Archival Spaces Research Articles

Amplifying the Impact of Special Collection Exhibitions

This article seeks to provide an adaptable model for cultural heritage institutions looking to amplify exhibition impact using creative secondary outreach tools. Exhibition creation has become integral to the archival and cultural heritage professions—highlighting collection materials, bringing new audiences into archival spaces, and providing opportunities for advocacy. By identifying targeted outreach stages, archives and special collections staff can build partnerships with related cultural heritage institutions and better utilize internal resources.

Centering dialog and care in digital Indigenous knowledge stewardship: Of relationality, responsibility, and respect

AbstractThe question of how to appropriately care for and share Indigenous knowledges is central to cultural heritage documentation and, contemporary archival praxes and discourses. Transforming the standards of Indigenous knowledge management (IKM) necessitates confronting the legacies of colonial control and Indigenous expurgation that settler colonial galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) have contributed to (intentionally or not). Writing of and within the Māori context in New Zealand, we argue that a renewed orientation toward dialogic collaboration between institutions and Indigenous communities is crucial for revitalizing archival practices and partnerships in ways that center Indigenous values. Moreover, we purport that aligning institutional practices with Indigenous values is insufficient if Indigenous communities are neither made to feel welcome within archival spaces nor empowered to utilize them. As such, we identify the notions of relationality, responsibility, and respect as vital in supporting this ethical transformation of Indigenous knowledge stewardship both in New Zealand and in other Indigenous contexts. We propose that current efforts to reshape IKM praxes in culturally responsible and responsive ways can be meaningfully expanded through dialogic engagement, and an ethics of care.

Indigenous Relational Methodologies and Archives

Indigenous Relational Methodologies and Archives

Small axe: chipping away at special collections barriers to inclusivity

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to share this study’s efforts to foster belonging in special collections public service spaces, as Black and Latina practitioners of color, while navigating known systemic professional barriers to inclusivity in the library information profession.Design/methodology/approachIn this conceptual essay, frameworks from Black and Chicana feminist theories are applied which resonate deeply with this study’s practices but are not often encountered in library spaces, namely intersectional nepantla, which is used to situate the positionality within special collections.FindingsFostering belonging in special collections environments is an ongoing effort, but this study offers reflections in solidarity with all who seek to increase inclusivity and equity in their spaces. It is believed that the cumulative impact of many small actions implemented from the ground up can potentially be as significant as top-down, administrative charges.Originality/valueThis article's originality stems from both its authors and the methodology. As BIPOC practitioners, to the authors emphasize the authentic, day-to-day interactions that are essential to developing inclusivity and equity in special collections and archival spaces. Special collections reference workers have limited time off desk to collaborate and conduct research.

