Traditional Archives Research Articles

Study on the Archives Management System of Aviation Products Based on MBD

With the model based definition (MBD) technology widely used in the aviation industry, the traditional archives management mode had seriously hampered the market response speed of aviation products. Firstly, the paper analyzed the formation process of the MBD-based aviation product archives data. Secondly, the paper designed an integrated system framework of MBD-based aviation product archives, which employed the strategy "immediate logical archiving, regular physical archiving. Finally, the paper proposed the functional module of the MBD-based aviation product archives management system (MBDAMS), which was benefit for the automated, knowledge-based management of the aviation product archives. The MBDAMS has the engineering practical value and the good application prospect.

Archiveras anarquistas: Corporal Testimony in the Work of Diamela Eltit

Abstract: There exists a constant within the trajectory of Diamela Eltit’s contributions to New Chilean Fiction: the turn to the body’s revelatory capacity as a corporal archive of human existence. Simultaneously exploring and rejecting the confines of the traditional testimonial reliance on language, Eltit moves the reader to a re-consideration of the truth-telling function of the biological materiality of the body, placing imperfect corporalities on display as a means of speaking, even where the voice itself may falter. This essay locates Eltit’s move to the corporal within the trajectory of feminist criticism, the traumatic realities of the Chilean dictatorship and post-dictatorship periods, and the search for the recuperation of those bodily knowledges represented by the disappeared. Next, it turns to Eltit’s Impuesto a la carne as her most recent re-visioning of the importance of corporal textualities, whether or not the subject-matter of the body’s denunciation is connected to the dictatorship. Lastly, this essay reconsiders the rejective power of the traditional archive, analyzing the effect set models have on those who seek to tell their stories outside of the traditional testimonial model. I argue that the case of Diamela Eltit is an example of the way writers and producers of cultural texts which actively inscribe alternative memories of the past are resisting the authoritative power of the archive and subversively inscribing narrative memory onto bodily materialities, re-orienting the view of the corporal from an evidentiary showing to an active process of re-telling the past. Eltit’s novels, inscribed with her corporal textual model, give voice to survivors, articulating an alternate historical model for the archive, embracing the biological and making it speak against the rigid abuses of authoritarianism.

Fill/Flash/Memory: A History of Flash Mobs

This essay offers a genealogy/history of flash mobs, a form of performance that emerged on the streets of New York City in 2003. Through the construction of both a comparative analysis with the traditional archive, as well as a performative genealogy based upon the work of Michel Foucault and Joseph Roach, I reveal a network of specific practices and behaviors linking flash mobs to the historical avant-garde and other less-acclaimed sites of performance, as well as examining the particular characteristics of flash mobs that make them unique performance events.

Triumph in My Song: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century African Atlantic Culture, History, and Performance Conference (review)

