Contemporary Archives Research Articles

АРХИВЫ РЕСПУБЛИКИ КОРЕЯ: ИСТОРИКО-ДОКУМЕНТАЛЬНОЕ НАСЛЕДИЕ

The article discusses the history of collecting, preservation and use of the documentary heritage of South Korea. It also analyses the historical experience of collecting sources since ancient times. It is underlined that in Korea special attention has traditionally been granted to history and archives since the establishment of the History Department in the 10th century. The paper describes the main stages in the formation of the archival heritage of Korea. It deals with the notion of the so called “silllok” - the sources for the “chonsa” dynastic records - that turned out to be short everyday notes and weather chronicles. It is emphasized that seven hand-written South Korean historic masterpieces were included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme. The history of the creation of different national archives, manuscript departments and libraries as well as the main trends in their activities are being analyzed; the article also features the composition of the archives and the contents of their documentary funds. A network of the contemporary archives of the Republic of Korea is presented. The article accentuates that it is necessary to study and use the South Korean experience in electronic document management in present-day practice, including the system of electronic document turnover at state organizations which is connected with the electronic archives and the verification system of historic electronic signatures.

Archives, Quo Vadis et Cum Quibus?: Archivists’ self-perceptions and perceptions of users of contemporary archives

User studies are a rather neglected field in the archival area. This is becoming problematic, as more and more archives are developing online services and collections, becoming available to wider public. We can assume that this transformation will affect archival practice, much like in libraries, and require more knowledge of users’ needs, behavior, and skills. It is unclear how much archivists are aware of these developments. This is particularly the case in those countries where archives have only recently started to consider digitization and online presence and where no user studies have yet been made, like Slovenia (SLO) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BIH), the focus of this study. A qualitative study is presented which deals with the archivists’ perceptions, within the context of physical and digital archives, of the characteristics of the users, archivists’ educational opportunities regarding user-related issues, and competences needed by professional archivists and by users. Data were collected with interviews and surveys. The results enable an initial insight into archival user types and their characteristics, and the formation of a competence model for a professional archivist. The results have implications for archival theory, practice and education and can also be used in planning future archival user studies.

MEMORY INSTITUTIONS: DEPOSITORIES, THEATRES, TREASURIES OR DATA BASES?

Archives, museums and libraries appeared in the whirl of changes inspired by the introduction of new communication technology which initiated transition from print to digital culture. The time of change is the time of creating future visions and scenarios of archives, museums and libraries. These institutions are frequently called „memory institutions“ in order to higlight their common roles in communicating memory. Often speculations and metaphors of memory institutions (e.g. library/archive as computer, digital repositories etc.) lack clear understanding of what memory is. Therefore, the main objective of this article is to define and evaluate paradigms of memory communication, which determine strategies of cultural heritage dissemination in the contemporary archives, museums and libraries, and assess both their roots and future perspectives. For this purpose current knowledge about communication of memory in archival science, museology and library science is summarised; major principles of memory communication in archives, libraries and museums are generalised, Abstractbasing on the theories of memory; and current paradigms of memory communication as well as their development are analysed, relying on the ars memoriae research. Two paradigms of memory communication have been distinguished: memory-as-computer and memory-as-theater. It is concluded that communication of memory requires integration of two dimensions: 1) social, which covers contextualisation of cultural heritage resources with reference to present needs of societies and 2) narrative, which refers to meaningful structures that transform heritage objects into meaningful stories of the past. It is concluded that memory-as-computer paradigm neglects the necessity of heritage contextualization and interpretation because it relies on the statement that there is a universal code for representation and management of any information. With increasing volumes of cultural heritage available online these collections may become meaningless to users. The paradigm of memory-as-theater demonstrates an increased interest to the new ways of interaction between users and heritage objects in the digital environment; however, the same as the first paradigm it ignores social objectives and context for communication of memory. In this light, the third paradigm, providing an integral approach to all dimensions of memory communication should be developed.

Building the Neo-Archive

Abstract Dionne Brand's memoir, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, touches on the author's childhood in Trinidad and adulthood in Canada but is equally concerned with understanding and intervening in the larger histories among which Brand situates her identity. A lush work of memories, poetry, and criticism, the work presents vignettes from the author's life alongside her meditations on writing, history, mapmaking, and most important for this essay, the archives. Brand's memoir is replete with supporting materials that range from ffteenth-century journals and letters to contemporary critical theory, from geographers' logs to films and pop culture. Her sources are rich and varied, and they can be broken down into three general types: the historical archives written during the “age of exploration” and the slave trade; the contemporary archives of newspapers and journals; and the creative archive of postcolonial writers, or what I am calling the neo-archive. Brand's memoir participates in an entire genre of postcolonial and in particular Caribbean literature that addresses the colonial archive. She thus provides a singular overview of the neo-archive by bringing many of these texts into dialogue with one another, and she explores as well the dialogue between such texts and the dozens of archival fragments she incorporates into her self-portrait.