Developing Training for Rural Library Workers to Build Inclusive Archives

Nearly four in ten public libraries in the US are located in rural communities and serve more than 30 million Americans, and one-third of public library buildings serve populations of 2,500 people or fewer (Swan, Grimes, & Owens, 2013 https://www.imls.gov/sites/default/files/publications/documents/ brief201305.pdf ). Yet, training for practitioners across LIS and best practices often do not scale to these smaller memory institutions. This project advocates for a reorientation of curricula that centers community memory and recognizes small and rural libraries. Co-PI’s Bateman and Mattock observed these challenges during partnerships with rural public libraries in Iowa: untouched boxes of photographs, cabinets brimming with yellowing newspapers, whole basements of genealogical documents and burial records in storage. Stewarding these untouched collections are overworked library directors, rightly more concerned with immediate patron needs such as computer access. Being the only memory institutions within large radii, rural libraries become presumed repositories for community memory records, donated by well-meaning citizens cleaning out the family attic or by the local organizations producing such documents. Describing this phenomenon to librarians doesn’t take many words; to them, it’s self-evident. “I know exactly the problem you’re talking about,” a rural librarian from Vermont responded to us. But getting to the root of the problem is harder, and finding solutions is harder still.
 The IMLS-sponsored project “Activating Archives in Remote Communities” evolved in response to the challenges that we have observed. Over the past year, the project has convened a diverse group of community-engaged practitioners with the aim of understanding how MLIS programs can respond to the needs of these rural archival spaces through curricular interventions and open educational resources that can help prepare rural public librarians to engage with archival materials and become aware of the cultural pluralities that constitute the vast service areas of small libraries. Representing practitioners from across the United States, “Activating Archives” includes the perspectives of the LIS professionals who are tasked with preserving community memory as collaborators in the development of a curriculum that serves their needs and increases their capacity. Together we aim to provide an adaptable model for community memory and engagement that is directly applicable to the most remote communities.
 The “Activating Archives” advisory panel includes community-based and rural practitioners from across the United States: Joshua Burford, Director of Outreach and Lead Archivist for the Invisible Histories Project; Jerald Crook, Founder and Executive Director of Alabama’s Higher Ground Society; Jessica Ieremia, director of Alaska’s Sitka Public Library; Doris Malkmus, archivist and oral historian; Allie Parrsmith, director of the Iowa’s West Liberty Public Library; Verónica Reyes-Escudero, University of Arizona ‘s Katherine B. Willcock Head of Special Collections; Monique Tyndall an independent expert with experience in tribal archives and cultural affairs; and, Jessamyn West, librarian and community technologist in rural Vermont. The panel addressed many of the known challenges in small and rural collections, the lack of resources (time, funding, staff), and the reliance on volunteers. The group also stressed the necessity of collaboration, the politics of building and navigating partnerships, the challenges to building trust across heterogeneous communities, and the ethics of reparative archival work. As we concluded our conversations, the panel offered their perspectives on pedagogical interventions within LIS curricula and provided insight into how open educational resources can support training within MLIS programs and support the work of practitioners already in place in rural institutions. 
 During this session, project PIs, MLIS student collaborators, and community-engaged archivist Aiden Bettine will present the initial findings from the advisory panel and invite the session attendees to add their perspectives to the already rich conversation, further informing the resulting training modules and educational resources produced by the grant. The presenters will ask the audience to work together to share their perspectives and invite feedback from our initial findings, further informing the project deliverables that include training modules and open education resources to support LIS training at all levels. 
 Overall, this project aims to strengthen rural-community resilience, belonging, and well-being by encouraging collaborations that will help communities maintain their own cultural heritage sustainably. Our research reflects memory practices that de-center white, Western archival methods and instead reflect the numerous and mixed methods by which diverse community constituencies self-represent. The project has recruited an advisory panel that represents region-specific and culturally situated memory practices. We also hope that our research and curriculum will be used widely to help include non-dominant populations in library engagement as well as to include their voices in community histories. Finally, we view small and rural libraries as underrepresented organizations in LIS training and literature that nevertheless serve millions of diverse US patrons. Our focus on small and rural libraries includes particular attention to the populations who are likewise discounted in LIS discourse, such as rural Black library users.

Fashion Libraries

This article represents a reflection extracted and reworked from my MA thesis titled Beyond the Library: A Study of Fashion Documents’ Archival Spaces. With a reflection on the current panorama on the field fashion libraries, this paper aims to unpack the relationship that are at stake between social media archives and fashion libraries at large. Often seen as an unmatchable duality, with the opposition between paper and the digital that seems to be in constant contrast, I aim to demonstrate that the two fields can not only coexist, but also be of mutual benefit for the formation of a more actualised, inclusive and comprehensive definition of ‘fashion library’.

