The more visible women become in environmental records, the more thoroughly their epistemic authority can be foreclosed. This paradox, in which archival inclusion operates as a medium of epistemic exclusion, structures the relationship between gender and environmental recordkeeping across institutional contexts. Disaster databases, climate adaptation records, and environmental impact assessments increasingly claim to incorporate gender, yet women routinely appear in these documentary systems as data points and beneficiaries rather than as knowledge-producing subjects whose frameworks might reshape the archival categories through which environmental harm is documented. This article brings feminist epistemology and postcolonial ecocriticism into dialogue with archival theory to develop a diagnostic framework, the spectrum of silencing, identifying three mechanisms through which environmental recordkeeping produces gendered epistemic exclusion: metric backgrounding (appraisal operations that convert embodied subjects into interchangeable data points, foreclosing questions of differential accountability), testimonial capture (descriptive frameworks that absorb embodied testimony into dominant registers, producing testimonial smothering), and infrastructural erasure (the slow erosion of material conditions for knowledge transmission, rendering place-based knowledge unarchivable). The framework is tested through a comparative close reading of four poems spanning three continents, treated as diagnostic sites where the representational operations underlying archival practice become visible with concentrated formal clarity. The article contributes to critical archival studies by specifying how environmental records systems actively produce gendered epistemic hierarchies rather than passively reflecting them, and proposes counter-strategies calibrated to each mechanism, including revised appraisal criteria, community-controlled documentation, and participatory recordkeeping.
This paper uses the meme “Shrimps is Bugs” as a provocation for thinking about classification, translation, and governance in archival systems. While the statement is taxonomically incorrect, it persists because it remains socially legible, revealing a tension between formal classification and relational ways of understanding similarity and meaning. I extend this tension to archival description, accessioning, and metadata practices, arguing that archival systems do not simply record identity but stabilize, flatten, and govern it through classificatory infrastructures. Focusing on gender and sexual identities, with an emphasis on the Turtle Island (North American) term Two-Spirit, this produces what I call archival translation: a condition in which relational, place-based, and evolving forms of identity exceed the descriptive frameworks designed to contain them. Drawing on archival theory, Indigenous statistics, Indigenous Data Sovereignty, and scholarship on refusal, I examine how standards and data models privilege legibility, comparability, and interoperability over relational accountability. I argue that even when archival systems adopt more flexible or “relational” descriptive models, they often preserve the underlying requirement that knowledge be rendered as structured, exchangeable data. In contrast, Indigenous frameworks such as CARE, OCAP®, and Jennifer Wemigwans’s A Digital Bundle demonstrate that governance is not external to information systems but constitutive of them. The paper concludes by arguing that archival change cannot depend solely on individual ethical practice. If archivists are to take relationality seriously, then respect, reciprocity, and responsibility must be embedded into archival infrastructure itself. The problem is not only descriptive language, but the systems, standards, and governance models that make some identities legible while rendering others translation. In doing so, the paper introduces the concept of archival translation as a way of theorizing the structural limits of archival systems when engaging relational forms of identity.
The term Christian Hymnology refers to all the texts concern the Holy Sacraments and Services, in respect to the doctrine and approaches within the doctrine. All hymnologies can be studied over the 365 days of the annual cycle of Christian hymns. Generally speaking, the main corpus of the annual hymnology in the Eastern Orthodox Church is divided daily into Vespers, Orthros, and the Divine Liturgy. This study aims to provide a metadata schema for the description of the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, the main liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom appears to have some elements in common with the Order of Mass of the Latin Rite. Due to this, the schema is of general value and—adapted or modified—could be considered to be adopted as a new standard. Metadata schemas for Vespers and Orthros (Matins) of the Eastern Orthodox Church are also provided.
