of the history of science and because they each speak to contemporary crises in public health and health inequity that continue to affect our local and global landscapes. We suggest that works such as these have the capacity not only to expand our field but also to counteract narratives of white supremacy and other cultural beliefs that stigmatize and oppress; these works show us how expanding our understanding of the origins and current practices of medical knowledge beyond our traditional Western narratives can help provide healthier and more equitable forms of care and wellness.

Sylvia Wynter, Maskarade, and Performing the State

First produced as a teleplay for the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation in 1973, Sylvia Wynter’s Maskarade stands at the juncture of art-making and statecraft. The play centers on the Jamaican performance tradition of Jonkonnu, an African-descended carnival practice. Wynter’s state-commissioned plays funded by the now defunct JBC were part of a larger trend in the Caribbean in the mid-twentieth century, a time when governments in the region sponsored theatrical works in order to teach newly minted citizens how to relate to emerging states. These works also reconfigured and centralized the role of Black working-class and poor women in the new national imaginary through characters like Maskarade’s Miss Gatha. Using archival recovery and critical fabulation, I analyze the origins of the 1973 teleplay and subsequent 1983 published script in order to demonstrate the connection between twentieth-century Caribbean statecraft, media, and post-colonial theory (namely Wynter’s theorizations of “Indigenization”).

African American Gay Men

African American Gay Men

Toward a Black–Queer Critical Rhetoricism

Toward a Black–Queer Critical Rhetoricism

Archival training for employees of the Sungai Pinang Luar Village Office, Samarinda City

Apart from being an organizational asset, properly organized archives are also useful as material for making quick and accurate organizational decisions. The proper implementation of archives can reduce the number of management errors that the organization will make. Human resources, standard archive handling procedures, and archive storage systems are some of the archival issues at the Sungai Pinang Luar Village Office. This training resulted in the management of archives using a problem-based classification system and the recovery of archives using an alphabetical system.

Analisis Prosedur Pengelolaan Arsip Dinamis Pada Kantor Sub Bagian Keuangan Dinas Kehutanan

This study aims to oversee the management of dynamic records, human resources who carry out archive management activities to monitor obstacles in managing archives at the Sub-Division of Finance Office of the Forestry Service of West Sumatra Province. This research method is descriptive qualitative, with data sources of several informants who are determined based on criteria in accordance with interviews and direct observations to the object of research. Secondary data that supports this research is obtained from documents available at the place of research object. Based on the information from the information, this research can serve that the management of dynamic archives as a whole is almost done well, but it is still not maximized. This is because: 1) based on incoming and outgoing mails, it has not been implemented optimally; 2) the use of dynamic archives has not been implemented properly and archive recovery still takes a long time; 3) archive maintenance has not been implemented optimally; 4) shrinkage archives that are not in accordance with existing procedures. This happens because of several reasons: 1) there is no archivist or special employee who manages the records; 2) Inadequate quality and quantity of archiving facilities. Based on the research above, archives can be provided to employees to increase awareness of dynamic management. The leadership should place human resources who manage archives who have an archivist background, provide adequate and complete facilities and infrastructure.Keywords : dynamic archive management, archive dynamic.

Archiving Islam in Nadeem Aslam’s Libraries

This article explores the representation of libraries and Islam in Nadeem Aslam's three most recent novels: The Wasted Vigil (2009), The Blind Man's Garden (2013), and The Golden Legend (2017). In these novels, the Golden Age of Islam – for which Baghdad's legendary House of Wisdom has come to serve as metonym – is repeatedly referenced as a time of learning, cultural production, and cultural syncretism. Meanwhile in contemporary south-east Afghanistan and north-west Pakistan, a region of the world that has been scarred by violence, books and libraries proliferate as vehicles and spaces of translation, enlightenment, and sanctuary. The article scrutinises the place of Islam within the historically deep and geographically broad world mapped in Aslam's novels, tracing its presence in the rich archives that they uncover and explore. It investigates how in Aslam's work, books and libraries disrupt both categories of difference, by bringing the Islamicate world and the secular West into dialogue with one another, and linear notions of time through its archival recovery. Yet, the article argues, its archival excavation of the Golden Age of Islam is implicitly contrasted with the poverty of the faith in the present, which risks reinstating the temporality that the novels are, in some way, intent on disrupting. The article questions how far Aslam's libraries, and Aslam's novels, uncover the past for the present, and to what extent they allow the anglospheric reader to travel across the divide that separates contemporary Islam from secular liberal thought. It argues that the libraries' admission is limited to those who can fit a model of a secular liberal cosmopolitanism, and that the novels' archival recovery falls short of a decolonial praxis that deconstructs hierarchies of knowledge in the present.