“They Weren’t Necessarily Designed with Lived Experiences of Disability in Mind”

Using semi-structured interviews with disabled archival users and building on the emerging field of critical access studies, this article illustrates the ways in which archival spaces and their in/accessibility affectively impact disabled people. Interviewees describe how they experience barriers to accessibility not only at a basic, architectural level – of not being able to get into a building or archives room – but also through archives’ policies and expectations regarding the ways in which archival work is done. The way that accessibility is implemented, even beyond legal compliance, greatly impacts the extent to which disabled researchers feel they belong in archival spaces. Inaccessibility, this research shows, produces a sense of unbelonging; the deprioritization of disability both as a subject or organizing category and as an identity of a potential researcher, shows disabled people that they do not belong in archival spaces, and this is further complicated for multiply marginalized disabled people. By examining the multifaceted ways that disabled people experience inaccessibility, this article focuses on the “emotionally expensive” aspects of inaccessibility to emphasize the ways in which barriers compound and accumulate and can prevent disabled people from accessing our own histories. These findings demonstrate how central accessibility is to disabled people’s lives: it is almost impossible to talk about our experiences of archival materials and history without discussing how we navigate the multiple barriers to accessing them.

Flames of Time:

The manuscript as narrator in Icelandic children’s novel Bál tímans (2022) belongs to a literary tradition of sentient object narrators who document the domestic spaces in which they circulate. Bál tímans shifts the reader’s focus to normally invisible manuscript owners and users, including women and children, bringing attention to disparities in access created through archive-building activities. In domestic settings, Möðruvallabók is accessible to a broad segment of the Icelandic population through practices of social reading, women’s book ownership, and home education. In the archive, human-manuscript interactions are restricted to a narrow and initially male-only elite. While tensions between preservation and access are resolved when the codex is exhibited in a museum space where it can share its stories with a wider audience, Bál tímans examines what can be lost by bringing cultural objects into archival spaces.

Making Sense of Archives: An Introduction

AbstractThis introduction to the thematic section “Making Sense of Archives” explores different archival terrains in Southeastern Europe. It discusses the politics of storage against the background of the processes of professionalization in the archival field, the provenance of funding for both storing and digitalizing archival collections, and the chronic lack of archival personnel. The author makes a plea for critical engagement with archival spaces by explicating the logics of the archiving processes of documents of different kinds and the dimensions of power immanent to them. Moreover, she argues that scholars need to reflect more critically on archivists’ mediating interventions, including appraisal, arrangement, processing, and description as a necessary complement to applied source criticism. Lastly, she locates the thematic section’s contributions within broader themes in the archival field, including knowledge management and blind spots in archives, the archival turn, the potentials and pitfalls of visual archives, and the study of documents as archival artefacts.

Making visible the invisible: Colonial sources and counter body-archives in the boarding schools for Black “mixed race” Italian children in fascist East Africa

ABSTRACT This article examines life conditions for Black “mixed race children” in the boarding schools of former Italian colonies in East Africa by taking into account both archival colonial sources and oral sources. It problematizes the very notion and function of colonial archival spaces by conceiving “the Archive” as a locus of power characterized by inherent practices of invisibilization in which whiteness has been historically institutionalized and maintained. In contrast, the article suggests the idea of the “body-archive”, namely epidermic and carnal counter-archives of bodies, marked – and scarred – by the histories of colonialism and whiteness. By providing a reading of archival colonial sources “against the grain”, the analysis demonstrates how the gaps, the silences, and the unwritten present in “the Archive” can be filled by the voices and memories of (post)colonial subjects whose counter-narratives may unveil hidden dynamics of power embedded within ideas of knowledge rooted in colonial paradigms.

The Social Movement Archive

The Social Movement Archive

Essaying the Impasse

Essaying the Impasse

Osamu Tezuka’sBuddha, Canonical Authority, and Remix Theory in the Study of Religion

AbstractContemporary narrative repositories of religious traditions are often the ambiguous product of dialogic oral transmissions that occurred over many years, undergoing variation based on audience, context, or ideological purpose. Through an application of remix theory, both official and unauthorized narrative developments among the sacred stories of religious traditions can be understood as sampling processes in which select elements are sourced from archival spaces of narrative data in the creation of unique versions for the contexts in which they emerge. This is specifically demonstrated through Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha manga series, but the questions it raises and the conceptual challenges it presents for doctrinal notions of authority and authenticity are also relevant outside the immediate context of Buddhism for the canonical traditions within other religious systems. Thus, this article demonstrates how remix theory can be utilized to better challenge the ways such concepts are understood and taken for granted in religious traditions.

