Traditional Archives Research Articles

Veranderingen in archiefvorming en archiefgebruik in een veranderende samenleving 1747-18471

Abstract Changing Society, Changing Archives 1747-1847 Developments in Dutch society and government in the first half of the nineteenth century led to changes in archival practices. The newly-established unitary state needed more and different information about society and people, and that information had to be managed and archived. However, after the Restoration in 1813 many traditional archiving practices were reintroduced. Aside from the function of government, collecting and publishing archival documents was not only (as in the eighteenth century) deemed necessary to bolster legal legitimacy, but was seen as a prerequisite for writing local, provincial, and national histories. A small number of cities and provincial governments appointed an archivist to serve the community by collecting and publishing archival documents.

Born digital: The Black lives matter movement and memory after the digital turn

The dominance of traditional, institutionalized archives and memory platforms has been more and more challenged by the emergence of digital networks and “peer-to-peer” memory practices. This article argues that memory practices on social media platforms provide minority groups with affordances that established archives do not. Therefore, I will analyze tweets, Tumblr posts and a YouTube video in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement in the USA. Social media platforms can act as alternative archives to institutionalized archives and related systems of knowledge and power. While traditional archives focus on the representation of events, memory practices on social media platforms can also stress structural and slow forms of violence and their embeddedness in the everyday, point to historical continuities and make memories travel, thus establishing transnational and transcultural networks of mnemonic entanglements.

Documentary monument collection in scientific libraries: Expanding and limiting innovations

Relevant issues of building the collections of documentary monuments in libraries are discussed: principal identification of monuments within the context of functional converging of modern libraries, archives and museums; traditional and innovative approaches to collection structuring, populating, expanding; specific character of museum and archival collections of this type. The author provides multiple examples of traditional archival and museum items included into science library collections provided that they legitimately belong to certain documentary monument type or in case they appear to comprise a well-defined documentary component. The author proves that these documentary monuments non-characteristic for library collections are nevertheless principal for scientific libraries though they may not dominate: the core collections of universal or specialized scientific libraries are made of printed books, other publications, unique and rare valuable publications and items. The current tasks of optimization and updating of documentary monument collections in scientific libraries call for creative non-standard solutions aimed at expansion and modernization of these collections taking into account increased typological variability, i. e. new types and groups of documentary monuments, including valuable digital documents, to be acquired. Innovative approaches have to be based on theoretical, methodological and specialized foundation of expertise, selection, description, preservation activities and revealing new, non-typical collections, as well as on inclusion corresponding disciplines into the librarians’ advanced training curricula. The author emphasizes, however, that modernization does not imply depreciating traditional forms of dealing with the monuments which is the classic of library theory and practice.

Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures

Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures

Until the Revolution: Analyzing the Politics, Pedagogy, and Curriculum of the Oakland Community School

In United States conversations about progressive pedagogy and alternative forms of education, the longstanding models that scholars used were predominantly white. African-American historians of education have problematized this narrative. More recently, the interdisciplinary field of Black Power studies has increased investigation into Afrocentric pedagogy and Black politically-engaged education after World War II (Rickford, 2016). While much attention has been paid to the freedom schools, educational sites run by Black revolutionary nationalists have received less attention. One particular site is the Oakland Community School (OCS), the Black Panther Party’s full-time day school. Initially a combined day-care and home school known as the Children’s House in 1970, the school changed to become the Intercommunal Youth Institute in 1971. It then operated as the Oakland Community School from 1974 until 1982, earning acclaim from the California Department of Education and the governor of California (Gore, Theoharis & Woodard, 2009). While multiple historical studies detail the pedagogical contours of the school and its community engagement, very few elicit the voices of former students. This work incorporates such voices, in conjunction with traditional archives and digital archival material, as a means of contextualizing the OCS within the Black Panther Party’s politics of the period and the school’s implications for contemporary education.