Reviewed by: Triumph in My Song: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century African Atlantic Culture, History, and Performance Conference Aaron M. Tobiason (bio) Triumph in My Song: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century African Atlantic Culture, History, and Performance Conference. University of Maryland, College Park May 31-June 2, 2012. In The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2003), Diana Taylor presents a concise history of the interdisciplinary field of performance studies. She articulates what she sees as one of the most important contributions of the field, arguing that "by taking performance seriously as a system of learning, sorting, and transmitting knowledge, performance studies allows us to expand what we understand by 'knowledge'" (16). Taylor surveys the "rift" she discerns in traditional approaches to scholarship (specifically) and human history (in general), a gulf between what she terms the archive and the repertoire, the former consisting of "texts, documents, buildings, bones," and the latter embracing less tangible cultural artifacts, such as "spoken language, dance, sports, ritual" (19). She suggests that scholars may obtain a more complete picture of the phenomenal world by consulting both the archive and the repertoire, and that the field of performance studies facilitates both a particular conception of knowledge—as that which is embodied and manifested in performance—and an accompanying set of heuristic tools applicable to a variety of subjects whose nature renders them incompatible with the rigid materialism of the archive. In many ways, a desire to explore the productive potential of uniting these ostensibly incompatible epistemologies seems to have been at the core of the "Triumph in My Song" Conference held at the University of Maryland, May 31—June 2, 2012. In particular, the program's interdisciplinary approach and innovative integration of performance was well suited to the conference topic; historians of any diasporic or subjugated population have long grappled with the fact that their subjects rarely leave the type of direct [End Page 267] evidence that can be preserved in the archive, while scholars of performance must confront similar absences when studying a form that, by its very nature, is unrecoverable and ephemeral. At several points, "Triumph in My Song" suggested ways the inclusion of evidence from the repertoire can complement or enhance research drawing on traditional archival material. One of the Society of Early Americanists "special topics" conferences, "Triumph in My Song" was also supported by the American Society for Theatre Research; the University of Maryland's College of Arts and Humanities, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, and School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies; and the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora. The conference featured a wide range of topics to correspond with this broad funding base, including presentations and performances by historians, literary scholars, ethnomusicologists, and theater scholars and practitioners. Many of the sessions engaged with the notion of "performance" in some fashion, approaches that can be grouped into three general categories: those that took types of performance as their subject matter; those that used performance as a metaphor for the ways relationships between individuals and institutions were established, maintained, or challenged; and those that embraced performance as methodology and heuristic technique. Of course, the challenge for any author writing a conference review is the inability to attend every session. Accordingly, this review offers what I hope will be a representative sampling of the work presented throughout the three-day event. It was in the first session of the conference, "Voices from the Past," that one of the most fitting examples of performance as metaphor, as well as the potential value of studying both the archive and the repertoire, appeared. Sydney Nathans, in a paper entitled "Alabama Griot: Oral History and Re-Scripting the Plantation Past," related the process of constructing a narrative for enslaved African Americans whose absence from the traditional archive is nearly total, but whose memory and legacy endure in oral histories. He related how his (ad)ventures outside the archive revealed apparent contradictions in the evidence documenting the forced migration of slaves from North Carolina to Alabama in 1844. Ultimately, Nathans's discussion demonstrated the value of reading the...

Going beyond data collection in ethnography: Options for bridging the gap between researchers and archivists

This article investigates options for bridging the missing link between ethnographic field research and archiving. It interrogates the place of archiving in the entire fieldwork process and the roles played by researchers and archivists in promoting access. While a number of reasons explain the gap between research and archiving, the article identifies lack of collaboration as the main challenge. Borrowing from the postmodernist theoretical framework, the article argues that archivists cannot detach themselves from data collection, because the decisions they make are not objective but personal and subjective. The conclusion and main message are that digital technology, in spite of its many advantages, may not deliver all that it promises to data collection and archiving. There is a need to complement digital technology data collection and archiving with traditional archiving methods because of the latter's reliability and cost effectiveness.

Transmedia Beckett: Come and Go and the Social Media Archive

Beckett’s late works for film, theatre, and television approach the condition of installation pieces, minimalistic and iterative texts that resemble instruction manuals more than theatre. At the same time, these works are preoccupied with archival themes: personal and public memory, history, documents and their technical media. While his works interrogate the condition of archives, Beckett’s own archive is characterized by the increasing visibility in Beckett’s later texts of elaborate instructions, maps, and charts, as in the diagrams that fill the text of Quad . Yet, Beckett’s authorial control over his works became known for its insistence on media specificity, the reluctance to translate a work from one medium to another. Beckett’s “extraliterary” texts (as Gontarski and Chris Ackerly have described them) strive to become their own archive, not as a definitive version recorded in film or technical media, but as sets of instructions to be repeated, and thus capable of producing their own series of iterations. These iterations, in fact, characterize contemporary media archives, as they become organized according to the modular logic of a database over and against the temporal logic of the traditional archive. This essay conceptualizes the archive of Beckett’s works in a transmedia context in which concepts of “work” and “author” no longer function to authorize discrete versions of Beckett’s extraliterary texts.