Archival Historiography in Jewish Antiquity by Laura Carlson Hasler (review)

Reviewed by: Archival Historiography in Jewish Antiquity by Laura Carlson Hasler Eric X. Jarrard Laura Carlson Hasler. Archival Historiography in Jewish Antiquity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. xiii + 216 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000143 Laura Carlson Hasler's Archival Historiography in Jewish Antiquity examines how the diverse array of texts found within Ezra-Nehemiah and Esther seeks to imitate ancient Near Eastern archival spaces. The book is part of a larger constellation of research examining how biblical texts function mimetically to enshrine the vast range of imperial tools, objects, and sites—often as means of resistance, legitimation, and (in a postexilic context) restoration. Carlson Hasler's unique contribution to this conversation, which she clearly articulates in her introduction, is that the form of Ezra-Nehemiah eschews narrative continuity in favor of mirroring an archival space. She proposes the term "archival history" for this mode of composition, in which cited documents, such as lists, decrees, and letters, are inserted into an otherwise coherent narrative, as one might collect documents in a physical archive. She ultimately suggests that archival history is "a hybrid mode of history writing that blurs the line between story and space" (110), particularly within the context of imperial resistance. Chapter 1 explores the characteristics and contents of Mesopotamian imperial archives from the first millennium BCE Mesopotamian empires. Carlson Hasler establishes a profile of common archival practices, drawing on a range of material evidence and archaeological records from across the ancient Mediterranean, including Nineveh, Sippar, and Persepolis. The second chapter narrows its focus to articulate how the qualities of Mesopotamian physical archives are reflected in Ezra-Nehemiah. The evidence she uses to support this proposal includes not only references to documents being stored in archives (Ezra 4–6), but also archives of artifacts other than documents (e.g., temple vessels) and documents without reference to their storage in facilities (e.g., genealogies). The heart of Carlson Hasler's argument occurs in the third chapter, which examines various archival texts embedded within Ezra-Nehemiah. She contends that the decrees, letters, and lists within Ezra-Nehemiah disrupt the "narrative coherence" (52) of the text. She maintains that the inclusion of these citations is part of a concerted effort to rebuild a community with a purely textual—not architectural—archive at its center. Scholars whose critical inquiries are buttressed by the presumption or pursuit of narrative coherence elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, for example, pentateuchal criticism, will likely appreciate this argument. Chapter 4 discusses the notion of archive in the MT and Greek versions of Esther. Here Carlson Hasler proposes that the various editions of Esther are similar to the archival historiographic efforts found in Ezra-Nehemiah, for instance, in their presentation of imperial reliance on the archive as a cognitive prosthesis for Persian kings. Still, the archival function in Esther diverges in its concern for promulgating "textual counterclaim[s]" (95) rather than accumulating archival documents as in Ezra-Nehemiah. This distinction is all the more conspicuous in the Old Greek of Esther, which appends various documents only mentioned in the MT. Carlson Hasler presents their inclusion as a survival strategy to resist "threats of erasure" (96) by ensuring documents—letters, edicts, etc.—are [End Page 436] significant enough to maintain, but also perpetually available to the community's constituent members. The final chapter explores the effects and function of archival historiography in Ezra-Nehemiah. Carlson Hasler argues that archival historiography "facilitates the recovery of Judean identity in the shadow of empire" (110). Of course, an argument concerning recovery necessitates a discussion of loss, which the bulk of the chapter investigates. The short epilogue expands on the suggestion that this collection of texts functions in lieu of spaces. It ends by briefly gesturing toward other biblical and Jewish texts (Exodus, Chronicles, Maccabees, and Josephus) that may perform a similar function. Carlson Hasler's suggestion that Ezra-Nehemiah is intentionally mimicking the archival space is intriguing and provocative, leaving room for development in a number of promising ways. One might, for instance, press this point by asking how archival histories would potentially interact with archival spaces. That is to say, at some point these archival histories and/or their component parts existed...