The “Gout of the Medici”: Making the modern diagnosis using paleopathology

Documentary sources show that painful joint disease afflicted several members of the Medici family, which dominated Renaissance Florence in Italy. The term frequently reported in contemporary archives to indicate these morbid episodes is “gout.” Paleopathology allows us to verify the nosological information obtained from the written documents and to clarify the nature of the rheumatological condition that afflicted the Medici.A paleopathological study carried out on the skeletal remains of several members of the Medici family buried in the basilica of S. Lorenzo in Florence demonstrated that the “gout” of the Medici was truly a uric acid gout only in Ferdinand I (1549–1609), whose left foot showed peculiar lesions. Genetic and environmental factors, with particular regard to diet, may have been involved in the etiology of this disease, which in Ferdinand was associated with diffuse idiopatic skeletal hyperostosis (DISH). DISH was observed also in the column of Cosimo the Elder (1389–1464) and Cosimo I (1519–1574); a link between the incidence of DISH and high social status, especially in terms of lifestyle and nutritional patterns, has been suggested and the present study seems to further confirm this association. Finally, rheumatoid arthritis (RA) was diagnosed in Cosimo the Elder, Piero “the Gouty” (1416–1469) and Cardinal Carlo (1596–1666); as for Carlo, macroscopic and radiological findings were supported by molecular results which revealed that he was bearing the specificity HLA-DR4 predisposing to RA. The coexistence of DISH and RA attested in Cosimo the Elder can be interpreted as coincidental.In conclusion, the term “gout” as used in Renaissance texts has to be regarded as the clinical manifestation of a number of different joint diseases. In the case of the Medici family in Florence, these included DISH, rheumatoid arthritis and uric acid gout.

DOKUMENTAS IR / AR PRISIJAUKINTAS VALDŽIOS ŽVILGSNIS: „BLOKADOS“ ARCHYVAS

The article questions the order of contemporary film archive working with cinematic documents of mass extermination, dying and suffering. It scrutinizes how the forms of historical memory based on archive footage are constructed, what “acceptance” of these forms by general and professional public tells us about the collective identity of “acceptees” and the configuration of their historical memory. The main material is the World War II archive footage films, primarily films about the Holocaust and the Leningrad Siege.The general framework of the article is based on the question of historical memory forms and the peculiarities of its cinematic construction. It starts with the concept of (war) archive (Michel Foucault, Allan Sekula) and moves to the re-interpretation of visual documents from the WWII in the European experimental film and visual arts. Then it surveys the ways of conceptualizing the experience of witnessing / looking at the sites challenging the limits of humanity (Giorgio Agamben, Georges Didi-Huberman). Finally, it analyses in detail the film “The Siege” (2006) by Sergei Loznitsa, a “consensual” film in regard to the common understanding of “the truth of the blockade”.The analysis shows what the form of archive is created / supported by the narrative strategies of the film, first of all by the visual and sound montage, what kind of power position it transmits, and how this film answers the question about the meaning of the WWII representation in Russia today. Thus structured, the article “tests” whether the interpretative models and vocabulary of the “paradigmatic” – Holocaust – case in terms of visual representation are applicable / limited in discussing other cases of mass killing, dying, or suffering, here – the Leningrad blockade.The analysis of “The Siege” by Loznitsa shows that the historical memory consensus in the form of film (probably not only in Russia) pays its price: it engages into the retro-scenario (Jean Baudrillard, Thomas Elsaesser). It proves that archiving conventions are hardly to change significantly as long as the order of “witnessing” is grounded in the institutionally arranged archive and dominant modes of representation. Finally, “The Siege” demonstrates the validity and the limits of the Soviet version of the WWII cultural mythology still offering the ground for the collective positive identity: the WWII myth works until the enemies are punished and the Victory firework cast.

