Archives Recordkeeping And Social Justice

Archives, Recordkeeping, and Social Justice expands the burgeoning literature on archival social justice and impact. Illuminating how diverse factors shape the relationship between archives, recordkeeping systems, and recordkeepers, this book depicts struggles for different social justice objectives. Discussions and debates about social justice are playing out across many disciplines, fields of practice, societal sectors, and governments, and yet one dimension cross-cutting these actors and engagement spaces has remained unexplored: the role of recordkeeping and archiving. To clarify and elaborate this connection, this volume provides a rigorous account of the engagement of archives and records—and their keepers—in struggles for social justice. Drawing upon multidisciplinary praxis and scholarship, contributors to the volume examine social justice from historical and contemporary perspectives and promote impact methodologies that align with culturally responsive, democratic, Indigenous, and transformative assessment. Underscoring the multiplicity of transformative social justice impacts influenced by recordmaking, recordkeeping, and archiving, the book presents nine case studies from around the world that link the past to the present and offer pathways towards a more just future. Archives, Recordkeeping, and Social Justice will be an essential reading for researchers and students engaged in the study of archives, truth and reconciliation processes, social justice, and human rights. It should also be of great interest to archivists, records managers, and information professionals.

Archival Silences demonstrates emphatically that archival absences exist all over the globe. The book questions whether benign ‘silence’ is an appropriate label for the variety of destructions, concealment and absences that can be identified within archival collections. Including contributions from archivists and scholars working around the world, this truly international collection examines archives in Australia, Brazil, Denmark, England, India, Iceland, Jamaica, Malawi, The Philippines, Scotland, Turkey and the United States. Making a clear link between autocratic regimes and the failure to record often horrendous crimes against humanity, the volume demonstrates that the failure of governments to create records, or to allow access to records, appears to be universal. Arguing that this helps to establish a hegemonic narrative that excludes the ‘other’, this book showcases the actions historians and archivists have taken to ensure that gaps in archives are filled. Yet the book also claims that silences in archives are inevitable and argues not only that recordkeeping should be mandated by international courts and bodies, but that we need to develop other ways of reading archives broadly conceived to compensate for absences. Archival Silences addresses fundamental issues of access to the written record around the world. It is directed at those with a concern for social justice, particularly scholars and students of archival studies, history, sociology, international relations, international law, business administration and information science.

With new technologies and additional goals driving their institutions, archives are changing drastically. This book shows how the foundations of archival practice can be brought forward to adapt to new environments—while adhering to the key principles of preservation and access. Archives of all types are experiencing a resurgence, evolving to meet new environments (digital and physical) and new priorities. To meet those changes, professional archivist education programs—now one of the more active segments of LIS schools—are proliferating as well. This book identifies core archival theories and approaches and how those interact with major issues and trends in the field. The essays explore the progression of archival thinking today, discussing the nature of archives in light of present-day roles for archivists and archival institutions in the preservation of documentary heritage. Examining new conceptualizations and emerging frameworks through the lenses of core archival practice and theory, the book covers core foundational topics, such as the nature of archives, the ruling concept of provenance, and the principal functions of archivists, discussing each in the context of current and future environments and priorities. Several new essays on topics of central importance not treated in the first edition are included, such as digital preservation and the influence of new technologies on institutional programs that facilitate archival access, advocacy, and outreach; the changing legal context of archives and archival work; and the archival collections of private persons and organizations. Readers will also learn how communities of various kinds intersect with the archival mission and how other disciplines' perspectives on archives can open new avenues.

We often assume social justice work is raised voices and raised fists. But for those who don't feel comfortable battling in the trenches, Dorcas Cheng-Tozun expands the possibilities of positive social impact, offering sensitive souls ways to meet a hurting world with a quieter, but equally passionate, path to collaborate for social good.

Producing the Archival Body draws on theoretical and practical research conducted within US and Canadian archives, along with critical and cultural theory, to examine the everyday lived experiences of archivists and records creators that are often overlooked during archival and media production. Expanding on the author’s previous work, which engaged archival and queer theories to develop the Queer/ed Archival Methodology that intervenes in traditional archival practices, the book invites readers interested in humanistic inquiry to re-consider how archives are defined, understood, deployed, and accessed to produce subjects. Arguing that archives and bodies are mutually constitutive and developing a keen focus on the body and embodiment alongside archival theory, the author introduces new understandings of archival bodies. Contributing to recent disciplinary moves that offer a more transdisciplinary emphasis, Lee interrogates how power circulates and is deployed in archival contexts in order to build critical understandings of how deeply archives influence and shape the production of knowledges and human subjectivities. Producing the Archival Body will be essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of archival studies, library and information science, gender and women’s studies, anthropology, history, digital humanities, and media studies. It should also be of great interest to practitioners working in and with archives

This groundbreaking text demystifies archival and recordkeeping theory and its role in modern day practice. The book's great strength is in articulating some of the core principles and issues that shape the discipline and the impact and relevance they have for the 21st century professional. Using an accessible approach, it outlines and explores key literature and concepts and the role they can play in practice. Leading international thinkers and practitioners from the archives and records management world, Jeannette Bastian, Alan Bell, Anne Gilliland, Rachel Hardiman, Eric Ketelaar, Jennifer Meehan and Caroline Williams, consider the concepts and ideas behind the practicalities of archives and records management to draw out their importance and relevance. Key topics covered include: • Concepts, roles and definitions of records and archives • Archival appraisal • Arrangement and description • Ethics for archivists and records managers • Archives, memories and identities • The impact of philosophy on archives and records management • Does technological change marginalize recordkeeping theory? Readership: This is essential reading for students and educators in archives and recordkeeping and invaluable as a guide for practitioners who want to better understand and inform their day-to-day work. It is also a useful guide across related disciplines in the information sciences and humanities.

Offers the first analysis of international courts' archives and of how these constitute the international community as a particular reality.