Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Literature Review: Concepts - Coggle Diagram
Literature Review: Concepts
Archival Collection Theory
Helen Samuels, 1980s
Documentation strategies
Collection not self-contained; collaborative links with other collections within and outside institution
Responding to rapidly expanding information world
Functional analysis
Institutional working
Analysing the functions instead of historical research/collection surveys
Analysing the subject matter and identifying required documentation
Cook, 1992
Critically analyses Samuels' work
Her work addresses Ham's criticisms of the inadequacy of appraisal in the modern world
A macro-approach, analysis of important functions, creators, and creating processes to identify records with archival value and document the whole while dealing with large numbers of records
Cook states this should be used alongside provenance
Samuels and Cox, 1988
Suggests research needs to occur to improve the archivist's appraisal abilities
Understand nature, interrelatedness, and value of the record
Documentation strategy approach would support this
Jennifer Marshall, 1998
Critique of Samuels' DS
Useful framework for encouraging rethinking
Has not been widely implemented due to constraints
Gerald Ham, 1975
Traditional acquisition creates gaps and biases in collections
Reconceptualisation of what the archivist is, from passive to active, collaborative, and committed to learning
Surveying collections to identify and address gaps, biases
Formal but flexible guidelines and frameworks
Systematic coordination and collaboration across institutions
Takes Zinn's ideas further
Not a passive receiver, but an active creator of content
Acts now while material still exists, proactively making contacts and establishing the safety of the record
Cox, 1994
Reaction to documentation strategy as a way to deal with modern society and its records
Useful definition of DS
Reducing records makes them usable; criteria must be assigned
Assigning value is difficult
Almost anything could be ascribed value
Understanding function and purpose of records, and its wider context
Assigning value according to creators and users perceptions
Outlines basic set of principles
Etherington and Long, 2013
V&A first major museum
Response to changes in society
Objects would disappear for perceived lack of value, but their value is their connection to a movement/event
Schellenberg, 1956
Theodore Schellenberg, The Appraisal of Modern Records (Michigan, 1956).
Macro-appraisal: consider the whole to establish value
Value/significance as ambiguous concept
No absolute standards but general principles
Appraisal: analysis, researching, understanding the whole
Archivist is the moderator making these decisions
vs. Jenkinson: the neutral archivist; the organisation makes decisions on value
Reaction to growing bulk/scale of modern records; Jenkinson approach was no longer viable
Greene and Meissner, 2005
More product, less process
How can archives collect contemporary with existing backlogs?
Taking in more than can be processed
Christen and Anderson, 2019
Slow archives
Slowing down processes to analyse, understand, and re-route them. Listen, re-focus, and act
Existing activities rooted in and reinforce 'colonial paradigms' and 'structures of injustice'
Committed to decolonisation, prioritising community values and needs
Emphasis on process over product
Past Collecting Initiatives
Ashley Maynor, 2016
Responding to lack of literature/guidance in capturing tragic social events
Case study approach: Texas bonfire; Virginia Tech; Sandy Hook
Dynamic, unpredictable: recommendations are flexible and non-prescriptive
Logistics
Mission and purpose
Selection and processing
Format and use
Preservation and access
Communication, collaboration, transparency
Staff member at Virginia Tech: first hand experience of experiencing then documenting traumatic event
Specifically: capturing "temporary memorials"
Common concerns
Resource: human, financial, space
Emotional burden
Staff
Respecting victims and their families
Metadata: extent
Controversial materials
Overwhelming response
Unwanted materials
Contextualising
Balancing timely responses
Boston Bombing, 2013
Maynor, 2019
Managing grief, healing
Acknowledging, remembering, and forgetting all important
Emotional labour for staff
Privileging of white tragedies
Our Marathon (blog)
Healing process
Rewriting the media focus on perpetrators
Collection built by the community and diaspora
Hisrchbiel
Collaborative effort
McGrath and Peaker, 2018
Collaboration to share skills expertise knowledge
Crowdsourced collecting
Ethics of care for the staff
Important: scoping the aims
Crowdsourcing and community engagement (blog)
Expertise and labour from non-employees
Own note: sustainability?