Life: A Huge Archive Electronic Archive Has Become an Urgent Necessity in the Face of Enormous Technological Advances

Smart devices collaborate in increasing the quantity of information hugely. Therefore, traditional archiving couldn’t support this explosion of information. The electronic archive will lead to many advantages such as faster access, privacy and security, data accessibility, and distribution of authorities between administrative levels. This paper will discuss electronic archiving and whether it is a necessity or an administrative luxury. This research shed some light on three main topics, which are general archiving, distributed database systems, and a case study.

Fact and Fiction: The Contribution of Archives to the Study of Literary Translation

This paper examines the role of traditional physical archives within Translation Studies research, investigating the contribution that such resources can add, providing information that otherwise would not be available in existing scholarly volumes, academic journals and digital material. The question is illustrated with the specific case of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and its first two translations into Italian, carried out respectively in 1936 by Cesare Giardini and 1950 by Fernanda Pivano. Both translations were published by Mondadori, Italy’s largest publishing company, as part of two different series, I romanzi della palma and the later Medusa collection.Adopting a microhistory approach, the study of these translations, through the resource-rich archives of the Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori in Milan, can shed light on a number of issues that the text alone cannot provide: documentation, including the other books published in the same series, highlights the target audience that Mondadori were seeking to address; the paratextual elements of the books themselves are revealing of the prominence (or otherwise) of American literature in general and Fitzgerald in particular within the Italian literary polysystem at the time of their publication; in the case of the first translation, readers’ reports on the novel indicate how the censors of the Fascist regime might receive the somewhat racy themes contained in the book, while, in the case of the 1950 translation, correspondence between the publisher, literary agents and the translator herself highlight the many issues surrounding the ultimate publication of the volume.

From provider to partner: how digital humanities sparked a change in Gale’s relationship with universities

The past decade has seen huge growth in the teaching and research of what is broadly called digital humanities (DH). Increases in computing power and data availability have seen a rise in individual researchers and research groups working on digital scholarship projects in the humanities, arts and social sciences. This article shows how publishers of traditional digital archives have adapted to the increasing prevalence of DH amongst their traditional customers. The success of this adaptation depends entirely on the relationship with the academic community, and Gale has seen a shift from being a provider of products to a partner, trusted to help libraries, scholars and institutions achieve their objectives. As a leading global provider of digital archives, Gale is well placed to review the current state of DH research and teaching, and this article will discuss significant academic events that have brought scholars, librarians and students together, and the lessons learned for institutions around the world looking to expand into DH. Finally, the article looks at how working to understand the common challenges and barriers to DH research and teaching has pushed many archive publishers to re-evaluate traditional archive publishing and enable new and innovative ways to explore the past.

Editors’ Introduction

> “Through this book, I imagine the possibility that later generations of media feminists might not have to do this work again: putting a stop, for a while at least, to this particular feminist ‘re’-cycle.” > > —Alexandra Juhasz, Women of Vision , 20011 > “Theories and concepts help order history, but critically informed production practice, an orientation of learning, thinking, and doing might move us out of these painful historical reveries.” > > —Angela J. Aguayo, Documentary Resistance , 20192 alexandra juhasz: In October 2017 I received …

Application of Three-dimensional Digital Model in Digital Archive Ubiquitous Intelligent Service

With the rapid development of information technology and mobile Internet technology as well as the rapid spread of smart phones, the way of the information obtained by people is more dependent on mobile devices. The traditional archive service model can no longer meet the needs of users. The way of archival information services should also keep up with the times. Based on the fully analysis of the current archival information service methods, the main modes of the current archive information service mode are analyzed in this paper. A three-dimensional digital model is put forward, The application of the three-dimensional digital model in the ubiquitous intelligent service of digital archives is studied. Its purpose is to organically combine archive management ideas, systems, organizational methods, management measures, and modernization of management talents, to further realize the sharing of archive information resources. It will provide an effective guarantee for the archives ubiquitous intelligent service.

