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Looking Back to Move Forward
Looking Back to Move Forward is an opportunity to hear from some of AERI’s founders who aimed to build the archival studies discipline in significant ways as well as next generation scholars who have continued this work locally and internationally. Panelists include Anne Gilliland, Beth Yakel, Jeannette Bastian, Joanne Evans, and Michelle Caswell. Anne GillilandAnne…
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The Research Impact of Ciaran Trace on Archival Scholarship
This panel honors the scholarly legacy of Dr. Ciaran Trace (1971-2024), whose significant research transformed archival studies and information studies. Dr. Trace’s intellectual contributions reshaped fundamental approaches to archival theory and practice. Panelists will examine Dr. Trace’s work on recordkeeping practices, archival literacy, and the social dimensions of documentation. Her methodological innovations, particularly her ethnographic…
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On the Impacts of AI and Automation on Archival Work
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, sensitive information detection, discovery and…
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Descriptive Contexts Lost and Found
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 hand in ensuring the materials’…
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From CURE to CARE: Developing Course-Based Archival Research Experiences for Undergraduates Across Disciplines
The course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) model of STEM pedagogy has been successful in integrating authentic experimental research into the conventional undergraduate curriculum, making laboratory research experiences accessible to a wider range of students, with positive impacts on retention, persistence, and inclusivity especially for underrepresented students and those from first-generation backgrounds. Drawing on the model…
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Trauma-informed Archival Education and Support Panel
With the shift in archives towards person-centred archiving, affect and emotions in archives, there has been a focus on how these concepts can be reflected in archival education and training. This panel brings together four international perspectives, from Australia, Canada and the UK, on developing and delivering education and training about emotions in archives, with…
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Archival Education
Mapping 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 or institutions of higher education…
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Histories of Exclusions and their Contemporary Impacts
Black 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 Grandy, James Dent Walker, Patricia…
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Affect and Archives
This half-day workshop will explore the current state of intersections between archival studies and affect studies with a particular focus on LGBTQ+ archival collections. The lead organizer/facilitator, Ann Cvetkovich, is the author of An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, which has had significant influence within archival studies from a foundation in…
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The Finding Aid in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Finding aids continue to hold colossal sway over the work of archives. By purporting to facilitate access, finding aids reveal the deeply sociotechnical nature of archival labor. Advances in digital technologies, such as encoded archival description, help ensure that the work of finding aids is embedded within an increasingly interconnected digital ecosystem. However, in doing…
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Trauma, Healing, Joy
“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 later as adults (Allnock &…
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AI and Trust in Archives
Revisiting 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 are increasingly produced through complex…
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Engaging the Community: Translocal Conversations on Archival Practice
This panel brings together 4 practitioner-scholars engaging with different community contexts to examine how archival practices can better reflect the lived realities, priorities and cultural logics of the communities they serve. By placing our distinct projects in conversation, this panel highlights both the common threads and the complexities of working in each of our respective…
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How Untruths and Partial Truths in Official Records Fuel Denialism
Our panel explores how those who seek to deny the truth of state-sponsored human rights violations represent official records as authoritative and exhaustive accounts of the past; how Survivors of human rights violations can nonetheless use these records in taking control over the representation of their own violation; and how archives should manage these records…
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New Models and Methodologies
Systematic 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 study outcomes; these investigators hone…
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AI for the Processing of Audio Records
This 3-hour workshop is based on an Open Educational Resource developed by the researchers on uses of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the processing of digitized Audio Records in the context of the InterPARES Trust AI Project. It introduces a framework for AI applications to the processing of audio records, case studies, critical assessments of the…
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Critical Archival Perspectives at the Intersections between Art and Archives
Through case-study presentations this panel weaves together Filipino, queer, activist, feminist and trauma-informed perspectives to examine aspects of the relation between art and archives. Ringo Bunoan looks at artist-centred archiving in the context of Asian diaspora artists in London, introducing the Filipino concepts of kapwa and kutob as part of a framework for actively working…