Should sensitive archival images be shown—and if so, how? This article examines the ethical, legal, and technical stakes of providing access to colonial-era photographs at scale for researchers, archivists, curators, and wider online publics, including members of source communities, arguing for qualified access supported by human-in-the-loop AI. Drawing on fifteen semi-structured interviews with professionals across GLAM institutions in the UK and continental Europe, we map current practice around sensitivity review, metadata enrichment, and collaboration with source communities. We complement these insights with a small pilot that applies a commercially available computer-vision tool (Google Cloud Vision SafeSearch) to twenty colonial photographs from the Archives Nationales d’Outre mer (France). This pilot shows that SafeSearch under-detects violence, particularly in monochrome, staged, or context-dependent scenes (a classic domain-shift problem). It performs comparatively better at flagging nudity within this small sample – an area that engages clear legal and safeguarding obligations for institutions within UK and EU frameworks (particularly where minors may be depicted). We outline a pragmatic pipeline for archival settings—combining SafeSearch-style triage, OCR/HTR of mounts and captions, authority-linked entities, semantic (vector) search, and constrained multimodal captioning—while acknowledging that these findings are based on a limited pilot, and emphasising that models inherit training biases, struggle with historical formats, and must never replace curatorial judgement. Interviewees converge on governance needs: clear takedown and escalation procedures; explicit labelling of AI-generated metadata; least-privilege technical setups; and early, sustained engagement with source communities. We propose a decision framework that aligns institutional risk (legal compliance, safeguarding, staff wellbeing) with public-interest goals (research access for scholars, students, and other users of digital collections; accountability to affected and source communities; and broader public engagement with histories of empire and violence), and that positions co-governance with source communities as a core condition of responsible access. The result is a practicable route for institutions working in similar legal and professional contexts to make difficult images more discoverable while minimising harm: AI can assist with scale; archivists and communities retain authority over what is surfaced, how it is described, and when warnings or access restrictions are required. By aligning institutional risk with public-interest goals, the framework also reflects institutional responsibilities and pressures, including legal compliance, reputational risk, and staff wellbeing, and therefore addresses not only user access but also the practical and ethical constraints under which GLAM professionals operate.
While archival buildings are often treated implicitly as neutral containers of records, this article argues that they are themselves archives—tangible, readable records of historical, political, and cultural information. Through horizontal comparison of typical archival buildings across geography, time, hierarchy, and theme, combined with vertical material culture analysis of Huangshicheng (China’s Imperial Archives, 1534-present), this study demonstrates that archival buildings record information through their complete material systems: architectural body, interior spaces, archival facilities, and environmental atmosphere. The article introduces the concept of “design writing” to theorize how design functions as a recording mechanism in archival buildings. Parallel to traditional archival writing (inscription on paper, bamboo, or parchment), design writing encodes information through material selection, spatial organization, color application, and decorative patterns. However, design writing exhibits distinctive characteristics: multi-sensory perception, embedded power distribution, and dynamic accumulation across time. Crucially, it records both intentional and unintentional information, providing multi-dimensional historical evidence that can corroborate or complicate traditional archival records. By expanding the definition of the term archive and revealing design’s mediating role in historical recording, this research contributes new theoretical perspectives to archival studies.
Modern transparency regimes rest on a foundational assumption: that increased disclosure equates to increased accountability (Meijer 2013; Roberts 2006). This article examines a related but distinct question: whether disclosed records are interpretable, not merely accessible. When records are stabilised for public disclosure—converted from dynamic, relational systems into static outputs—the connections through which they acquire meaning are not always readily observable at the documentary surface. This condition is conceptualised as Representational Contraction. The analysis draws on two independently generated administrative disclosure outputs released in response to statutory privacy information requests made under New Zealand’s Privacy Act 2020. To examine this condition, the study employs a reflexive control methodology incorporating records authored by the researcher. Even with extensive prior familiarity, some documentary connections were not readily apparent within the disclosed form. In response, the article proposes the Record-Surface Visibility (RSV) analytical framework, comprising five interdependent dimensions: Identifier Continuity, Metadata Embedding, Procedural Relationality, Attachment Linkage Visibility, and Format Interoperability. RSV is intended for application to disclosed outputs and provides external observers—including researchers, requesters, and oversight bodies—with a structured vocabulary for assessing whether documentary relationships remain observable once records have left their originating systems. RSV shifts attention from record production to record legibility: the extent to which the relationships through which records acquire evidential meaning remain observable to external observers encountering disclosed outputs. Across the disclosed outputs examined, recurring patterns included identifier instability, attachment disconnection, and discontinuities in temporal coherence. Informational content may persist, while procedural sequences, contextual connections, and documentary relationships become less readily apparent. The presence of information does not ensure interpretability. Formal completeness does not guarantee evidential accessibility. Transparency is not determined solely by the existence of records, but also by the visibility of their relationships.