Balancing Boutique-Level Quality and Large-Scale Production: The Impact of “More Product, Less Process” on Digitization in Archives and Special Collections

Introduction Few writings within the realms of archives and special collections have reverberated throughout the field to the degree of Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner’s 2005 article “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing.”1 Its clarion call to shift archival arrangement and description away from time-consuming, detailed processes toward rapid, minimalist strategies was met with both cheers and groans that continue unabated. In a sign of its ubiquity, the approach advocated by Greene and Meissner is now simply referred to as “MPLP,” and its implementation is the subject of ongoing discussion in numerous venues, including professional journals, conference . . .

European digital archive on soil maps (EuDASM): preserving important soil data for public free access

Historical soil survey paper maps are valuable resources that underpin strategies to support soil protection and promote sustainable land use practices, especially in developing countries where digital soil information is often missing. However, many of the soil maps, in particular those for developing countries, are held in traditional archives that are not easily accessible to potential users. Additionally, many of these documents are over 50 years old and are beginning to deteriorate. Realising the need to conserve this information, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the ISRIC-World Soil Information foundation have created the European Digital Archive of Soil Maps (EuDASM), through which all archived paper maps of ISRIC has been made accessible to the public through the Internet. The immediate objective is to transfer paper-based soil maps into a digital format with the maximum possible resolution and to ensure their preservation and easy disclosure. More than 6,000 maps from 135 countries have been captured and are freely available to users through a user-friendly web-based interface. Initial feedback has been very positive, especially from users in Africa, South America and Asia to whom archived soil maps were made available to local users, often for the first time. Link: http://eusoils.jrc.ec.europa.eu/library/maps/country_maps/list_countries.cfm

Legacy of Partition, 1947–2009: Creating New Archives from the Memories of Leicestershire People

The project entitled Legacy of Partition, 1947–2009, funded at the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland by the Museums, Libraries and Archives partnership, was aimed at gathering the memories of Leicestershire people who lived through the upheaval of Indian partition in 1947 and exploring the understanding of these events among the younger generation today. The article explores the methodology of the oral history interviews, the new resources collected by the archive as a result of the project, the inter-generational learning that resulted in the schools which piloted the teaching resources, and the implications of such community projects for the traditional archive, involving people who never thought of themselves as having any interest in history as depositors of records for the future.

Toward an understanding of archives as a feature of collective memory

This paper reviews important aspects of the literature on collective memory, how some of these concerns have been expressed in archives, and contemplates how these issues relate to the politically transformative South African post-apartheid context. It highlights the erosion of boundaries between archives, museums, and other less-institutionalized memory projects in post-apartheid South Africa. It notes ways in which archival activity is taking place outside of traditional archives, as part of a changing and evolving memory landscape. It acknowledges the significant gaps in the written record that are a result of apartheid practices and cites different approaches that were overlooked by apartheid’s official archival systems. This paper offers a way of contemplating the ‘social constructedness’ of collective memory and the social and political dimensions of archives.

La heurística digital y el estudio histórico de los procesos de globalización

This article reflects upon the pertinence of digital sources for the study of the political, economic, social, and cultural processes of globalization. After presenting some basic themes related to these processes, it provides various illustrative examples of the contributions that telematic documentation offers as a specific product of global culture and as a heuristic input that permits its analysis. It also issues a word of caution regarding the diversity and heterogeneity that characterize the archives of cyberspace which, besides residing in repositories different from traditional archives, have different formats and content than historians are generally accustomed to.

Long-term Access to Archival Materials That are Not in a Traditional Archives

This paper explores issues surrounding historical archive materials that are currently not housed in a conventional archive, using a case study of biomedical illustrations created for the textbook, Grant's Atlas of Anatomy. The paper explores the following issues:• Resolving intellectual property issues when a commercial publisher owns the copyright to archival materials with high research value;• Determining what are the archival copies - the original drawings or the digital copies and where both the originals and the digital copies should be housed;• Ensuring long-term sustainability for digital archival materials that are not housed in a traditional archives.Our multi-disciplinary research project team is seeking solutions that meet the needs of all the stakeholders while ensuring the drawings are available for current and future generations of researchers. The answers lie in creative dialog between the rightsholders, the medical illustrator creator community, researchers and archivists. For the Grant's Atlas illustrations, the dialogue has at least begun.