Comparative Global Humanities After Man: Alternatives to the Coloniality of Knowledge

The core concept of ‘the human’ that anchors so many humanities disciplines – history, literature, art history, philosophy, religion, anthropology, political theory, and others – issues from a very particular modern European definition of Man ‘over-represented’ as the human. The history of modernity and of modern disciplinary knowledge formations are, in this sense, a history of modern European forms monopolizing the definition of the human and placing other variations at a distance from the human. This article is an interdisciplinary research that decenters Man-as-human as the subject/object of inquiry, and proposes a relational analytic that reframes established orthodoxies of area, geography, history and temporality. It also involves new readings of traditional archives, finding alternative repositories and practices of knowledge and collection to radically redistribute our ways of understanding the meaning of the human.

Information Management in Special Archives of Kolkata A Case Study


 
 
 Archives are the important information centre along with libraries and museums in respect to preservation of historical documents. And similar to libraries archives also exist in different categories like academic, special, governmental, newspaper and private archives. This article is dealing with one of this category and that is Special Archives. The research area that has been chosen for the data collection is central part of Kolkata. These archives are being studied to know how they are organising the documents and preserving them for future posterity. Finally, the paper tries to highlight the problems these traditional archives are facing in this digital era, especially handling of documents for digitising the archival materials. The problems are mainly related to skills and financial support for digitising the archival documents.
 
 

Gli orizzonti della conservazione. Le tre età dell’archivio e il ruolo dei sistemi di conservazione

Currently, in Italy digital preservation is regulated by the Digital Administration Code and the Technical Rules on conservation system. By analyzing the existing legislation and the recommendations reported in the three-year plan of the Agency for Digital Italy, the purposes of the current preservation model are investigated, in particular with respect to the traditional model of the three ages of archives. A proposal for the access management is also given, as provided for in the art. 40-ter of CAD. Finally, the advisability of reconsidering the third age of archives in digital preservation is discussed, along with the new role that traditional Archives should play in this context.

Histories of Childhood in the Caribbean: New Perspectives and Methodologies

Histories of Childhood in the CaribbeanNew Perspectives and Methodologies Shani Roper (bio) "Children are to be seen but not heard" is a popular refrain that reflects socio-cultural attitudes and beliefs that silence the voices of children in the present, in the traditional archive and in the past. In the Caribbean, existing socio-cultural attitudes towards children, child-welfare policies and institutions owe their existence to late nineteenth and early twentieth-century imperial concerns about creating civilized colonial states. Children were and continue to be at the centre of this discourse, especially as it relates to harnessing their potential labour and to creating good "citizens". Given the centrality of children to debates on national development, gender justice and public health, how do we uncover their historical lives and experiences? What methodologies do we use to centre children's experiences and perspectives and what are the tensions within age categories that delineate the boundaries between infancy, childhood, youth and adulthood? Childhood is a pliable social construct that varies based on time, geography, class, race, gender, economics, religion and cultural belief systems. Today, childhood is defined as a period of dependency and submission, necessitating adult guidance. This definition obscures the ways in which children express their ideas and challenge the landscapes they occupy. Limited archival data as well as changing age categories after Emancipation make it difficult to access children's historical perspectives. As scholars of Caribbean slave and post-slave societies, we recognize the inherent biases of the archives with which we work–archives constructed from the perspective of imperial and colonial agents which undermine, demean and dismiss the agency of oppressed [End Page 187] groups. Constructed as "othered" within these discourses, Afro-Caribbean are hyper-visible meanwhile more privileged children, considered normal, are rendered invisible. Colonial administrators singled out children of African descent as delinquents and victims of unstable families.1 It was the perpetual need to control the movement of black labour that brought Afro-Caribbean children to the forefront. Scholars are, therefore, forced to "read along biased grain of the archive" to reveal a more nuanced understanding of Caribbean societies and uncover the lives of children.2 Centring children within the histories of colonial and post-colonial Caribbean societies ultimately changes our understanding of significant historical events as children are never powerbrokers or decision makers. Attitudes towards children and their role in society changed in response to decolonization and political independence. These events had a direct impact on the quality of life of the average child. Studies of childhood in the early twentieth century must consider the impact of global and colonial child-saving movements in the colonies and their impact on local efforts to improve child nutrition, child welfare, and maternal and public health. How did attitudes towards children change over the course of the twentieth century? Did political independence change attitudes towards children or how did definitions of childhood and youth change in response to socio-political, religious and cultural discourse within colonial spaces? Very few historical studies on Africa and the Caribbean explore childhood or produce colonial histories from children's perspectives. Rather, children's experiences are linked to or explored within the context of women's experiences, Afro-Caribbean families and the education system. While histories of education and educational institutions position children as receptacles shaped by societal values, in the scholarship children and youth are rarely conceptualized as individuals who challenged, negotiated and reconceptualized colonial subject-hood. Saheed Aderinto's 2015 edited collection Children and Childhood in Colonial Nigerian Histories argues that the history of children is "submerged in a larger history of state and empire formation, colonialism, modernity and socio-political transformation".3 It is this submersion that silences children's roles as subjects challenging and shaping race, class and gender discourse within colonial societies. Beverley Grier, in her study of children's labour in Colonial Zimbabwe, posits that "children and adolescents are the 'invisible hands' whose labor [sic] was involved in substantial ways in the capitalist [End Page 188] transformation of Zimbabwe".4 For these scholars, childhood is a site of contention and negotiation. Studies of childhood in Africa, therefore, explore the conflict between colonial perspectives on childhood and local...

