The Art of Digital Curation

Artists have long engaged with digital and networked technologies in critical and creative ways to explore both new art forms and novel ways of disseminating artworks. Net-based artworks are often created with the intent to circulate outside traditional institutional spaces, and many are shared via artist-run platforms that involve curatorial practices distinct from those of museums or commercial galleries. This article focuses on a particular artist-run platform called Paper-Thin, characterizing the activities involved in managing the platform as digital curation in a polysemous sense – as both the curation of digital artworks and the stewardship of digital information in a complex technological ecosystem. While scholars and cultural heritage professionals have developed innovative preservation strategies for digital and new media artworks housed in institutional collections, the ongoing care of artworks shared through networked alternative spaces is largely carried out co-operatively by the artists and curators of these platforms. Drawing on Howard Becker’s sociological theory of art worlds as networks of co-operative actors, this article describes the patterns of co-operative work involved in creating, exhibiting, and then caring for Net-based art. The article outlines the importance, for cultural heritage professionals, of understanding the digital-curation practices of artists, as these artist-run networked platforms demonstrate emergent approaches to the stewardship of digital culture that move beyond a custodial paradigm.

“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.

Archival Readiness

This article explores the challenges of engaging historically excluded communities with archives and archival discourse, focusing on people and communities experiencing homelessness. Positioning the phrase literal homelessness, which is used in the United States to determine eligibility for an annual census of people experiencing homelessness, as representative of ongoing exclusive and non-collaborative forms of recordkeeping, the author proposes a concept that she calls archival readiness to move toward archive making, rather than archive taking, with historically excluded communities. Using her experiences as a part-time staff member in a temporary emergency shelter that was established during the COVID-19 pandemic, she shows how archival readiness, based on ongoing relationships among archivists, researchers, community organizations, and individuals, would increase the likelihood that shelter guests would participate in archiving. Exploring how homelessness creates challenges for the development of inclusive institutional and community-archiving praxes, she argues that while archival readiness would not solve each of these challenges, it could enable historically excluded communities to participate in generating other approaches. The author enacts archival readiness by sharing three records from the shelter and her interpretations of them, introducing forms of information about shelter living that is not collected in official data that tracks “literal homelessness.”

Archival Interventions and Disentangling Legacy Records

Appraisal and disposition of government records at Library and Archives Canada (LAC) focuses primarily on acquiring the “right” records to best document a given function of the Government of Canada. Once records pass into LAC’s care, access is provided through an inconsistent approach of online descriptive records and on-site finding aids, often with minimal or incorrect contextualizing information that hinders their overall discoverability and use. Through a study of both the legacy photographic records in the National Film Board of Canada Fonds and the recontextualization project currently underway at LAC, the author examines the history of the record, from recordkeeping practices to the transfer to LAC, and some of the interventions by the archives to describe and shape these records over several generations of custodial care. All of these various actions have had a hidden impact on the use and understanding of both the individual records and the larger collection. This article provides a case study in how rearrangement based on research into creators, organizational recordkeeping systems, and archival custodial practices can draw out complex, multiple provenances and provide researchers with a fuller contextual history of the record.

Write Us into the Story

Archivists need to increase public understanding, support, and engagement in archives to enable archives to fulfil their missions. As one way to increase support, archives have increasingly carved out time and resources for various types of outreach. One important audience that has long been acknowledged is children. In the past, archivists have visited classrooms, brought children to archives, and prepared kits of archival facsimiles or surrogates on websites for children to use with the guidance of teachers. But another way to reach children includes narratives in books, films, and television directed at children. This article explores a number of titles to see whether archives and archivists are accurately portrayed in the narratives. The numbers are few, and the portrayals are generally weak. Two exceptions were books created by an archivist and commissioned by an archives. These two approaches led to significant works that enhance children’s understanding of archives and archivists and lead the way as examples for future archival endeavours to emulate.

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.

Copyright in Fire Insurance Plans

Fire insurance plans are among the most valuable records documenting the development of Canada’s cities and towns during the late 19th and 20th centuries. Many of these plans are preserved in Canada’s archives and libraries. However, for nearly three decades, making copies for researchers and (more recently) digitizing for online access have been subject to a copyright “chill” as a result of the copyright claims of the companies that created these plans and their successors. This article recounts the history of Canadian fire insurance plans preserved in Canadian repositories and establishes their current copyright status in terms of ownership and duration. The article then explores the extent to which the copyright concerns are justified and offers possible solutions.

Critical Ethnography as an Archival Tool

Due to the limitations of existing archival theories and methodologies, there are few clear options that allow underrepresented and marginalized communities to represent themselves ethically, faithfully, and responsibly in their own voices in mainstream archival institutions. As a result, many of these communities lack knowledge and fundamental pedagogical resources about themselves and their history in Canada. Based on research from the author’s one-year master’s degree, this article uses a critical ethnographic framework and oral history interviews to understand the archival needs of a segment of the Afghan diaspora that has long been settled in Canada. The Afghan Canadian participants agreed that digital archives could provide a solution to the community’s dearth of knowledge and material about itself – its own histories and stories. The research demonstrates that a critical ethnographic framework can be applied as an instrument in the archives in order to understand the desires, identity-formation processes, and representations of a marginalized community to ensure faithful archival representation.

“It Feels Like a Life’s Work”

By considering a set of in-depth interviews with eight bereaved mothers, this article seeks to explore ideas about what records are and what they do. Working to centre the voices and experiences of the bereaved mothers, the article first discusses some of the objects, events, places, and bodily traces they identified that function as records. It next considers the roles records and recordkeeping played for the parents interviewed, identifying four types of records work: proving life and love, parenting, continuing a relationship, and imagining. Records and recordkeeping are shown to be instrumental in the ongoing processing of traumatic loss as well as in the significant work of ensuring a life has meaning and is acknowledged. Finally, the interviews with parents also showed how deeply imbricated are love and grief as emotions and as motivations for recordkeeping, and the article ends by articulating a call for archivists to learn to “look with love.”