As cultural heritage conservation increasingly relies on multi-source analytical data, procedural records, and information intended for long-term preservation, conservation documentation has become an archival object with evidential, administrative, and research value. Existing documentation approaches, however, still rely mainly on structured frameworks or condition survey instruments, which are limited in their ability to organise complex conservation information generated across multiple stages and to preserve evidential relationships across records. Drawing on existing discussions of modularity, information architecture, and archival information organisation, this study reconceptualises conservation documentation as a problem of archival information organisation. It develops a modular method through workflow analysis, record structure analysis, and metadata mapping, and proposes an archival framework consisting of ten interrelated modules. The framework is tested through a case study of palm-leaf manuscript conservation. The results indicate that the framework can integrate heterogeneous conservation information, strengthen semantic connections and procedural continuity across records, and improve the evidential integrity and long-term reusability of conservation records. The study offers a transferable framework for the archival organisation of conservation documentation and supports the development of structured and sustainable conservation documentation systems.
This paper reports findings from interviews with 15 practicing archivists mostly from the United States to examine how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming archival work practices and affecting the archival workforce. The findings show that archivists employ AI in diverse ways, spanning varying levels of maturity and technical demand. Rather than replacing archivists’ jobs, AI adoption has primarily transformed the organization of work by automating selected routine tasks, enabling new forms of archival activity, augmenting professional capabilities, and improving efficiency once systems reach full production use. These changes have contributed to backlog reduction, capacity expansion, and the reallocation of staff time, as well as generating demand for new technical expertise. Interviewees reported no job losses attributable to AI to date and generally anticipated stable staffing levels in the foreseeable future, for a variety of reasons. Overall, these findings suggest that AI is more likely to reconfigure archival labor than to displace it in the near term.
Traditionally, the reverse sides of archival documents have attracted little attention from either archivists or historians, except in cases of palimpsests. What remains understudied is that they are material surfaces that might influence the circulation of documents. To challenge this conventional understanding, we propose a close analysis of the repurposing of documents bearing swastikas within the bureaucratic practices of post-1945 Poland. The redrawing of Poland’s borders after 1945 and the incorporation of formerly German territories confronted Polish officials with an overwhelming presence of German material culture, including a substantial number of Nazi documents marked with the swastika. As a symbol of the brutal German occupation of 1939–45 and of the detested Nazi ideology, the swastika carried considerable emotional weight. Despite this, Polish officials reused these documents, writing on their reverse sides and thereby reintroducing them into circulation. We argue that this practice is possible to be interpreted not merely as a pragmatic response to post-war paper shortages but a deliberate act: a form of symbolic retribution against German symbols and, by extension, against the Germans and their state. Drawing on Alison Wiggins’ approach to the materiality of documents, we interpret the turning over of the swastika as a performative act of resistance. Thus, this analysis uncovers the post-war emotions and meanings embedded within these documents. By foregrounding the performative dimensions of documentary practice, along with its temporality and material entanglements in processes of information exchange, our theoretical framework offers a potential of a novel lens for examining the role of documents in post-conflict bureaucratic and archival contexts.