A range of activities
9/11
Wallace and Stuchell, 2011
Creation of and access to archives are used for political manipulation, influencing narratives
Contextualisation of the creation etc of the archive is necessary to situate what is known and what is not - historicisation of the archive
Brier and Brown, 2011
Planning of and reflection on the process essential
Everything required to be collected, is
Improves inclusive practice and representative collections
Collaboration with other institutions
Support preservation
Acquire more collections
Manchester Bombings
Arvanitis, 2019
Documenting the processes and decision-making about the archive (instead of the outcomes/outputs)
My own research combines the two for a well-rounded understanding
A new practice altogether that is informed by standard museum practices but adapts, improvises and creatively goes beyond them
Lack of professional guidance and best standards, though this is slowly being temporarily placated with academic works
No selection criteria
The physical space of the store replicating a physical and sensory performance of the memorial
Reflection in action - Schön
Common themes
Case study analysis
No other (?) literature reviewing the state of CC through analyses of general trend
Virginia Tech, 4/16
Purcell, 2012
Personal perspective of professional responsible for handling the collection
Recommends phased approach, planning, and collaboration
Appraisal for 'representative' collection; antithesis of Manchester Together
Offers recommendations for others dealing with similar task
Fox et al, 2007
Development of a digital library
Source for future learning and research
Support the community in healing, provides assistance and services
'sense-making impulse to collect'
More technology focused, not very relevant
Occupy Wall Street
Rhodes, 2014
Library focus
Responding to and capturing social movements to represent, engage, and document their communities
Changing with modernity to serve its purpose for its community
Erde, 2014
Learning wide participation and non-hierarchical from social movements
Practical: deal with the large volume of records
Political: archives are not neutral, subverting the power of the archivist that can be exclusionary. Creating diverse/inclusive archives
Kavanagh, 2014
Balancing time: space from the trauma of the event, ensuring objects/context does not get forgotten
Capturing the whole: immediate and reflective
A lack of an urge to collect, very close to the event and its impact
Gave the team confidence in approaching CC in the future
Impossibility of preparation to the inpredictability
Ethics
Michelle Caswell, 2016
Connecting human rights abuse/community archive/activist approaches
Centring survivors and families in the curation/stewardship of material, autonomy
Dynamic, not all the same; flexible and general recommendations
Disrupting strict definitions and traditions
Richard Cox, 2013
Criticises 'unfinished' work
Ethics as a symbolic acknowledgement; failure to integrate into practice/every day archival work
Glenn Dingwall, 2004
Codes of ethics are necessary
Understand boundaries of good/bad
Trust building
Decision making
Consistency in practice
Ethical Toolkit for Museum Practitioners, 2019
Absence of codified guidelines for museums; generating frameworks to support those doing the work now
Balance
Decolonisation
Trauma
Digital preservation
All key factors that are relevant to archival CC projects
Has prompts, questions, case studies for self-reflection and examples
Sloan et al, 2019
Canadian archivists facing secondary trauma
Useful as a template for my dissertation structure
Encounter when: interact with donors, process records, and provide access
Discomfort acknowledging experiences due to privileged position
Used to find questions for future research, attempting to bridge literature gap and a 'call to action'
Not an isolated experience; a problem that must be acknowledged and enacted upon
Jimerson, 2006
Written code of ethics is a useful framework
Balance conflicting interests of those we serve
Help archivists make decisions relating to ethical concerns
Supports the judgement of perceived unethical behaviour
Doc the Now White Paper, 2018
Police brutality against African Americans
Concerns
Lack of informed consent from users
Manipulation of material
Potential of harm, e.g. monitoring by law enforcement
Large volumes of data
Difficulty engaging with users
Recommends
Engaging with the communities
Application of traditional archive practices such as appraisal and donor relations
Fife and Henthorn
Lack of women in leadership roles despite women-outnumbering in the sector (7)
96.7% white, more white than other sectors 85.7% (7)
Smaller proportion of people with disabilities, 15.95 v 18.1 (7)
predominantly middle class or financially privileged, due to the financial barriers of accessing postgrad, and the temporary and underpaid nature of the work, as barriers to the entry of the profession for working class people and people of colour (11-14)
'perpetuate patterns of whiteness, affluence, and other privileges' (13)
Cilip and ARA, 2015
COVID-19 commentary
Eira Tansey, 2020
Self-reflection
Necessity? Motivations
Self righteous, for own reasssurance?
