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In conducting original research for a graduate archival studies course, the paintings of Monuments Man Lewis Stanton Williams (1893–1970) emerged as an important archival collection that would requ...

Two frameworks for understanding how we acquire, utilize, and preserve information within the archival profession include the concepts of information ecology and the participatory archive. As these frameworks converge, there are immense implications for how participatory actors interact with each other to create, transfer, and interpret archival records. The interactions of the archivist, record creators, subjects, and users of archival materials, facilitated by new technologies, have forever changed the dynamic within the archive. This article will examine how technologies and their usage affects the relationship dynamic between the various actors within participatory archives and resultant implications for appraisal and description.

This article discusses how the concept and practices of archival intellectual control have evolved in the new technology environment. Although traditionally aggregate control dominated archival description, today item-level description is affordable in many scenarios. Meanwhile, the methods and tools for aggregate control have been diversified. In addition, the intellectual control of digital records reaches below the item level and includes the description of item-components and individual variables of datasets, as well as the annotation of textual content.

This article highlights the objectives and outcomes of the multi-year Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) research and demonstration project and discusses related developments to establish a large-scale sustainable cooperative for maintaining information about creators of archival collections, leveraging the Encoded Archival Context—Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF) standard. The article discusses processes developed to derive EAC-CPF records from existing EAD finding aids, MARCXML records, and original authority records, enrichment of those records from other sources, and the creation of a prototype research resource, providing integrated access to dispersed archival collections and the social-historical context of the collections.

This study analyzes the representation systems of three digitized archival collections using the traditional archival representation framework of provenance, order, and content. The results of the study reveal a prominent role of provenance representation, a compromised role of order representation, and an active role of content representation in digital archives. The findings of the study highlight the challenges faced by the archival community to preserve archival context and at the same time expand archival accessibility in the digital environment.

Computing in the Humanities, an undergraduate course for Computer Science Department majors and minors and Web Programming minors at New York University, represents a unique collaboration between the Computer Science Department and the University Archives. The course's final assignment required students to select, digitize, and contextualize materials from the Archives’ collections in an interactive Web site. The design and implementation of the course incorporates four current and important trends in both disciplines. First, the professor and archivist worked closely together before and during the course, which served to integrate the archival research component into the core mission of the course. Second, the students’ projects provided increased subject access and dynamic Web content to the repository and meaningful work to the students. Third, this course produced students who “bridge” the needs of humanists with the capabilities of technology. Fourth, this course illustrated the growing importance of...

In this research project, the authors set out to discover the current practice in both the archival and cataloging worlds for usage of access points in descriptive records and to learn how archival descriptive practices fit into long-established library cataloging procedures and practices. A sample of archival finding aids and MARC records at 123 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) institutions were examined to determine if finding aids and catalog records had the same or similar number of access points. The research also provided additional data regarding description of archival materials in these libraries.

SUMMARY This article examines the evolution of a national register of the archives of science and technology in Australia and the related development of an archival informatics focused initially on people and their relationships to archival materials. The register was created in 1985 as an in-house tool for the Australian Science Archives Project of the University of Melbourne. Its potential as a public reference guide for historians of science and technology soon became apparent. The story of the computerisation and publication of the register provides the background for the examination of the use of archival authority records as a means of finding better ways of connecting archives with their potential users. The success of this approach led to demands from the community for a generic database tool using a framework based on the authoritative entities associated with archival materials-an activity that we started to call contextual information management. The Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM) was ...

SUMMARY In the late 1990s the Archives of Ontario adopted a version of the Australian “series system” for the arrangement of Government of Ontario records. Series-based systems of arrangement and description provide an alternative means for archives to represent the relationships between a body of records, the functions and activities that generated them, and the organizational entities that carried out those functions. Integral to these systems is the use of archival authority records to represent the people and groups that create archival records. Implementing such a system does present challenges. It forces an archival repository to closely analyze the organizational context from which it receives records and to make systematic decisions about how this administrative environment will be represented in authority records so as to consistently represent the context of records creation. Moreover, once established, systems that document record creating bodies in archival authority records require a consider...

SUMMARY The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) launched the Archival Research Catalog (ARC) in 2002. ARC was the first centralized system for describing materials held throughout NARA's nationwide system of archival repositories. ARC's complicated development involved the entire agency, as staff wrestled with years of distinct descriptive practices. NARA evaluated external and internal standards, established a consensus-based decision-making structure, and through teamwork, successfully put into practice shared data structure, data content, and data value standards. This article addresses the selection or creation, implementation, and maintenance of the authority files and thesauri that provide data values for ARC access points to ensure consistent and precise retrieval of archival descriptions.