Throughout history and across political contexts, archival systems have been vulnerable to manipulation, censorship, destruction, and ideological distortion especially under repressive regimes. This study examines how authoritarian/repressive governments weaponize archival power to legitimize dominant narratives, erase dissenting voices, and manufacture selective histories. Using a qualitative documentary analysis approach, the study systematically reviews published scholarship, government documents, historical records, and case studies from Africa, The findings revealed five interrelated strategies of archival oppression: destruction of evidence, censorship and restricted access, fabrication of misleading records, surveillance-based documentation, and selective preservation aligned with dominant ideologies. These practices compromise archival authenticity, undermine transparency, and erode public trust in official memory systems. The paper concludes that archival manipulation is not merely a technical violation but a profound ethical and political act that reshapes what societies know, remember, or forget. Safeguarding archival integrity requires institutional accountability, digital preservation frameworks, inclusive documentation practices, and robust governance mechanisms, especially in politically fragile contexts. The study underscores the urgent need to strengthen archival resilience in the face of ongoing threats posed by state power, digital vulnerabilities, and emerging information risks.
Although positionality statements have gained considerable visibility in archival studies scholarship and professional discourse, little empirical evidence exists concerning the ways in which archival professionals themselves use positionality statements. Drawing on an international survey of 62 archivists, this exploratory case study examines archivists’ attitudes toward positionality, their experiences creating positionality statements, their perceptions of positionality statements’ usefulness and drawbacks, and their views on such statements’ application, namely in archival description, reparative description, and peer review. Findings show that most respondents value reflection on positionality and perceive payoffs for personal ethics, professional practice, and scholarly communication. Conversely, participants expressed ambivalence toward positionality statements as a practice. While many respondents identified potential advantages such as showing the researcher’s location, countering bias, enhancing understanding, illuminating the ostensible insider/outsider relationship, encouraging reflexivity, increasing transparency, augmenting trustworthiness, and promoting critical thinking, most also put forth concerns. These included inauthenticity, violating privacy, infusing bias, ineffectiveness, extra labor, irrelevancy, reductiveness, chilling effects on scholarly communication, intellectually suspect, not universally accepted, and a lack of best practices. Many stressed the potentially adverse ramifications of these on members of marginalized communities. Complementary quantitative analysis suggested that caring about positionality strongly correlated with perceiving positionality statements as useful, even though belief in their drawbacks persisted, irrespective of stance. Most participants opposed using positionality statements in colophons and annotations; they remained divided on PS’ role in reparative description. In peer review, finally, respondents mostly opposed requiring PS. This research complicates prevailing claims about positionality statements by foregrounding archivists’ lived experiences.
Despite the growth in digitization and broad access to online instructional resources, relatively few empirical studies in North America have examined how elementary, middle, and secondary teachers are using primary source materials in their classrooms. This article reports on the Diving into Archives! (DIA) project, a research initiative housed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The goal of the project is to build partnerships between archivists and teachers, aiming to support the use of primary sources in classroom settings and to encourage new kinds of historical thinking. This article situates the DIA initiative as an exemplary case for encouraging cross-domain collaboration, by sharing practical strategies for outreach and access efforts, designs for instructional support, and guidance for expanding meaningful collaborations between teachers and archivists.
Social media archiving has become an established institutional practice, yet uncertainty remains about what social media archives can be used as evidence of and how platform-mediated conditions shape evidential meaning. This paper addresses that problem by introducing the Mediated Recordkeeping Model (MRKm) as a conceptual and analytical framework for examining epistemic accountability in social media archiving. Building on records continuum theory, the MRKm explicitly models mediation, power and the distributed production of meaning across platforms, institutions and communities, responding to a theoretical gap in archival scholarship on how evidentiality is produced and constrained under platform conditions. The paper places the framework within contemporary contexts of platform capitalism, technical volatility, and ethical and legal constraints, and it argues that archival practice does not adequately specify how socio-technical infrastructures and institutional decisions actively shape what is known through archived social media. The analytical value of the MRKm is demonstrated through a deliberately partial, documentation-based application to the State Library of New South Wales Social Media Archive, which shows how evidential ambiguity and absence are produced through capture, organisation, curation and access design. The paper further introduces platform paradata as a practical mechanism for operationalising epistemic accountability by documenting these mediations. Rather than proposing a prescriptive solution or institutional evaluation, the paper positions epistemic accountability as a core archival responsibility and advances the MRKm as a diagnostic framework for explaining the conditions, constraints and trade-offs through which platform-mediated archives shape evidential meaning.