The obsolescence of Information and Information Systems CERN Digital Memory project

In 2016 was started the CERN Digital Memory project with the main goal of preventing loss of historical content produced by the organisation. The first step of the project was targeted to address the risk of deterioration of the most vulnerable materials, mostly the multimedia assets created in analogue formats from 1954 to the late 1990’s, like still and moving images kept on magnetic carriers. In parallel was studied today’s best practices to guarantee a long life to digital content, either born digital or resulting from a digitization process. If traditional archives and libraries have grown up during centuries establishing recognized standards to deal with the preservation of printed content, the field of digital archiving is in its infancy. This paper shortly exposes the challenges when migrating hundreds of thousands of audio, slides, negatives, videotapes or films from the analogue to the digital era. It will then describe how a Digital Memory platform is being built, conform to the principles of the ISO-16363 digital object management norm that defines trustworthy digital repositories. Finally, as all information repository managers are faced with the necessary migration of underlying systems and the obsolescence of the information itself, the talk will explain how a digital archiving platform focusing only on content preservation could be of direct interest for most of the live systems.

An Exploration into Archival Descriptions of LGBTQ Materials

ABSTRACT While traditional archives have successfully diversified collecting scopes to include materials from marginalized communities, archivists have yet to examine whether the descriptions of th...

Il management della storia: quale prodotto per quale mercato

Purpose of the paper: This paper aims to demonstrate how a type of cultural heritage such an archival collection can be turned into a non-conventional museum, which would not be based upon the exhibition of objects, but on the transmission of knowledge using the mechanism of storytelling. Methodology : The paper analyses the case of the Historical Archives of the Banco di Napoli, which is part of the Foundation of the same name, and in particular on its museum project called ilCartastorie. Results : The paper allows a model to be made from this experience, with a transferable approach to cultural heritage contexts involving printed material (essentially archives and libraries), by delineating a conceptual and operative framework for the creation of historical museums which primarily use the technique of storytelling. Research limitations: In light of the fact that this is the presentation of a single case study, the limitation of the research lies in the specificity of the subject matter of the research and its condition as a private holder of cultural heritage which is of interest to the public; from this point of view, the principles of transferability may clash with the regulatory and procedural limits found in the public sector, which holds a large part of the cultural heritage found in archives and libraries. Practical implications : From an operational point of view, this paper provides the essential coordinates to be applied to the promotional model, while adapting them to other contexts. Originality of the paper: Traditional archives very rarely and in completely different ways move towards an integrated project of promotion and, when applied, it is usually based on the mechanism of “exposition” of the archival documents and not on the narrative process of the content of those same documents. The originality of this paper lies essentially in the specificity of the subject matter of the research: an archival collection which uses storytelling for the transmission of knowledge.