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Continuum Perspectives: Connecting Past, Present and Future in Pluralistic Recordkeeping Research and Practice
Recordkeeping plays a significant role in the lives of people in every community, and it is essential that recordkeeping professionals understand the wider impact of their actions on others. At the same time, recordkeeping researchers need to understand the many challenges facing professionals working with records and people in multiple, complex communities. A continuum perspective…
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On Archives and Kinship
Bloodlines 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. Within cultural heritage and archival…
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An Autobiography of a Northern Alberta Reserve
In this talk, I work with an incomplete archive—bringing together both official and personal documents and texts—to map out the affective and political contours of the Driftpile Cree Nation in northwest Alberta. My aim is to meld autobiographical reflection with historical analysis to consider the reserve as a kind of “living text” that exceeds the…
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Living Indigenous Archives
The recently released publication by Kirsten Thorpe, Living Indigenous Archives challenges and addresses the colonial constructs that have shaped archival work and studies. Thorpe’s research centres Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, placing Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing at the forefront. Drawing on case studies, academic and community research we propose to present…
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Archival Pace: Bureaucratic Orders, Silences, and Critical Archival Practices in Documenting Public Works and Labour in Africa
This panel, comprising members of the interdisciplinary team of the ERC ArchLabour project, adopts the concept of archival pace as a guiding lens for understanding historical archives inherited from the Portuguese colonial administration in Africa. By combining critical analysis of these archives with interdisciplinary approaches, from archival description practices to oral histories, the panel argues…
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Archival Ethics and Advocacy
Archivists 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 sector archivists and records managers.…
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“I suspect the Agent with the Record in the Place!”: Teaching Records in Context with a Clue-Inspired Game
The Records in Context (RiC) conceptual model represents a significant shift in archival description. While RiC offers a powerful framework for modeling archival contexts, its complexity can challenge educators, practitioners, and students seeking to teach or learn about it. This interactive session proposes a game-based approach to teaching and learning RiC, inspired by the classic board game Clue.…
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Considering Alternative Forms of Archival Evidence and Methods of Archival Research
Artist’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 identification of both the archive…
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Rethinking Archival Studies and Standards through Interdisciplinary Approaches
A 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 sources addressing a fundamental question:…
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Ways of Knowing in Archives through Indigenous Epistemologies, Diaspora Studies, and the State’s Subjects
Sentirpensar 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, rooted in universalist thinking, often…
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Maintaining Authenticity in the midst of Digitization, Commercialization, and Social Media
Platformed 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. Through its central role in…
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Intentional Documentation of HIstorical and Cultural Memory: Mapping, Recordkeeping, and Memory
Le 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 1865, the Union had enforced…
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Wikidata Workshop
This half-day workshop will equip attendees with foundational technical knowledge on using Wikidata as an authority identifier for people and name records. Collecting institutions, particularly museums and archives, are increasingly exploring the applications and potential benefits of using linked data to document cultural heritage (Davis and Heravi, 2021; Hawkins, 2022; Hyvönen, 2012; Martin, Sistruck, and…
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Pursuing Archives in Critical Times: A Roundtable with the Next Generation of AERI
This PhD Day plenary invites three recent archives PhD graduates for a roundtable that looks to the future of our rapidly changing field. Drs. Itza Carbajal, Tamara (Tam) Rayan, Anna Robinson-Sweet, in conversation with one other, will discuss their experiences as archival scholars in information science programs that have become increasingly data-driven, and in job…
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UBC Farm Tour
Join us to explore UBC’s 24-hectare organic research and production Farm and forest. We’ll learn about Musqueam history and stewardship, climate change and ag research, seed saving as archiving biodiversity, food security, food sovereignty, and what the Farm is doing about global sustainability issues in agriculture. We’ll visit the research forests, heritage apple orchard, truffiere,…
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Belkin Decolonization Walking Tour
The Decolonization Tour highlights site-specific artworks by Indigenous artists and raises questions around issues of place, space and identity. Considering how these works address urgent social and political concerns, we’ll discuss ideas about settler colonialism, decolonization, reconciliation, protocol and the history of UBC’s Vancouver campus, which is located on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory…
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Chung Lind Gallery Tour
