Counterweight: Helen Samuels, Archival Decolonization, and Social License

ABSTRACT Helen Samuels sought to document institutions in society by adding to official archives counterweights of private records and archivist-created records such as oral histories. In this way, she recognized and sought to mitigate biases that arise from institution-centric application of archival functionalism. Samuels's thinking emerged from a late-twentieth-century consensus on the social license for archival appraisal, which formed around the work of West German archivist Hans Booms, who wrote, “If there is indeed anything or anyone qualified to lend legitimacy to archival appraisal, it is society itself.” Today, archivists require renewed social license in light of acknowledgment that North American governments and institutions sought to open lands for settlement and for exploitation of natural resources by removing or eliminating Indigenous peoples. Can a society be said to “lend legitimacy” to archival appraisal when it has grossly violated human, civil, and Indigenous rights? Starting from the question of how to create an adequate archives of Canada's Indigenous residential school system, the author locates Samuels's work amid other late-twentieth-century work on appraisal and asks how far her thinking can take us in pursuit of archival decolonization.

WAKING TO NORMAL: Examining Archival Appraisal in Data-driven Society

The COVID-19 environment, where the internet is the literal lifeline and livelihood of humanity, has exposed the chasm between those equipped for technological existence and those shocked by abrupt isolation. For archives, many institutions are on an unforgiving precipice of irrelevancy. The focus of this paper is not to iterate the necessity of archival theory but to examine the position of appraisal within a technologically-driven, internet society. Of significance to this evaluation is that organization, retrieval, and use of information have evolved, and users are central players in curation cycles. Also, of importance are those archives shifting to, and innovating, decentralized digital models - and thriving. A historical overview of both fields shows that appraisal falters in technical maturation and in response to changes in how society generates, captures, and retrieves information. There exist alternate paradigms for archival roles and appraisal, however, including recognizing that users derive the interpretation of information and that transdisciplinary archivists are vital. There are also developments in digital archives where access is the bedrock of the arrangement and description and the entire appraisal process.

Appraisal Practices in Web Archives

This paper explores the art and science of deciding what web archives collect by reviewing the literature of archival appraisal through the theoretical lens of Science and Technology Studies. I suggest that our anxieties around what web archives remember and forget, get embodied in dreams (and nightmares) of Big Data and The Cloud. These notions are best understood by attending to the specific material practices of people working with memory and machines. The disciplinary perspective of software studies can provide insight into how these material practices of appraisal operate in response to, and outside of traditional conceptions of the archive, and also as an instrument of governmentality.

HANS HENRICH BOOMS AND ARCHIVAL APPRAISAL

The article is devoted to one of the most important and most complex tasks of archival studies – the theory of archival appraisal. Despite its representative scientific literature, its individual aspects remain poorly developed. One of the largest european archivists of the 20th century Hans Booms, has entered the history of developments in the archival appraisal. The main content of his theory is the need to consider complex approaches to determining the significance of documents, in particular the value framework of society, personality. He became the first who changed the official paradigm of archives to the public, recognized the usefulness of hermeneutics to find out the motives for creating documents without touching upon the relativity of objective and subjective reflection of reality in them. Hans Booms expanded the concept of “documentary heritage”. Its meaning goes beyond the traditional perception of a document that serves to provide managerial actions and implement relevant decisions, and covers all “texts” irrespective of their form of existence – written, printed, photographic, mechanical or automated. This greatly influenced the notion of “public heritage” and determined the well-known concept of collective memory. H. Booms deny the usual vision of the archive as a place of cumulating of documents that ensure the effectiveness of management in “active life”. Theoretical understanding of the archive was reflected in the definition of the unit of storage, which, in the conditions of the emergence of the newest information carriers, expands significantly. This is no longer just administrative documents, but also other objects that archivists may have nothing to do with the appearance and operation of which. Therefore, as Booms argued, archivists can be responsible for the practical scope of working with operational documents when it comes to administrative documentation. An important merit of G. Booms is that he holistically represented the natural inclination of the archivist – to create a documentary heritage. Keywords: Hans Booms, Archival Education, Archivist, Archive, Archival Appraisal, MacroAppraisal.

Building a Living, Breathing Archive:A Review of Appraisal Theories and Approaches for Web Archives

The paper provides a review of published literature on the collection and development of Web archives, focusing specifically on the theories, techniques, tools, and approaches used to appraise Web-based materials for inclusion in collections. Facing an enormous amount of Web-based materials, archival institutions and other cultural heritage institutions need to devise methods to actively select Webpages for preservation, creating Web archives that constitute a cultural record of the Web for the benefit of users. This review outlines the challenges of collecting and appraising Web-based materials, places the theories and activities of collecting Web-based materials within the broader discourse of archival appraisal, and points out directions for future research and critical discourse for Web archives.

Organisational climate change is here: memory curators in the digital age

Purpose This paper aims to describe two themes of information and knowledge management in building corporate memory through curation in complex systems. The first theme describes the skillsets of new memory curators: curation; appraisal; strategist and manager. The second theme describes four concepts that support information management in complex systems: David Snowden’s just-in-time process; Polanyi’s personal knowing; Wenger’s transactive memory system; and David Snowden’s ASHEN database schema. Design/methodology/approach Academic journals and professional publications were analysed for educational requirements for information professionals in complex adaptive systems. Findings The skills described should be readily applied and useful in a complex adaptive system with the four concepts described. The four concepts displayed features indicating each separate concept could be aligned and integrated with the other concepts to create an information sharing model based on synergy between reasoning and computing. Research limitations/implications Research is needed into the capability and potential of folksonomies using recordkeeping metadata and archival appraisal to support peer production information and communication systems. Originality/value The author has not found any research that links archival appraisal, user-generated metadata tagging, folksonomies and transactive memory systems governance policy to support digital online, co-innovation peer production.