No Sex in Newark: Postindustrial Erotics at the Intersection of Urban and Adult Film History

No Sex in Newark: Postindustrial Erotics at the Intersection of Urban and Adult Film History Whitney Strub (bio) No masterpiece of pornography by most standards, Newark Penn Station Pt 1: Dude Fingering My Musty Booty (neanea14, 2015) consists of fifty-six seconds set in a restroom that foreground a man’s thrust-out ass. We peer up into it from below, as another man sitting on a toilet in an adjacent stall reaches under the divide to, indeed, finger it. The man being fingered shoots the scene from his phone camera, held in one hand as he strokes himself with the other, leaving us with a shaky and constrained view. Just before the minute mark, it abruptly stops. [End Page 175] Fortunately for viewers left disoriented or seeking narrative or sexual closure, our cruising pornographer, known only as neanea14, posted a short sequel to his XTube channel. In the caption to Newark Penn Station Pt 2 (2015), he explains, “i went to the urinals and we went into the stall to finish what we started at the urinals. my dick was musty as fuck. hope you enjoy.”1 This fifty-seven-second scene brings the video to an orgasmic conclusion, as the two men, now standing inside one stall, jack themselves and each other off to completion, ejaculating in turn into the toilet bowl. In the next stall, a man stands to pee and flushes, seen only by his feet. We never see faces in the two videos, which afford us mere snippets of the men at play: black, with tight athletic abdomens, dressed casually in sweatpants, jeans, and sneakers. From neanea14’s profile, we get an expanded sense of an attractive twenty something very interested in public sex, public masturbation, and the act of recording himself. Much of his erotic circuit seems to follow the route of the northern New Jersey Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) train itinerary, with similar encounters recorded at the Journal Square stop in Jersey City and elsewhere. Much could be said of the sometimes charming, sometimes troubling erotic subjectivity that neanea14 charts over the course of his fifty short videos, all posted to XTube between approximately 2013 and 2016. As a proud versatile bottom and self-identified Christian, his stated turn-ons include mustiness and men of all varieties, with the exception of “fat guys and Caucasian men.” As an exemplar of Black queer autopornography, he represents do-it-yourself (DIY) culture work of the sort that still receives too little scholarly attention.2 The work of neanea14 also points toward the ways pornography proves useful at the intersection of urban history, film studies, and the history of sexuality, especially when traditional archives fail us. Both the production and the exhibition of porn offer rich resources for documenting precarious postindustrial erotics that too often go overlooked. Notably, neanea14’s “hit me up” geography does not include New York City—a mere three stops and ten minutes past Journal Square on the PATH, and so easily accessible for him. Instead, it comprises a North Jersey nexus of Jersey City, Bayonne, Newark, Hoboken, and East Orange. Nor is neanea14 the only DIY pornographer working in this space; XTube user deesoul87 offers Penn Station Head (2011), seventy-five seconds of blow-job footage riskily shot on an elevator inside Newark Penn Station.3 Clearly, Newark affords space for pleasure and desire. One would not know it from the existing scholarship on the city, however. In the dominant national symbolic economy, Newark remains an overdetermined metonym of urban decay, eternally trapped in the shadow of 1967’s long hot summer and its incessant renarrativization everywhere from PBS to Philip Roth novels.4 When anthropologist Ana Ramos-Zayas [End Page 176] studied how Newark was rendered legible to Brazilian and Puerto Rican immigrant communities, she found that blackness registered as an affect, defined through aggression, which in turn became the “meta-narrative of emotion in Newark.”5 In this reading of the city, otherwise-marginalized groups partook of hegemonic consensus. Indeed, postindustrial blackness seems to foreclose the sort of urban erotics bestowed on other cities. To pluck from eclectic historiographies for effect: eighteenth-century Philadelphia begins with Sex among...