In April 2005, the University of Maryland Libraries launched ArchivesUM (www.lib.umd.edu/archivesum), an online database of finding aids for manuscript and archival collections using Encoded Archival Description (EAD). ArchivesUM, however, is only the publicly available end-product of a much larger project-an integrated system that ties together the basic archival functions of accessioning, inventory control, and description with a public interface for searching and browsing collection descriptions. In this article, the authors explore the challenges and solutions encountered while developing the system, addressing the theoretical, practical, and programming decisions that contributed to the design of this archival management system.

Historical methodology and library techniques have been the basis for archival education, but arguments of placement of an archival program within the university and the desirable degree for professional archivists have led to inconsistencies in graduate school curricula. The author conducted a study to determine if graduate schools adequately prepared new archivists for employment in the archival profession. The study examined job advertisements in Archival Outlook from 1997 to 2003 to determine qualifications institutions require and prefer in prospective archivists, the educational level preferred, geographic location of jobs advertised, certification requirements, and graduate school curricula in regard to teaching Encoded Archival Description.

Archives are preserved records of human activities. An account of Chinese archival development is as long as the written records of the Chinese history. Oracle bones, bronze ware, and wood and bamboo strips are the three most important recording forms of the early Chinese civilization, as they represented three major stages of archival development in China. Early Chinese archival documents were exclusively administrative records of the state. The basic guiding principles of archival organization throughout ancient China were the essential, imperial orders of the feudal society. This article presents a brief account of the Chinese imperial archives and its administration from the beginning of the Chinese civilization to the end of the Qing Dynasty, the last empire in the Chinese history.

The technical issues surrounding the implementation of the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) seem to overshadow the importance of archival descriptive standards in developing access tools for our historical collections. Influenced by Dennis Meissner's 1997 American Archivist article on EAD and reengineering finding aids at the Minnesota Historical Society, the author posed eight hypotheses and conducted an online survey of repositories creating EAD finding aids to test his theories. The results indicate that archivists are clearly lacking in applying content standardization in their descriptive work. The author urges the profession to become more concerned with developing data content standards and best practice guidelines to ensure proper data exchange. As he states, “Patience on this end … is more important to the field than increasing the number of available finding aids available online to users. Putting EAD finding aids online with malformed content only serves to pollute the archival data ...

Since 1994, undergraduate students at Rutgers University have had the opportunity to explore broad issues in the history of women's higher education by examining issues surrounding single-sex and coeducation at their own institution, with specific concentration on social issues and student culture. Four distinct seminars and projects, two of which incorporate oral history, and all four involving historical research in archival sources, have contributed to the historical literature and have added valuable documentation on the history of women at Rutgers University. This article presents an overview of these specific courses. It further provides an assessment from the particular perspective of a university archivist who attempts to document the history of the institution, promote the use of that documentary record by a diverse audience of users, including undergraduate students, and who has had the opportunity to teach two seminars on the history of women's higher education, using Rutgers as a case study. The courses to be discussed are: "Rutgers Women: A Living History" (1993-1995), a research seminar incorporating oral history of the first women students to enter the previously all-male Rutgers College in 1972; the Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II (1994 to present), an ongoing project recording the memories of Rutgers men and women and their wartime experiences; the Douglass College Scholar's Program seminar on psychobiography (1998), a seminar which explored the life of Mary Clara Kangler, a 1938 graduate of the New Jersey College for Women whose tragic life ended in suicide; and the Douglass College Scholar's Program seminar on the history of the Douglass College and its role in the history of women's higher education in the United States (1999-2002), a research seminar based on archival research which explored the experiences of women and the controversial issues surrounding women's education at Rutgers.

Providing K-12 schools with digital access to archival materials can strengthen both student learning and archival practice, although it cannot replace direct physical access to records. This article compares a variety of electronic and non-electronic projects to promote teaching with primary source materials. The article also examines some of the different historiographical and pedagogical approaches used in archival Web sites geared for K-12 instruction, focusing on differences between the educational sites sponsored by the Library of Congress and the National Archives and Records Administration.

Many archivists regard the archival imagination evidenced in the writings of David Bearman as avant-garde. Archivist Linda Henry has sharply criticized Bearman for being irreverent toward the archival theory and practice outlined by classical American archivist T. R. Schellenberg. Although Bearman is sometimes credited-and sometimes berated-for establishing "a new paradigm" centered on the archival management of electronic records, his methods and strategies are intended to encompass all forms of record keeping. The essay provides general observations on Bearman's archival imagination, lists some of its components, and addresses elements of Henry's critique. Although the longlasting impact of Bearman's imagination upon the archival profession might be questioned, it nonetheless deserves continued consideration by archivists and inclusion as a component of graduate archival education.