Public archival institutions occupy an ambivalent position in democratic societies. Institutionally, they are configured—through international frameworks and professional self-representation—primarily as evidentiary infrastructure: reliable custodians of records that enable accountability, contestation, and redress. At the same time, archival scholarship and a range of practical initiatives increasingly position these institutions as active agents in processes of democratisation, capable of shaping the conditions under which diverse voices, histories, and social perspectives can circulate in the public sphere. This article argues that the persistent gap between these two framings is structurally produced, at least in part, by the policy ecosystem in which archival institutions are embedded. Through a comparison of supranational archival frameworks with heritage and museum policy frameworks, it demonstrates that archival institutions are internationally configured primarily as custodians of records rather than as relational actors with an explicit transformative mandate—which helps explain why transformative practices tend to emerge fragmentarily and remain institutionally precarious. The article then analyses how archival institutions nonetheless exercise democratic agency through three interlocking registers of sub-political power: infrastructural, distributive, and persistent. Guided by two core democratic functions—as infrastructures for evidence and as pillar of pluralism through the distribution of archival capital—it examines how institutional choices can both restrict and expand public impact in concrete public-sector contexts. It concludes that archival professionals need a sharper understanding of the sub-political effects of their everyday routines; that transformative scholarship must engage more seriously with the constrained nature of public archival work; and that making public archives productive as democratic actors requires explicit recognition in supranational and national frameworks—not only as evidentiary infrastructures, but as distributors of archival capital co-responsible for pluralism in the public sphere.
This article builds on critical theories of access and accessibility to explore the extent to which archival websites provide for the specific functional requirements of disabled visitors, and the methods that archival practitioners can adopt to further disabled inclusion in archival spaces. We take a mixed methods approach with an emancipatory ethos, combining accessibility testing of archival websites for the technical attributes that contribute to accessibility for those identifying as visually, sensorily, cognitively and physically disabled, and interviews with archival practitioners on their approaches to include and source support for inclusion in their respective institutions. Together, these methods construct an understanding of the current state of disabled inclusion in digital archival collections in the United Kingdom. The article demonstrates that while access is one of the main principles of archival theory, the nature of that access is often considered in its broadest sense, without considering the individual requirements of those engaging with archives. Defaulting to non-disabled visitors further marginalizes the disabled users with specific access requirements, thus rendering them invisible in the development of physical and virtual reading rooms. We encourage a mindset shift towards foregrounding the needs of disabled users, offering a framework around which other practitioners may shape their initiatives to work towards a more holistic, imperfect accessibility policy.
Although the Records Life Cycle model has faced extensive criticism in theory, many archival settings still assume a linear timeline in practice, treating records as items that move step by step from current administrative use to long-term preservation In digital settings where machines act in very short time frames and record care is shared across many parties, a linear view does not reflect what a record is in practice. The article introduces Archival Time Simultaneity (ATS) as a framework for thinking about the archival record not as a biological entity that decays over time, but as a hyper-temporal node within a Block Universe. Using ideas from the physics of time and the graph-based ontology in Records in Contexts (RiC), ATS argues that evidential, administrative, and memory values should not be treated as stages that follow one another. Instead, they exist at the same time as different dimensions that come into play depending on context through metadata. On this view, each time a record’s value is activated in a given setting, the record is interpreted in a new way, and its meaning is reshaped (Ketelaar, Arch Sci 1:131–141, 2001). By treating the record as something that exists in multiple states at the same time, rather than as something that develops along a single line, ATS can serve as a theoretical basis for postcustodial stewardship. This view allows records to be activated in context where they are held, without requiring physical transfer or a final point of closure.