The Adult Film History Project

The Adult Film History Project Peter Alilunas (bio) and Dan Erdman (bio) Eventually, just about every adult film historian encounters a familiar, frustrating scenario. While conducting research, tantalizing traces of evidence—crucial contemporary press accounts, invaluable legal papers, or other primary documents—will come to light, only to vanish again, slipping through the historian’s fingers as if they never existed. Generally speaking, the adult film industries did not create conventional paper trails, nor did they embrace their own long-term legacies.1 In almost all cases, the bits and pieces they did leave behind have not been preserved or archived with conventional methods.2 The result for historians has been a methodologically complicated landscape defined by particular challenges. In this essay, [End Page 152] we describe the creation of the Adult Film History Project (AFHP), a crowdsourced, online repository of adult film–related materials with the goal of remedying at least some of these challenges. The potential of this project—and particularly the linking together of personal collections—stems from the overwhelming scarcity of necessary research material. For example, a scholar researching the distribution and marketing of a non–adult film such as E.T. (Steven Spielberg, 1982) might be able to assemble, within hours and completely online, a thick dossier of advertisements, detailed box-office grosses, reviews, and trade discourses. A rich variety of physical archives and bricks-and-mortar libraries might also hold material applicable to the project. Should that same scholar research E.X. (Domingo Lobo, 1985), a hard-core parody of E.T., they would struggle in vain to find any traces online and would likely find no more success in traditional libraries or archives. This shot-on-video production had no theatrical release, left almost no historical footprint, and was ignored by mainstream publications, as were tens of thousands of adult films. Digging out the histories and contexts of adult films such as E.X. requires patience, creativity, a willingness to work (and occasionally compete) with collectors and dealers, and unflagging persistence and flexibility. These efforts still use time-tested historiographical methods, just applied in new directions and with new targets. Elsewhere, I (Alilunas) have described this process as “trace historiography,” a method that examines fragments of seemingly disparate evidence in an effort to reconstruct a past that seems impossible to locate clearly in predictable and typical ways.3 A crucial part of trace historiography is something that every historian—of adult film or any other kind—understands intimately: the construction of a personal archive. For the adult film historian, however, this personal archive often serves as the only option. Traditional archives of material related to adult film’s industrial histories do exist; the best known remains the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University, Bloomington, home to perhaps the most significant collection of sex-related materials in the United States. As Linda Williams, Thomas Waugh, David Church, and others have noted, however, the institute does not make its collection easy for scholars to access and employs confusing and perplexing metadata and filing protocols.4 More recently, the Kinsey Institute has taken disturbing, politically motivated steps to make itself less public and less about sex.5 A handful of [End Page 153] collections at other institutions focus on topics related to sex or adult film.6 As with any type of archival research, there are barriers to entry: scholars must have the means and opportunity to travel, the time to work in them, and the general knowledge to quickly assess the collected material. That combination can be difficult even for senior scholars and often remains close to impossible for graduate students. While this small group of “official” collections related to adult film exists, the truth is that extant material exists in all kinds of archives, often set aside in out-of-the-way shelves, uncataloged, ignored, or forgotten, as the archivist Dwight Sanson has described.7 Scholars are often quick to attribute such laxity to prudishness on the part of the collection managers, but this neglect can occur for a variety of less exciting reasons. Many archives rely on grants and donations, and managers may be hesitant to upset...

Фонд аудиоматериалов музея-архива народной культуры украинского Полесья: специфика формирования

The article by Ukrainian scientist Heorhyi Shamonin (Георгій Шамонін) deals with the process of formation of the sound fund of the Museum-Archive of Ukrainian Polissia Folk Culture. The author points out the necessity of combining regulatory principles of organization of archival affairs with the requirements of scientific work. In addition, the article covers special aspects of formation of audio collection of MAUPFC in comparison with traditional archival technology. Key words: sound archive, cultural heritage preservation, Ukrainian Polissia, Chornobyl catastrophe.