Beginning in 1848, the rush for gold prompted large migrations of people to western North America. As miners chased the ever-elusive El Dorado, or “Gold Mountain” 金山, they carried more than their gold pans—they also brought their diverse cultures and outlooks. The Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection and Phil Lind Klondike Gold…
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Hogan’s Alley Society and hua foundation Walking Tour
Though Chinatown and Hogan’s Alley walking tours have long served as accessible, tangible, and engaging ways to share the histories of the neighbourhoods, they are often told in isolation of one another. In partnership, Hogan’s Alley Society and hua foundation are developing a walking tour that moves through both Chinatown and Hogan’s Alley, drawing connections…
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Community Archives in Southern California
Community archives create spaces for marginalized people to preserve their materials and share their stories. Their existence further allows for our communities to solidify their place in history, in a time where community building and survival can be increasingly challenging. Coming together and into the conversation around current community archives and how they persevere, we…
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Community Archiving across Cultures and Languages: Community-centred Approaches: Place-based Memory, Archives and Identity
This round-table discussion is composed of four presenters, who together will explore the intersection of place, memory, and identity through the lens of community-centered and place-based archives. Presenters will share insights from their experiences working with community-based archives that reflect the cultural, historical, and social dimensions of place, and how archives contribute to the construction…
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Community Archives across Contexts
Funding 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 reflect the country’s varied historiography.…
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Multilingual Archival Studies
As the lingua franca of our time, the English language exerts a strong influence over the framing of the global world. By using English unreflexively in research, education, and professional cross-cultural exchanges, we may unwittingly support unequal power structures, the homogenization of research, and the marginalization of traditions and knowledge systems based on languages other…
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Radical Strategies for Queer Archival Interventions
Queer community archives have long emerged in response to institutional neglect, misrepresentation, and erasure. In the current moment—marked by renewed attacks on LGBTQ+ lives, histories, and public memory—these archives function not only as repositories of the past, but as living, relational spaces that mobilize memory as political evidence and community infrastructure. Through practices of care,…
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Multilingual and Multicultural Recordkeeping in Practice
Community archives in North America are usually developed around historically underrepresented cultures and groups, including ethnic, racial, and religious identities, as well as sexual and gender orientation, economic status, and geographic locations. Yet, these categories are often porous, especially when these organizations are situated in highly multicultural locations. These intersections create dynamic community archival spaces…
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Focus on Faculty Organizing for Community Archives Support (FOCAS)
Disability 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, spaces where communities converge, and…
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The Archived Academy: Preparation, Intuition and Research-Creation in the Archives
Archival research can sometimes be a strange mix of rigorous preparation and research intuition. Considering these two elements as connective parts of a broader archival methodology, rather than disparate, unrelated processes, can expand our understanding of archival research as an iterative, creative process. Research intuition and archival serendipity are not random, unplanned occurrences in the…
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Archival Advocacy in Action Workshop: Responding to the elimination of LAC’s DHCP grant program
In February this year, Library and Archives Canada announced the cancellation of the Documentary Heritage Communities Program (DHCP), a funding program that supported local organizations in their efforts to preserve and provide access to Canada’s documentary heritage. It was a valuable source of funding for community archives as it supported diverse projects, covered 100% of…
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Screening of Unarchived
Unarchived examines “traditional” archives in British Columbia, those rooted in European colonial practices upheld by government, academic and other settler institutions. Records preserved in such repositories centre and privilege the stories of the dominant culture, perpetuating the re-telling of biased histories. This film challenges typical archival practice and encourages the viewer to question what is…
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Archives in Transition and the Work of Community-Centred Stewardship
The Haitian American Museum of Chicago (HAMOC) is a community-based cultural institution whose mission is to promote and preserve Haitian art, culture, history, and community in Chicago and beyond. As one of two Haitian American museums in the United States, founded in 2012 by Elsie Hector Hernandez to challenge negative perceptions, HAMOC serves as an…
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LIS and Epistemicide in Gaza
This poster examines the limits of foundational LIS theory under conditions of genocide, colonial violence, and systematic archival destruction. Using S. R. Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science as an analytical framework, it interrogates how assumptions about access, preservation, growth, and neutrality fracture in contexts of occupation and epistemicide in Gaza. Although Ranganathan’s laws are…
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ROPER Model
