AI and the Future of Archivists: Impacts on Work practices and Job Quality The archival profession has been exploring AI applications for over a decade through research, development, and experimentation. Today, AI supports a wide range of archival functions, including appraisal and selection, handwritten text transcription, entity extraction, metadata generation,…
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Empowering Curation’s Shared Responsibility and Clarifying Archival Provenance with Veteran-Contributed Paradata Soldiers contribute an important role in the safeguarding and preservation of cultural heritage. Before heritage items make their way in various conditions from the field and into the care of archivists and museum conservators, soldiers may have had a…
Leave a CommentMapping the Landscape for Archival Education in North America, Australia, and the UK: Comparing International Standards Approaches to standardization of archival education standards vary widely across countries. While national professional organizations are often the body that takes responsibility for creating guidelines or frameworks for such documents, independent continuing education providers…
Leave a CommentBlack Intellectual History at the United States National Archives in the Twentieth Century This paper presentation surfaces the contributions to archival history and to African American intellectual history made by a remarkable cohort of Black archivists—including Harold T. Pinkett, Sara Dunlap Jackson, Roland McConnell, Dwight Hillis Wilson, James Moore, Lillian…
Leave a Comment“I’m not a historic case, I’m still breathing”: Working with Trauma in Archives of Child Sexual Abuse Survivor Activism, 1960-2024 Many survivors of child sexual abuse (CSA) have been (and continue to be) disempowered, disbelieved, silenced and shamed by health, social care, police and justice systems, first as children and…
Leave a CommentRevisiting Image Provenance in the AI Era Current research into AI-generated images has raised questions about establishing and verifying provenance in online environments. While provenance has long served as a core archival principle, the emergence of generative AI challenges conventional assumptions about image creation, authorship, custody, and preservation. AI-generated images…
Leave a CommentSystematic Reviews as Digital Archives: Expanding the Archival Landscape Archival scholars continue to debate what constitutes an archive in digital contexts. This presentation proposes that systematic reviews, scoping reviews, and evidence maps can be productively understood as a form of digital archive. Many researchers who conduct systematic reviews are focused on…
Leave a CommentBloodlines and Throughlines: The Relational Work of Digital Surrogacy In this short paper I introduce my work-in-progress “Reproduction and Rebirth: Exploring the Digital Surrogate Records of Artistic Practice” in order to explore how relationships between records creators, communities of practice, records, and knowledge are created and sustained through digital surrogacy.…
Leave a CommentArchivists as Street-Level Bureaucrats: Discretion, Ethics, and the Dual Role of Citizen and State Agent The archival profession has traditionally been attributed a role in preserving cultural heritage, closely linked to historical research. In recent years, this image has been complemented by the more operational and proactive role of public…
Leave a CommentArtist’s Archives in Portugal: Content Curation and Study of Daciano da Costa’s Legacy (2003-2022) The distinctiveness of artist archives resides in the significance of their elements/documents/objects collecting and assembling role, considering both the creative process and the subsequent information curation practices. Those mechanisms should be observed in the existence and…
Leave a CommentA Literature Review of Digital Capture of Oral Cultures and Community Perspectives on Effectiveness As archives increasingly digitize Indigenous oral histories and cultural heritage materials, a critical literature has emerged examining what community members identify as effective versus inadequate in digital preservation approaches. This literature review synthesizes scholarly and community-generated…
Leave a CommentSentirpensar as a Sites of Dialogue in the Andean Diaspora This submission in paper format, explores how sentirpensar, an ontological articulation that integrates feeling and thinking, can serve as a framework for rethinking archival practices within Indigenous and Indigenous-descendant Latinx diasporas. It argues that dominant Western notions of the archive,…
Leave a CommentPlatformed Death on Legacy.com: Digital Obituaries and How We Remember in the Age of LLMs Legacy.com has grown significantly in size since its launch in 1998, now hosting over 40 million digital obituaries in the United States and mediating transactions between grieving families, 10,000 funeral homes, and 3,200 local newspapers.…
Leave a CommentLe Tirage: A Case Study in Mapping Archival Documents From March through May of 1865, the Union Army drafted over 8,000 men from the occupied city of New Orleans. The city had been an early target of the Anaconda Plan, and had fallen into Union hands three years prior. By…
Leave a CommentFunding Landscape for Community Archives in Australia Mainstream GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) institutions, along with various community archives, play a crucial role in preserving Australia’s diverse heritage. Many community organisations, including dedicated community archives and local history associations, are actively involved in documenting and maintaining local histories that…
Leave a CommentDisability Intersections: How Community Archives Document Disability & Navigate Accessibility Community archives have the power to represent the nuances of communities on their own terms. Community archives—typically smaller, grassroots archives that focus on minoritized communities documenting themselves and that reflect their values—have the power to be repositories of community empowerment,…
Leave a CommentRelational Archives: Family Photographs as Sites of Decolonial Pedagogy This paper conceptualizes family photographs as generative and relational sites for decolonial pedagogy and archival research. Positioned at the intersection of public history, visual culture, and critical archival studies, it advances a framework that approaches family photographs as transdisciplinary and transhistorical…
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