Archiving in the Age of Digital Conversion: Notes for a Politics of "Remains"

����� ��� Over the last few decades, the public institutions responsible for archiving have been confronted with new challenges arising from electronic communication. Nevertheless, as a specialist in such national institutions has noted, “although some actions have been taken, digital preservation research and implementation are still in their infancy” (Steenbakkers). There have been numerous inquiries and research projects on archiving, and there is no doubt that studies on the digitalization of manuscripts, printed matter, photos, films, sound recordings and more have resulted in a number of short- or intermediate-term solutions. However, solutions often differ from country to country, and the rapidly evolving techniques for preserving and reproducing require frequent updating. Hence the problems posed still need to be pondered in their breadth and depth. The archive is located at the intersection, on the one hand, of the materiality of the means of preservation and communication of documents, and on the other hand, of the relationships of power and of the institutions of the past. The archive is a particular case of social transmission. One could even say that it transforms a text, an image, or a sound into a document, in the same way that a rubber stamp gives a letter an official status. The archive is an authorization to endure beyond the ephemerality that characterizes human productions. In the strict sense, an archive is “an assemblage of documents, no matter what their form or their material support, whose increase is ensured automatically through the activities of a private or public person” (Andre, 29). However, it is judicious also to think of the archive as every trace of the past that has been documented, thus giving it an authority (at least potential) by this act of conservation or of extraction. Now, in the age of digital communication, the ways of recording our present have mutated. Thus it is essential to address the question of the contemporary archive with epistemological and historical breadth, in order to better grasp its difficulties and possibilities. These stakes concern not only archival technology, though this is important. Recall the Stasi archives recovered ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall: they were on the hard drive of an obsolete computer, whose

The legend of Black Friday

The Women's Social and Political Union (W.S.P.U.) wove around itself a series of legends contributing to a mythology, which continues to be repeated as suffragette history. This article examines this mythology's centrepiece, the legend of ‘Black Friday’, the allegation that suffragettes were brutally attacked by the police during demonstrations between 18 and 23 November 1910. It challenges the accepted story by rigorous use of archive sources – principally contemporary newspapers and National Archives files – and offers conclusions which should lead to a searching reassessment of W.S.P.U. tactics and methods.

Present Past

Book Review| January 01 2009 Present Past Susan Meiselas: In History International Center Of PhotographyNew York City September 19, 2008–January 4, 2009Susan Meiselas: In History By Caroline Brothers, et al. New York: Steidl/ICP, 2008356 pp./$75.00 (hb) Mitra Abbaspour Mitra Abbaspour MITRA ABBASPOUR is a doctoral candidate at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is currently writing her dissertation on contemporary archives of Middle Eastern photography, among them Susan Meiselas's “akaKurdistan.” Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2009) 36 (4): 31–32. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2009.36.4.31 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mitra Abbaspour; Present Past. Afterimage 1 January 2009; 36 (4): 31–32. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2009.36.4.31 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2009 Afterimage/Visual Studies Workshop, unless otherwise noted. Reprints require written permission and acknowledgement of previous publication in Afterimage.2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Sublime Excess of the American Landscape : Dances with Wolves and Sunchaser as Healing Landscapes

The author analyses the landscapes of the films Dances with Wolves by Kevin Costner and Sunchaser by Michael Cimino, considering them as "theatres of memory" in which numerous arts are "remediated" for the screen. Here the conflictual relationship Americans have with the native Other as an "obstacle" to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny is projected onto its landscapes, staged and recomposed on them. In Dances with Wolves, the hero's new name suggests the loss of his American subjectivity, his links with the natives and a revisionist version of Manifest Destiny. In Sunchaser also the east-west dynamic illustrates the hope for rebirth and rebellion. Here the "pyramidal sublime" of the mountain is the signifier that motivates the road movie of the two heroes. The sequence in which they ride on horses together with the natives condenses the landscape culture's various strata. Film landscapes are a part of the contemporary archive of remediations : they instigate a conflictual memory and produce emblems of cinematic iconological "excess."

Who forgot Paul Broca? The origin of language as test case for speciation theory Jürgen Trabant & Sean Ward (eds.), New essays on the origin of language (Trends in Linguistics). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001. Pp. vi+258. Morten H. Christiansen & Simon Kirby (eds.), Language evolution (Studies in the Evolution of Language 3). Oxford: Oxford University Press,

In December 1999, as part of its tricentenary celebrations, the Berlin Academy of Sciences invited eleven speakers to discuss the Origin of Language (cf. the Trabant & Ward volume, henceforth T&W). In March 2000 a workshop (Crow 2002a) under the auspices of the British Academy and the UK Academy of Medical Sciences, ‘The speciation of modern Homo sapiens’, addressed the same problem. The speciation of Homo sapiens and the origins of language are surely two sides of the same coin. At about the same time, the Christiansen & Kirby volume on Language Evolution (henceforth C&K) was conceived at the Fifth Australasian Cognitive Science Conference. Together the contributions of these volumes constitute a substantial contemporary archive on the origin of language. Their publication provides an opportunity to review the status of attempts to account for the evolution of language. Do the contributions converge on a solution?