Outside the Hollywood Canon: Preserving Lesbian Moving Images

By examining restoration projects completed by the Outfest Legacy Project for LGBT Film Preservation—a collaboration between Outfest and the UCLA Film & Television Archive—this essay articulates the unique challenges that the preservation and conservation of lesbian moving images have historically posed for traditional archives.

Women in Early America: Recharting Hemispheric and Atlantic Desire

Women in Early America: Recharting Hemispheric and Atlantic Desire Tamara Harvey The articles in this special issue of Legacy treat literary and nonliterary writers and texts, span the Americas from the Andes to the St. Lawrence River, and explore women’s engagements with economic, political, social, and religious discourses. Some explicitly address cultural encounters and global circulations, while others rethink cultural paradigms less directly concerned with the transnational. They expand the traditional archive of women writers’ works to include accounts of Indies (narrations of services rendered to the Crown in the Americas) sent to the king of Spain by encomenderas (women who held grants of Indian labor from the Spanish crown), letters and Lives of noteworthy Native Catholic women, portraits, court depositions, and even the hard-hearted silence of the accused in early New England execution sermons. All in some way embrace key moves in the study of early American women over the past twenty years: They refuse a simple victim/oppressor dichotomy, and their theoretical interventions push us to rethink the map of the Americas with a critical eye sharply focused on the limits of ideological paradigms that tacitly locate Woman in the place of Other without taking full account of women.1 In many ways, the study of women in the early Americas has never been more robust. Work on women throughout the Americas, including European, African, and Native women, both free and enslaved, has profited from decades of groundbreaking scholarly attention not only to those whose names appeared on the title pages of books but also to women whose texts were hidden in the works of others, stagnating in untapped manuscript archives, or awaiting interpretive methodologies that could address oral and material texts. And yet, in the metaphors of maps and routes that frequently dominate the fields of Atlantic, transnational, and hemispheric studies, women can seem to be pushed to the margins, left to lounge in the cartouches of mappae mundi [End Page 159] or to stand duty as figureheads on the bows of ships. Interrogating the maps and metaphors used to situate the colonial Americas globally is a (necessary) commonplace in theoretical considerations of this field, whether attention is given to an expansion beyond nationally defined cultural geographies or to a troubling or layering of multiple perspectives and encounters. Complicating the relationship between peripheries and centers and multiplying the perspectives and consequences of innumerable incidents of encounter are crucial gestures, as is thinking about the power and aporia of maps themselves.2 Still, it may be argued that the study of early American women, especially in comparative contexts, is particularly troubled by maps and the metaphors derived from them, in part because women themselves are so frequently deployed as their vehicles and ornaments. The fertile land, the emblematic Native woman (Malintzin and Pocahontas, for instance), the exceptional woman used to validate or impugn colonial projects in the metropole—these feminized metaphors point to the desires that shape colonialism and its subjects. Adding to the challenge of these metaphors are the many differences among women that shape and mobilize their sense of themselves, their relationships to others, including other women, and their engagement with a host of religious, legal, and political institutions and discourses, all of which render the usefulness of maps for understanding women’s experiences across geographical and social locations particularly vexed. For this very reason, attending to women may help us better to deal with the trouble with maps that drives so much contemporary scholarship. Important work is being done on women in Atlantic, transatlantic, and hemispheric studies, often framed by caveats much like my own: A great deal remains to be done, both because the enterprise is necessarily labor intensive and because the neglect of women within current discussions of global studies during the colonial period persists, except among specialists. Citing only collections and collaborations, how we might more fully incorporate women into work on the Americas after the transnational turn has been explored in Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf’s Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800); a recent issue of the bilingual journal Letras Femeninas edited by Amanda Powell and Stacey Schlau and organized as a festschrift for Electa Arenal...