Community archives seeking to give voice to their community’s record may do so through digital displays like interactive maps, which can visualize both area histories and local identity – telling their community’s story and showcasing it across time and space through these interactive maps – which can serve as living records. In Chicago and the…
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What’s in a name?: Navigating authenticity in personal trans archives
Within archival scholarship ,transgender (trans+) identities are mentioned, but often not represented. There are only a handful of formal articles written by openly trans+ folks about trans+ recordkeeping. This proposal responds to calls by prominent archival scholars like Brilmyer (2022), Watson et al. (2023), Michelle Caswell (2023), and K.J. Rawson (2009) for information research by…
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Interdisciplinary Futurity: Spatial Justice Archives for Reimagining Narratives
As community archives become more pervasive, they inspire a creative culture that reclaims archiving as a liberatory praxis. This shift has expanded beyond archival studies into disciplines such as dance and architecture. However, these interdisciplinary intersections remain under-theorized. While traditional archival theory privileges static records, it lacks a unified framework to account for the ephemeral…
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From Scratch: The Beginnings of Community Archives
In 2025, the CACHE (Community Archive Collection and Heritage Exhibitions) research cluster at the University of British Columbia, which aims to bridge the gap between archival institutions and community archives in the Vancouver BC area, heard from partnering community organizations that their primary desire from professional and institutional archives is in having a mutually respectful…
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Institutional Knowledge and Records Management: A Preliminary Inquiry
This poster outlines ongoing doctoral research examining how organizational and recordkeeping cultures shape recordkeeping practices and influence the creation, maintenance, and retention of institutional knowledge. As contemporary organizations increasingly rely on digital tools, records are often created across numerous platforms, from formal systems to informal communication channels, posing significant challenges for professional practice. Situated within…
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Climate Change and Cultural Heritage: A Case Study Research
This 15-minute poster will describe the juxtaposition of cultural heritage preservation, cultural identity, climate change, and archival resources and sustainability. The poster will draw on case study research on small Pacific island nations that include former and current territories of the United States as they try to preserve their heritage and identity while fending off…
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Eating the Elephant: One Year at The West Town Museum of Cultural History
Our poster will summarize our collections work at the West Town Museum of Cultural History as Graduate student interns from Dominican University on the Faculty Organizing Community Archives Support project. The West Town Museum of Cultural History is located in Maywood, IL, a close suburb of Chicago. West Town is a branch of Operation Uplift…
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Research on the Collaborative Education Model of Government-Industry-Academia-Research in Archival Science in China: Taking Sun Yat-sen University as an Example
As a social science discipline, archival science has strong hands-on character. Therefore, in the professional talents training, China attaches great importance to the combination of theory and practice, and organically integrates decision-making support, knowledge learning, academic research, and practical applications,which is called the collaborative education model of government-industry-academia-research. This model mainly refers to integration the…
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The Endurance of Collective Memory: Building the Westside Cultural Archive
Over the past two years, faculty and students at Dominican University have had the privilege of facilitating community-led archival work through Faculty Organizing for Community Archives Support (FOCAS) thanks to the Mellon Foundation’s Public Knowledge program. Through the FOCAS program, we have collaborated with five local organizations in the Chicagoland area to create and support…
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Public Perception of the Trustworthiness of AI-Generated Records
The rapid adoption of AI across governmental, organizational, and everyday contexts has produced a lot of AI-generated records whose trustworthiness challenges established archival concepts grounded in human authorship. This study investigates public perception of the trustworthiness of AI-generated records and examines how traditional notion of trustworthiness is being reconfigured in AI-mediated record creation. Drawing on…
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Taking Love Seriously: What Love Does in Archival Work
Recent scholarship in archival studies has increasingly attended to affect and emotion, yet love remains insufficiently theorized and difficult to accommodate within dominant archival frameworks. Archival practices, particularly those surrounding personal, family, and community archives, are often deeply shaped by love as a motivating force, a form of labor, and a mode of valuation. This…
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Decolonization and Archival Wake Work
Relational 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 forms of knowledge-making. Drawing on…
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Intentional Creation: Reflecting on our Agency through Zine-Making
At once, our proposed workshop looks forward and back in time. We consider the future of personal and community archiving amidst the rise of fickle technology, generative AI for text and image generation, and constant pushes for content rather than intentional preservation and creation. For instance: the ouroboros of “AI slop”—training its models on previously…