Aims and purpose
Ethics
Staff
Donors
Fatigue
Commodifying trauma
Privacy and right to forget
Integration of ethics into project plan
Constant questioning
University of Edinburgh blog reflection
Largely born-digital materials submitted online
Concerns of digital preservation
Rapid responses required
Collaboration between organisations for expertise sharing
Remaining open minded about approaches to CC
Anna Sexton, 2021
Impulse to collect but must unpick ethical questions
Analysis of a sample of case studies to identify ethical concerns and questions
Re-traumatisation of donors
Secondary trauma of archivists
Shifting attitudes and processes to deal with new work
Acknowledging unequal impact of pandemic across race and class lines
Imogen Clarke, 2020
Museum perspective
Ethical practice relating to museum workers
Separating home, work, and pandemic near impossible
Anxiety and vulnerability
Ethical practice relating to donors
Isolation and lockdowns prevents relationship building
Pursuing human centred way of working
Collaboration and communication across the sector
Community
Cook, 2013
Empowering communities to look after their own records; utilising our expertise not for our own gain
Rejecting neutrality (Jenkinson) in favour of actively shaping
Centring communities and collaborating with communities; and rejecting identities of expert and the control and power that comes with this
Flinn Shepherd Stevens, 2009
Communities retaking control of their records and historical narratives
Empowering
Description
What is collected
Access
Motivation: misrepresentation and absence in dominant archives/institutions/historical narratives
Difficulties in sustainability relating to funding and expertise, and maintaining autonomy
Theimer, 2011
Archives 2.0
Openness, flexibility, user-centred, collaborative, active, participatory, transparent, technological
Evolutionary shift in thinking and practice across the profession
Huvilla, 2008
Formulates a participatory archival approach
Decentralised curation: using knowledgeable users
Radical user orientation: usability and findability is first priority
Contextualisation: context of archival hierarchies and the formation of the archive is clear and communicated
Iaconvino, 2010
Participatory rights
Subjects of records as co-creators
Acknowledges the subjects rights to privacy, ownership, access, and presentation
Human rights justification
Common themes
Contemporary collecting as a new, separate practice that requires new thinking and action
Sexton, 2021
Arvanitis, 2019
Neutrality, power, activism
Zinn, 1977
'inevitably political craft' (20)
'perpetuate the political and economic status quo simply by going about his ordinary business' (20)
acknowledging the power dynamics/political of the job/work
'supposed neutrality is ... a fake' (20)
Proposals of activism
Compiling documentary records representing ordinary people; who is not represented in the archive and rectifying this
Openness, freedom, accessibility to information
Cook and Schwartz, 2002
'archival practice perpetuates the central professional myth of the past century that the archivist is.... an objective, neutral, passive... keeper of truth' (5)
records traditionally seen as 'passive resources to be exploited' (1)
'archives established by the powerful ... certain stories are privileged and others marginalised' (1)
power exercised in appraisal, description, preservation, communication, access (1)
Archives constructed with power: those with power determine what is record, kept, described, accessed. Influenced by cultural and social frameworks which determine what and who is thought of as important, and thereby they are reinforced as the contents is naturalised and unquestioned, and becomes the foundation of our collective memory and shared identities.
Power must be questioned to be deconstructed, held accountable
Can I link this 'active' archivist to seeking contemporary collecting? Being active in searching for and creating records? Active in capturing an inclusive and accurate collection?
Harris, 2002
'any attempt to be impartial, to stand above the power-plays, constitutes a choice, whether conscious or not, to replicate if nor to reinforce prevailing relations of power' (85)
neutrality as a choice with real impact
echoing Zinn's argument 30 years later
Concept: the active archivist as acknowledging the power of selection, etc. as chooses to steer this in a positive direction (C&C lecture 9)
Cook, 2011
Passivity/neutrality is political, privileges those with power
Appraisal reflects and reinforces societal power structures
Appraisal is inherently political
Active approach: identifying what is missing, collaboration with citizens, to document the whole
Dunbar, 2006
Critical race theory
Support identifying and disruption of racial bias
Gives the unrepresented a voice to self-empowerment, to be heard/remembered, to express their identities, to identify significance in their own terms
Challenges whiteness as the normative
Can identify biases in content, creation, appraisal, interpretation, and access
Gilliland and McKemmish, 2012
Grand societal challenges
Health and wellbeing
Support global health and wellbeing initiatives
Democratisation
Transforming access
Citizen's rights
Social justice and inclusion
Inclusive of all rights/needs
Ettarh, 2018
Vocational awe
Idealisation of working for the sacred good prevents ability to see problematic nature of libraries
Identifying and acknowledging the problems as a source of empowerment
Contemporary collecting
Ethical Toolkit for Museum Practitioners, 2019
Absence of codified guidelines for museums; generating frameworks to support those doing the work now
Balance
Decolonisation
Trauma
Digital preservation
All key factors that are relevant to archival CC projects
Has prompts, questions, case studies for self-reflection and examples
MDNW, 2019
Contemporary collecting in museums
Benefits
Address gaps
Inclusivity/diversity
Gain richness from context, understanding of significance/value
Broaden skill set
Recommendations
Collaboration with communities/other institutions
Understand resources
Clear aims, remit and boundaries