This article examines how the archival profession is represented through cultural media by analyzing the lyrics of the song “Bangga Menjadi Arsiparis.” While archival scholarship has extensively addressed records, governance, and technological transformation, less attention has been given to how professional identity and archival values are communicated within popular culture. Treating song lyrics as a cultural text, this study employs a qualitative reflexive textual analysis to explore how archival meaning is constructed narratively and symbolically. The analysis demonstrates that the lyrics represent archivists as custodians of collective memory, ethical actors, and mediators of temporal continuity between past, present, and future. Professional pride is articulated as a collective identity grounded in responsibility and public trust rather than visibility or recognition. Archives are framed as infrastructures of accountability, while technological change is represented as an extension of archival practice that preserves core values such as authenticity and evidentiary reliability. Through its circulation beyond institutional settings, the song functions as a form of living archive that communicates archival values in affective and accessible ways. Conceptually, this study contributes to cultural approaches in archival science by foregrounding representation as a key site of archival meaning-making. Methodologically, it demonstrates the value of reflexive textual analysis for examining professional identity from within practice. The findings suggest that popular cultural media can complement institutional archives by enhancing archival literacy and professional visibility in contemporary societies.
This article provides a history of the records classification scheme that launched modern records management systems in Italy. It describes the government administrative reforms in Austrian Lombardy (1749-1796) and during the Napoleonic period (1796-1814), when institutional and bureaucratic transformations were energized by an emerging administrative discipline. The techniques of exercising public power and the intellectual technology used to manage records shared a toolkit that featured the concepts of function and competence. The growing confidence of archivists in analyzing the nature of government and its production of records led to a methodology for categorizing governmental subject matters; a rational archival order was ideally to reflect a rationalized administration. One result was the initiation of a systematic synthesis of registration and classification that would culminate in the modern protocollo-titolario system. In a historical narrative, the article reveals the crucial political and social changes affecting governmental and archival practice and, reciprocally, how by establishing a uniformity of classification, the public-law administrations of this era solidified state authority.
This study examines user perceptions of archival retrieval system functionality and interface design within the context of digital humanities research. Task-based user observations were conducted, with comprehensive recordings of participants’ interactions on archival retrieval systems, complemented by usability questionnaires to capture user experience and identify specific usability issues. Findings show that, despite recognizing the value of digital humanities analytical features, participants found the systems’ interfaces, functions, and terminology unintuitive. Overreliance on dropdown menus, insufficient guidance, and difficulties navigating hierarchical structures led to errors and trial-and-error behavior, hindering engagement and full system use. The study concludes with practical recommendations to improve the usability of archival retrieval systems integrating digital humanities analytical features.
This article investigates the evolving role of local (municipal) archives in Flanders, focusing on the paradigmatic tension between traditional evidential and emergent socially engaged archival functions: what signs of a paradigm shift are observable, and which factors facilitate or hinder a transition toward a more transformative archival praxis? Employing a critical studies lens and a mixed-methods approach—combining an online survey and interviews—the study finds that technical-administrative and evidential responsibilities remain dominant, with cultural and public-oriented roles considered as secondary and optional in nature. While professionals express intrinsic motivation for broader societal engagement, structural barriers such as ambiguous policy, fragmented mandates, and resource constraints inhibit the development of multi-dimensional, socially engaged archival practices. The findings demonstrate that the transformative potential of local archives depends less on ideological divisions than on the professionals’ ability to develop strategic agency and to navigate an uncertain policy environment. The findings conclude that realizing transformative change requires integrated policy frameworks, critical-theory informed training, and strategic leadership to foster archives as genuine agents of social change by harmonizing evidential integrity and affective engagement.