Widespread occurrence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis DNA from 18th-19th century Hungarians.

A large number (265) of burials from 1731-1838 were discovered in sealed crypts of the Dominican Church, Vác, Hungary in 1994. Many bodies were naturally mummified, so that both soft tissues and bones were available. Contemporary archives enabled the determination of age at death, and the identification of family groups. In some cases, symptoms before death were described and, occasionally, occupation. Initial radiological examination of a small number of individuals had indicated calcified lung lesions and demonstrable acid-fast bacteria suggestive of tuberculosis infection. Tuberculosis was endemic in 18th-19th century Europe, so human remains should contain detectable Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTB) DNA, enabling comparisons with modern isolates. Therefore, a comprehensive examination of 168 individuals for the presence of MTB DNA was undertaken. Specific DNA amplification methods for MTB showed that 55% of individuals were positive and that the incidence varied according to age at death and sampling site in the body. Radiographs were obtained from 27 individuals and revealed an association between gross pathology and the presence of MTB DNA. There was an inverse relationship between PCR positivity and MTB target sequence size. In some cases, the preservation of MTB DNA was excellent, and several target gene sequences could be detected from the same sample. This information, combined with MTB DNA sequencing data and molecular typing techniques, will enable us to study the past epidemiology of TB infection, and extends the timeframe for studying changes in molecular fingerprints.

Archiving the present: the Vektor project for European contemporary art archives

The European Union-funded Vektor project has focused on the opportunities for documenting contemporary art material in European archives and making it accessible on the Internet. After three years of research Vektor is now publishing the results, amongst which is European Artnet, a website connecting a number of different archival collections and giving information on contemporary art in Europe.

Des archives à l'entretien et retour : une enquête en Nouvelle-Calédonie

Historians and Archives. An introduction to the publication of the report by Philippe Bélaval on the French National Archives: "Towards a future strategy for the National Archives" The archives are "in a turmoil", wrote Alain Erlande-Brandeburg, the Director of the French national archives. His successor, Phih'ppe Bélaval. appointed six months later by the Council of Ministers, sized up this indefinable, protean crisis in a report submitted to the Minister of Culture in November 1998 and made public in February 1999. The text. entitled Towards a future strategy for the National Archives, not only reviews twenty years of chaotic archive policy in France: it also proposes specific, ambitious solutions to equip the country with archives capable of responding to the democratic issues involved in the : "duty to remember" as well as the scientific requirements pertaining to the . use of sources. The reflection on the future centre of the modern and contemporary archives (posterior to 1789) allows Ph. Bélaval to take a broad , look at the entire system of archives in ' France in relation to their fundamental purposes and to launch a process of modernisation starting at top of the national archive network in connection -, with the : bill to reform archive regulations. The report is therefore important insofar -as it highlights directions for renovating the archive network. . It is equally important with regard to the method used in analysing both problems and solutions. Finally, it is important in its wish to underscore the political nature of the issue of archives, . which represent one of the main dynamic forces in social science research and a major source of democratic expression at the dawn of the 2b century. All of these aspects should give researchers in~ contemporary history an incentive to read the Bélaval report, and beyond that, to take up the challenges of archive policy. For them, it will involve abandoning a strictly utilitarian conception of the archives and, on the contrary, considering what would appear to be a technical domain as a place for thinking and experimenting in historical practices, as a . means of learning and of renewing the : historian's social functions, and as an occasion to widen the field of political history by questioning the complex system of relationships among the state, its archives and its citizens. This critical call to mobilise historians on the "French archive issue" does not release political authorities and archive officials from- assuming their own responsibilities, which in this case means turning f an administrative, technical and scientific segment of the state into an open issue shared by everyone, in line with what Ph. Bélaval has proposed in his report which : is published here for the first time with an introduction bv Vincent Duclert.