Residential School Community Archives

Colonial archives are sites of trauma, erasure, and grief for many marginalized communities. In Canada the vast majority of archives relating to Indigenous peoples are held by government, church, and non-Indigenous archives. Colonial archives have actively taken Indigenous culture and heritage away from communities and made it inaccessible to those who the records are about. Many archives containing information relating to Residential Schools have just begun to grapple with the ethical and professional obligations that come from holding records that document colonial violence, abuse, death, and assimilationist practices. This article explores the practices of the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre (SRSC) community archive and the ways in which the SRSC supports community healing and navigates traumatic archival records. Since its establishment the SRSC archives has been a place of raw emotion and grief, but also a place of tremendous community strength, healing, and resilience. This article will explore the trauma associated with archives of Residential Schools and the ongoing navigation of archival spaces which embody loss and community. Pre-print first published online 09/28/2021

Laughter Filled the Space

This article offers a view of decolonialized approaches to archival spaces and insight into community centered constructions of space. By addressing perceptions of space and the physicality of where archives are accessed, this piece focuses on the emotional, physical, and intellectual barriers that are associated with archival information. The authors address the numerous facets of physical archival spaces, including but not limited to physical seating, wall colours, and sounds within a space. The authors highlight the differences between Euro-centric settler archives and Indigenous community archival spaces as a way to provide models for decolonialized approaches to creating archival space.

Toying with Early Cinema: Media Studies in the Children’s Archive

Toying with Early Cinema: Media Studies in the Children’s Archive Meredith A. Bak (bio) Researchers whose work falls under the multidisciplinary umbrella of childhood studies are accustomed to thinking creatively. “The traces of childhood found in archives and special collections,” Karen Sánchez-Eppler notes, “may tend toward the ephemeral.”1 Sánchez-Eppler also acknowledges the difficulty of finding the child’s perspective in the archive, pointing out that “[r]ecords of childhood and records made by children have been housed in archives and library special collections all along, although they have usually been classified in a manner that tends to obscure rather than highlight their presence.”2 Childhood studies has much in common with certain areas of media history. For instance, many scholars of childhood and practitioners of media archaeology contest teleological models of history that conform to a kind of “developmental paradigm,” and researchers in both fields maintain similar orientations to the archive as a repository to be interrogated and reinterpreted for missed perspectives.3 During the research for my book on nineteenth-century optical toys, I became used to venturing into archival spaces that did not register immediate or obvious connections to cinema [End Page 168] and media history.4 I spent a month at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts—an institution that endeavors to collect “everything printed in what was once British North America before the year 1877.”5 Yet their outstanding children’s literature collection includes several intricate movable and novelty toy books, which adapted pre-cinematic visual effects and gestured to experiences of spectacle and spectatorship that cinema would further institutionalize. Optical toys appear in the collections of such institutions as the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood in London, and the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University, where they are not typically or primarily regarded as objects of media history but for their relevance to the history of childhood. These objects’ inclusion across such varied collections demonstrates Sánchez-Eppler’s assertion that classificatory systems can conceal some associations just as much as they can illuminate others. Excavating the significance of optical toys as toys required archival encounters that sought these artifacts embedded within the visual and material worlds of childhood rather than within networks of meaning that prioritize the optical effects they produced (which have served as the primary basis for their link to the invention of cinema).6 Resituating these toys in this way opens up opportunities to view their functions as instruments of perceptual pedagogy, not as oppositional to the pleasure they afforded in play but as closely linked. If evidence of film and media’s longer history is distributed in such diverse archival contexts, interwoven with other narratives, to what other unexpected sources might we turn to trace histories that have remained under-considered? Moreover, can familiar texts in cinema history be reread to point us to previously overlooked forms of evidence? A new research project on the history of toys that come “to life” brought me to accounts of the origins of stop-motion animation and to a passage in Albert E. Smith’s 1952 memoir, Two Reels and a Crank. Smith recalls making a film called The Humpty Dumpty Circus in 1897 or 1898—shortly after he and James Stuart Blackton founded Vitagraph studios: “Vitagraph made the first stop-motion picture in America, The Humpty Dumpty Circus. I used my little daughter’s set of toy wooden circus performers and animals, whose movable joints enabled us to place them in balanced positions. It was a tedious process inasmuch as movement could be achieved only by photographing separately each change of position.”7 The film is not extant and may never have been made at all. If the film had been made, Donald Crafton hypothesizes, it was [End Page 169] not until later, between 1902 and 1905.8 Smith’s claim to have made The Humpty Dumpty Circus in 1898 is not widely believed by animation historians (and indeed, it can be disproven). However, his statement also raises an intriguing link between early animation and children’s play culture. This unexplored connection suggests...

