Archeota, Spring/Summer 2020

2018

Since the late twentieth-century, the popularity and prevalence of digital formats have presented challenges for two groups closely associated with archives: archivists and historians. If archivists cannot fulfill their mandate to preserve our growing digital documentary heritage in the face of rapid technological change, the historians who are one of the core user groups of these records will have very little material with which to reconstruct and analyze the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. This article explores the benefits and challenges that digitization and digital preservation have brought to archivists, as well as the repercussions of these developments for historians. Although the challenges are significant, there is reason to be optimistic: new archival approaches and technologies are being developed every year, and historians have a tradition of making the most of whatever archivists can preserve.

2009

Seasoned researchers know that it's always a good idea to contact an archives before visiting to do research--this ensures that needed collections will be available onsite during the actual visit to the archives, while allowing the researcher to begin a conversation with the archivist about any additional relevant resources available. Starting such a conversation (the "reference interview") with the archivist in advance will make a visit to the archives more efficient and fruitful. This reference role of archivists is generally understood, if not fully exploited, by most archival researchers.

Archival issues, 2016

The American Archivist, 2008

Archival Science, 2004

This article chronicles the rapid expansion since 1990 of research within archival science and characterizes contemporary archival research culture. It examines the role and state of key factors that have led to the development of the existing research infrastructure, such as growth in doctoral education, forums for presenting and publishing research, the numbers and size of graduate archival education programs, availability of diverse funding for research, transdisciplinary and international research collaborations, and application of innovative research methods and tools appropriate for investigating increasingly complex and wide-ranging research questions. An Appendix articulates and names archival research methods, including those derived and adapted from other disciplines, with a view to adding to the ''literary warrant'' for archival research methods, promoting the rigorous application of research design and methods, and providing sources for the teaching of research methods for professional and research careers. The article concludes with recommendations about how to sustain and extend the emerging research front.

2001

The Library Quarterly, 2017

Archival Science, 2019

To further analyze the past and current practices germane to archival repositories, I chose to perform a literary survey specific to public library archives and special collections. In addition to this survey, I visited one archive of particular interest to me within the New York Public Library system to gain firsthand knowledge of their archival practices. In this report I will provide a brief history of public library archives and a detailed overview of the archive I visited including its history, policies and practices, the characteristics of its records and the scope of its archival holdings. As a result of this survey, I hope to determine the degree to which current archival practices align with our coursework as well as how those practices have been changed or adapted to better suit public libraries and their patrons.

2005

The International Archive of Women in Architecture grew by 67.5 cubic feet (cf), with the creation of seven new collections and additions to 15 existing collections. Largely due to supplemental library funding for architecture graduate student assistants and a grant from the Beverly Willis Architectural Foundation, 15 collections (35 cf) were processed and have detailed finding aids. The IAWA now has 290 collections (~1200 cf).

Archivaria, 1982

Archivaria, 1983

Although Norton was working within the narrower American concept of "archives," that is, the government record to the exclusion of all else, and not within the more expansive European continental and, one hopes, Canadian understanding of archives as both the record of public institutions and private persons, a ringing tocsin sounds shrill throughout much of her writings on archives and archivists beware the enemy, beware the historian-archivist working with documents.

Scholarship across the humanities is being radically and rapidly transformed through digital access to archival sources. Through the development of online scholarly editions, digital archives such as the Walt Whitman Archive and online repositories such as HathiTrust Digital Library, among many others, a wealth of archival data—textual and graphic, quantitative and qualitative—have become electronically available. With this new digital wealth of materials for humanities scholarship has come new ways of looking at the archival record, new ways of interpreting historical information, and new standards for accounting its value and authority as knowledge. The fact that archival records are finding new life in digital environments does not, however, necessarily mean that they are accessible , let alone meaningful, to students, scholars, and citizens searching for evidence about the past and telling new stories about it. Single-search boxes of Internet browsers, online catalogs, and search engines offer a narrow window on to a vast landscape of digital data, organizing and retrieving results with the efficiency of machine reading and automation. They do so at the expense of kinds of attention and content expertise by which librarians and scholars have processed our cultural inheritance for hundreds of years at a human scale, using skills of eye and hand. Digital images of manuscripts , graphic material, and newspapers can make crucial information about provenance and format harder to find than when such artifacts are encountered in person, in traditional settings of archival research, in repositories, libraries, and other sites that collect, organize , and preserve cultural heritage materials for future use. This introduction to a summer 2017 special issue of American Literary History [Vol 29, Num 2] offers an overview of current scholarly approaches to archives in American literature.

class, writing, researching, or whatever I have had to do to get this done. Thank you for the laundry and grocery shopping I did not have to do, and the errands I did not have to run. Thank you for the encouragement, support and understanding. And finally, thank you to my committee. My chair, Dr. Alan Lessoff, never let me by with mediocrity. His patience and direction are much appreciated and sorely needed. The advice he gave me about pursuing a thesis option only if I was passionate about my topic was the best advice I was given in the last three years. I am also grateful to the other committee members, Dr. Patrice Olsen who has been one of my best cheerleaders throughout my time at Illinois State, and ISU Archivist April Karlene Anderson who has taken so much of her valuable time to assist me in my research and has always been willing to answer my questions and encourage me in this endeavor.