Telling Stories That Never End: Valeria Luiselli, the Refugee Crisis at the US-Mexico Border, and the Big, Ambitious Archival Novel

This essay argues that Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive (2019) experiments with literary techniques often associated with the “big, ambitious novel” to represent the pervasive problems created by US racial construction. More specifically, it contends that Luiselli's novel evokes the archive in its fragmentation, recombinant organization, and narrative multiplicity as a means for demonstrating the complexity and relentlessness of the refugee crisis and the constructions of Latinx difference that develop alongside it. Creating a recursive, referential narrative form, Lost Children Archive highlights the absences of refugee voices, attends to the histories of violence that have led to their disappearance, and refuses to posit an answer to how the story of the crisis ends. This analysis reroutes theories of the big, ambitious novel through discussions of archival recovery, immigrant maximalism, and historical revision developed in feminist and critical race theory, and suggests that big, ambitious novel strategies like polyphony, fragmentation, and centripetal connectivity are the provenance of women and people of color at least as much as they are the domain of the white men often associated with the form.

Upheavals in Black Thought

Upheavals in Black Thought

Marriage, Career, and Class in the Private Letters of Harriot Curtis, Coeditor of theLowell Offering

ABSTRACTThis article explores the private letters of Harriot Curtis, former factory worker and coeditor of the Lowell Offering. It draws on the archival recovery of the “Harriot F. Curtis papers,” which were recently donated to the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College; the papers contain thirty-five letters over a nine-year period (1836–45) from Curtis to her suitor Hezekiah Morse Wead, whom she ultimately rejects. Wead's letters to Curtis are not included in the Collection. The topics to which the letters give the most attention are marriage and career. Intimate in nature, Curtis's letters to Wead offer insight into the value she placed on marriage and writing as waged labor and how those values were constructed in relation to one another. Given that Wead, the person with whom she discusses her career, is a potential though unsuccessful suitor, the circumstances are such that discussion of marriage and career are intertwined by default. Curtis's letters, therefore, are a significant resource for academic inquiry into the nineteenth-century working woman's conceptions of marriage, career, literacy, and class.

Revision of archive recovery tests using analytical and numerical methods on thermal water wells in sandstone and fractured carbonate aquifers in the vicinity of Budapest, Hungary

This study offers a reinterpretation of archive aquifer tests, predominantly on the basis of recovery data, from an original datasheet of thermal water wells located in carbonate and sandstone aquifer units in the vicinity of Budapest, Hungary. The study compares the hydraulic conductivity (K) and specific storage (Ss) values derived in the first instance from an aquifer test evaluation. This included an initial application of the classical analytical Cooper and Jacob method. Subsequently, the visual two-zone (VTZ) numerical method was applied, then third, a more complex model, namely, WT software. It was found that the simple analytical solution is not able to represent the field conditions accurately, while in the course of the application of the VTZ model, it proved possible to alter the various hydraulic parameters within reasonable limits to fit the field data. In the case of the VTZ model, the researcher is required to calculate the accuracy of the fitted model separately, while with the WT model, this is automatic, the software seeks out the best fit. In addition to VTZ parameters, the WT model can efficiently incorporate data on up to 500 model layers, water level, and pressure. The optimization of the parameters may be achieved by automatic calibration, improving the accuracy of the numerical results. Recovery tests for 12 wells were numerically simulated to obtain values for vertical and horizontal hydraulic conductivity and specific storage for Triassic and Eocene fractured carbonate and the Upper-Miocene-Pliocene granular sandstone aquifer units. When an analytical solution is applied, only average values could be obtained. The conclusion reached was that the results of the analytical solution can be improved by the use of numerical methods. These methods are able to incorporate basic information on well design, aquifer material and the hydrogeological environment in the course of the evaluation. The revision of the archive recovery data using numerical methods may assist in the quest for better data for numerical flow and transport simulations without the need to perform new tests. In addition, the methods employed here can explain cases in which the original analytical interpretations proved unable to yield reliable data and predictions.

The Revelation on a “side street”: William Carlos Williams, Selden Rodman, and the Archival Recovery of “Moldy Skeleton”

The Revelation on a “side street”: William Carlos Williams, Selden Rodman, and the Archival Recovery of “Moldy Skeleton”