Writing With Sensitivity: The Importance of Standardizing Descriptions of Archival Material from Indigenous Communities

As custodians of records, archivists have the power to produce descriptions that respect the culture and knowledge of Indigenous populations. The current descriptive standards do not contain guidance for describing archival material from Indigenous communities, which is a critical absence that requires further discussion. It is important to generate specialized considerations regarding the representation of these archival documents because language is a powerful tool that can disrupt or perpetuate colonial legacies. Several recommendations can be offered, such as collaborating with members of Indigenous communities to acknowledge their expertise over their cultural heritage. By generating an accessible standard, archivists can employ proactive strategies at the outset of the description process. Ultimately, archival spaces must be willing to adjust traditional archival practices to sensitively perform their duty to the record subjects, creators, and researchers.

Paperwork of a Mamluk Muqṭaʿ

This article follows prevailing trends in research on the archival practices of the premodern Middle East by emphasizing the importance of documentary life cycles. Specifically, it examines the afterlives of a microsample of documents from an underexplored historical context: the administration of amirs who held iqṭāʿ land grants in areas of Egypt outside Cairo. Though iqṭāʿ holders (muqṭaʿs) were key administrative actors in the Mamluk sultanate, we know little about their activities on the ground. The material investigated here is related to the administration of justice in far-flung districts of Egypt, one of the less-known roles of these muqṭaʿs, and is preserved in the Papyrus Collection of the Austrian National Library in Vienna. Contextualizing the documents by relating them to the activities of several named amirs, I delineate three stages in the documents’ afterlives: archiving, reuse, and disposal. I rely on the materiality of the documents, an indispensable tool for identifying the more enigmatic aspects of documentary life cycles. I then turn to reflect on what these afterlives can tell us about the archival spaces of this administrative setting. By examining the muqṭaʿs’ paperwork, I highlight shifts in meaning that documents underwent over time, calling attention to the phenomenon of casual storage, or “documents lying around.”

Soundscaping the Archives: Disrupting Boundaries through Sensory Research

Through this paper, we seek to re-imagine and challenge the meaning of archival spaces. While archival spaces are repositories of information, they are also sites where cultural values and public memory are shaped, and forms of power enacted. Drawing on sensory ethnography research in the Le Corbusier archives in Paris, France, we consider how boundaries are disrupted through noise, echo, reverberations, buzzing, and other “sounds.” Our work is presented in two overlapping textures: a soundtrack, with recordings from the Le Corbusier archives; and the text written out below. Alongside tracing archival soundscapes, a secondary function of this paper is to find our way with voice. In our experiences, ethnography is an embodied method, personal and context-specific. This made engaging with the two sets of “I’s” within our work, ultimately, a reflexive and collective process that happened over many conversations. We have chosen to keep “I” and clarify, as much as possible, whose experience is being shared.