Dang'an: Contemporary Chinese Archives

Western scholars who have worked with records of imperial and Nationalist China are perhaps not so familiar with post-1949 archives.' This article introduces archives management in the People's Republic of China (PRC).2 For more than 2,000 years, Chinese written language has linked people who have locally different oral languages. This lends archives a political significance often taken for granted in China. There is profound respect for the antiquity of records (on bone, stone, bronze, bamboo, wood and silk as well as on paper), a respect that dignifies contemporary archives and archivists. Long archival traditions affect modern archives management and use of archives by scholars. Ordering history by imperial reigns and year within reigns persists in preference for chronological order rather than division into functional series. Court compilation of official histories survives as today's archivists compile and publish selected documents of historical events. During the 19th century, Western methods and forms of record-keeping were introduced and amalgamated with imperial methods of preservation and categorization, and may still be found in Chinese archives today. Soviet, German and American methods were absorbed partially during the 20th century. Archives work after 1949 was preoccupied with trying to pull together, restore and make useful the surviving remnants of a beleaguered past, and to build a systematic record of the present for useful social reference. The effort was aborted for a decade during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Since 1978, however, archive maintenance and management has received renewed attention and priority from central, provincial and local governments. Conditions and access are changing, although perhaps more slowly and inconsistently than seems tolerable to Western users. Only just rehabilitated and rejuvenated in the 1980s, the archival profession now faces reform of governmental and economic structures and the

Le service des archives contemporaines de la communauté urbaine de Strasbourg

Laurence Perry, The contemporary Record Office of the Strasbourg Urban Community. The service for contemporary archives of the urban community of Strasburg (27 membres) was created in 1992 to offer solutions to a very disorganized sector of activity. The team consists of 5 agents, who manage 3,3 linear km and a 300 sq.m. storing facility for plans. The service performs missions on semi-currents records, in terms of conservation and expertise. Thus, the necessary funding required respectively for the municipal archives and for the Urban community archives is much better defined.

The Record Group Concept in Contemporary Archives

The Record Group Concept in Contemporary Archives

Das Deutsche Rundfunkarchiv

The German Broadcasting Archives (Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv, DRA) in Frankfurt is a joint institution of the Association of publicservice broadcasting organisations of the Federal Republic of Germany (ARD) including RIAS BERLIN. The DRA collects, files, researches and makes accessible sound, picture and script documents concerning broadcasting in broadest sense. It has a Central-Catalogue to register radio and television programmes, a phonothek with historical soundrecordings of musical and contemporary history and Historical Archives for script documents and other papers concerning broadcasting history. The Central Cataloguing of Records (Zentrale Schallplattenkatalogisierung, ZSK) registers by EDP all record novelties of light music. Selected examples show how the work of the DRA functions in practise

Modern Organic Materials Meeting

responsible for a variety of artefacts: contemporary sculpture, textiles, film archives, modern furniture, paintings, industrial artefacts and objets d'art. The participants included curators, collectors and conservation scientists, but most were conservators. This balance was reflected in the speakers' programme, with the addition of representatives from industry and appropriate university research departments. The papers, published as preprints by S.S.C.R., fell into three broad categories. The first included basic information about polymers, their degradation and the development of the modern industry. A second, smaller section included information on both highand low-technology methods of identification in current use. The remaining papers presented interesting case histories on a variety of objects and materials.

The Toch and Zeisl Archives at UCLA: Samples of Southern California Activity to Preserve The Heritage of Its Emigre Composers

Since 1933 Southern California, with its film industry and temperate climate acting as magnets, has attracted scores of the emigre humanists and creative artists who have been forced to flee their native Europe. While the emigre contributions to society and culture have long been recognized and appreciated, only recently has interest in preserving this heritage in tangible form become manifest. The last ten to fifteen years have seen a flurry of activity in all fields of creative endeavor. The resulting breadth of coverage in Southern California is now impressive indeed, ranging from the Richard J. Neutra Collection housed in the Special Collections Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, to the Lion Feuchtwanger Library at the University of Southern California, from the Collection Marta Mierendorff, a veritable storehouse of information on emigres in the theater and in the film industry, to the wide-ranging Oral History of the Arts Archive at California State University, Long Beach.' In music specifically, there is comparable exciting activity to report: the Ernst Toch and Eric Zeisl Archives at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Contemporary Music Archives at the University of California, San Diego, which will include the Ernst Krenek Collection; and the Arnold Schoenberg Institute at the University of Southern California. The purpose of each Archive extends beyond that of passive repository. Recent years have seen Ernst Toch and Ernst Krenek Festivals in Southern California, while the Arnold Schoenberg Institute sponsors