“I Can’t Wait for You to Die”

Stemming from conflicts over the authority of professional archives to arrange and steward community knowledge, this article outlines the limitations of the archival apparatus to produce the conditions for social liberation through acquisition and offers suggestions for how to operate otherwise, as a collaborator in forgetting. It discusses the origins and revised mission of the Pittsburgh Queer History Project (PQHP) as a reflection of the precarious definition of community archives within the discipline and field of archival science. By retracing the steps in the PQHP’s mission, as it moved from being a custodial and exhibit-focused collecting project to acting as a decentralized mobile preservation service, I argue that community archival practice is an important standpoint from which to critically reassess the capacity of institutional archives to create a more conscious and complete history through broader collecting. Specifically, I demonstrate how contemporary attention to the value of community records and community archives is frequently accompanied by a demand for such archives, records, and communities to confess precarity and submit to institutional recordkeeping practices.

The body as an archive

ABSTRACT This paper aims to offer an understanding of the body as an archive while analysing poems written by queer and non-binary poet and performer Danez Smith. Seen as a conflicting field for power and control disputes, the archive can be read in different ways and this paper approaches it in order to theorise what a queer archival practice may signal when elements such as gender, sexuality and desire are interrogated in Smith’s poems. Taking into consideration theoretical contributions from Celia Pedrosa et al. (2018), Julietta Singh (2018), David Lapoujade (2017), Ann Cvetkovich (2003) and others, it is concluded that Smith’s poems display a complex negotiation of feeling and the world, allowing new meanings to erupt from the archive.

Safety, Collaboration, and Empowerment

In order to undertake liberatory memory work, engage effectively with communities and individuals, and centre people rather than records in their work, archival organizations must be aware of trauma and its effects. This article introduces the concept of trauma-informed practice to archives and other memory organizations. Trauma-informed practice is a strengths-based approach for organizations that acknowledges the pervasiveness of trauma and the risk and potential for people to be retraumatized through engagement with organizations such as archives and seeks to minimize triggers and negative interactions. It provides a framework of safety and offers a model of collaboration and empowerment that recognizes and centres the expertise of the individuals and communities documented within the records held in archives. Traumainformed practice also provides a way for archivists to practically implement many of the ideas discussed in the literature, including liberatory memory work, radical empathy, and participatory co-design. This article proposes several areas where a trauma-informed approach may be useful in archives and may lead to trauma-informed archival practice that provides better outcomes for all: users, staff, and memory organizations in general. Applying trauma-informed archival practice is multidimensional. It requires the comprehensive review of archival practice, theory, and processes and the consideration of the specific needs of individual memory organizations and the people who interact with them. Each organization should implement trauma-informed practice in the way that will achieve outcomes appropriate for its own context. These out comes can include recognizing and acknowledging past wrongs, ensuring safety for archives users and staff, empowering communities documented in archives, and using archives for justice and healing.

Integrating Equity and Reconciliation Work into Archival Descriptive Practice at the University of Waterloo

Despite sustained calls for a critical review of harmful content within archival descriptive records, there remains much to be explored by way of implications for Canadian academic archives. This article addresses the absence of Canadian archival practitioners in broader discussions about the revision and remediation of descriptive records by exploring how staff in Special Collections & Archives at the University of Waterloo Library are working to integrate equityand reconciliation-informed thinking into the department’s archival practice by revising their approach to language in archival descriptions. Beginning with an overview of the department and the landscape in which it operates, this article provides a brief review of guidance available in the Rules for Archival Description. It then provides the rationale behind the recent changes to descriptive practice before exploring a series of examples of how and where this work is newly underway. The article concludes with a consideration of current identified challenges and the related work ahead.

"My Zine Life is My Private Life": Reframing Authority Control from Detective Work to an Ethic of Care

The essence of identity management is authoritatively correlating people with the works they create—but what happens when people don’t want to be paired with their work? Contemporary artists and authors who create controversial artwork and literature have concerns around controlling their identity which may change over time and require thoughtful policies which give them as much autonomy as possible. The authors share our experience with zines, artists' books, and protest art, outlining the unique privacy concerns of creators of this type of work, with special consideration to the maintenance of authority files by large academic institutions and government agencies. We conclude by recommending potential infrastructure solutions for authority data structures to address privacy issues by taking cues from archival practice as well as arguing for the need for clarity around who has control over data in order to ensure creators have the right to determine when, how, and if they are identified with a particular work.

Provenienzprinzip und archivisches Denken

The following paper discusses the ‘principle of provenance’ as a fundamental concept of archival theory and practice. Whereas traditional archival practice follows an understanding of provenance as singular in origin, current discussions in the field of archival science open up this specific notion of provenance towards more complex forms of contextuality.

Bit Rosie: A Case Study in Transforming Web-Based Multimedia Research into Digital Archives

ABSTRACT This article is a case study in transforming web-based multimedia research initiatives into digital institutional archives to safeguard against the unstable nature of the Internet as a long-term historical medium. The study examines the Bit Rosie digital archives at the New York University Fales Library, which was created as a collaboration between a doctoral researcher in ethnomusicology and the head music librarian at the Avery Fisher Center for Music and Media. The article analyzes how the Bit Rosie archives implements elements of both feminist and activist archival practice in a born-digital context to integrate overlooked women music producers into the archives of the recorded music industry. The case study illustrates how collaboration between cultural creators, researchers, and archivists can give legitimacy and longevity to projects and voices of cultural resistance in the internet era. To conclude, the article suggests that more researchers and university libraries can use this case study as a model in setting up institutional archival homes for the increasing number of multimedia initiatives and projects blossoming throughout the humanities and social sciences.