The City of Roses—The Green City—Portland, Oregon

Located at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers in the heart of the Pacific Northwest, Portland was an ideal choice for the joint meeting of the National Council on Public History and the American Society for Environmental History. Incorporated in 1851, Portland is a relatively old city for the American West, yet it is also a thoroughly modern city that celebrates its reputation as the most environmentally friendly or “green” city in the United States. Through historic preservation, Portland has found a way to protect its historic resources and engage in environmentally sustainable forms of modernization. The sites reviewed for this issue of The Public Historian reflect Portland’s environmentalism, its commitment to historic preservation, and its diverse cultural history. Our reviewers visited traditional museums, archives, and historic sites. They also explored the city’s unique offerings in historic preservation and cutting-edge efforts to incorporate green technologies into adaptive reuse projects. We begin with Debbie Bahn’s assessment of the venerable Oregon Historical Society and History Museum. Bahn notes that the museum is one of the primary cultural and historical attractions in Portland and serves as the de facto state museum. As such, the society’s collections, museum, research library, and educational programs seek to address the diverse experience of Oregonians. TPH 32-4 11/30/10 4:32 PM Page 110

Introduction to Multimedia Reviews

Images of buildings are in a sense the raw material of architectural historians. Often when we think of our favorite historian we think of the slides she or he uses or the particular images that illustrate their texts. In the digital age, the production, archiving, circulation, presentation, and publication of images has profoundly changed, raising a whole new set of historiographic practices and questions. Access to images has been transformed and thereby so has the access they offer to buildings. Scholars can draw on an ever-expanding array of image sources from traditional archives, new collective upload sites for historians such as SAHARA, to public upload sites on the internet. The exchange of images between scholars is greatly facilitated, enabling new kinds of collegial debate. On the other hand, the expanding image field may be increasingly restrained by new kinds of copyright restriction. There is a quantum leap in the complexity of this debate when images are embedded in the buildings themselves, as when the SAH tags buildings in Chicago to reveal the history of the building to a web-enabled smart phone. The relationship between image and building is going through a transformation potentially as significant as the arrival of photography itself. These reviews monitor some of the key symptoms in this inevitable repositioning of the historian.

MPLP @ 5: More Access, Less Backlog?

Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner published their influential article “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing” five years ago. This study assesses the impact of the methodologies expounded by Greene and Meissner on processing and reference in the archival profession. A broad survey of American archivists conducted in the fall of 2009 is the basis for our exploration of the extent to which the “MPLP” principles have thus far generally decreased collection backlogs and increased researcher access to collections.

ラオス北部，ルアンナムター県訪問記

ラオス北部，ルアンナムター県訪問記

Investigations on buried soils and colluvial layers around Bronze Age burial mounds at Bornhöved (northern Germany): an approach to test the hypothesis of `landscape openness' by the incidence of colluviation

The idea of open landscapes around prehistoric burial mounds is founded on their topographical position and findings of plaggen clots within the hills at some sites. We have investigated the surroundings of four Bronze Age burial mounds at Bornhöved (northern Germany) to test whether this assumed landscape openness enabled soil erosion and colluviation or not. The soils and colluvia within a watershed below the burial mounds were investigated in six large exposures and additional auger cores. The chronology is based on 21 AMS-radiocarbon dates, complemented by charcoal analysis and the content of selected heavy metals in the sediments. Colluvia were deposited in the Late Neolithic (~2500—2200 cal. BC), Roman Emperor Times (~ 250—400 cal. AD), Mediaeval Times (~ AD 600—1400) and Modern Times (~ AD 1800—2000). Our findings indicate that the soil surfaces were protected against soil erosion during the phase of Bronze Age funeral use (~ cal. 1800—600 BC). Either the prehistoric gravediggers practised a well suited form of pasturing to keep the scenery open or the surroundings of the burial mounds were forested at the time of funeral use. The results of charcoal analysis reflect the known succession of woody taxa in the region and underline the great potential of anthracology on colluvial layers for palaeoenvironmental reconstructions apart from traditional archives such as lakes or mires. Bulk radiocarbon dating of organic matter overestimated the time of burial of a buried soil as well as the time of deposition of colluvial layers considerably.

Minimal Processing: Its Context and Influence in the Archival Community

ABSTRACT Since its publication in 2005, of Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner's “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing” has led to much discussion and self-examination within the archival community about working through backlogs. This article discusses the impact of Greene and Meissner's work and considers the questions and implications that the possible implementation of minimal processing provokes, in relation to financial, time, and privacy considerations, among others.