Community archives have become an important focus of archival research, as sites where authority and the right to tell one’s own story can be reclaimed. This power may particularly resonate with marginalized groups such as the LGBTQIA+ community. In this project, we interviewed 25 archivists responsible for queer community archives to explore their experiences and practices in managing queer archival collections in the United States. The findings reflect common strategies in community archive processing and management while also highlighting distinctive roles and approaches, particularly in building connections to both collections and communities. Archivists emphasized the importance of these connections, especially when inadequate descriptive tools required them to develop alternative ways of documenting queer communities. Respondents described the symbolic and literal annihilation of many in the queer community, such as individuals with HIV/AIDs, as well as the potential transformative power of representing communities that have been overlooked and/or silenced. Both respondents who were queer and queer archives users reported special bonds with the collection, such as being “seen” for the first time. These themes may resonate across community archives broadly, but they appear particularly salient in queer community archives.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) does not constitute a single phenomenon in archival practice. It may generate potential records, support archival functions, assist tool development, analyze holdings, become an object of preservation, or mediate access. Treating these different modes of involvement as homogeneous produces imprecise diagnoses and inadequate safeguards. This theoretical-conceptual article proposes a six-mode model: AI-assisted record production, AI tools for archival functions, AI-assisted tool development, AI analysis of archival holdings, AI systems as preservation objects, and AI-mediated access. Each mode is evaluated against common requirements of archival trust — authenticity, reliability, accuracy, and the chain of preservation — and is subject to a cross-cutting governance framework based on paradata, explainable AI, bias mitigation, ethical use, and accountable human oversight. The analysis is guided by the theoretical-methodological framework of InterPARES, particularly InterPARES Trust AI (2021–2026). The article concludes that AI can support archival work only when its use is governed by archival principles, documented procedures, and clearly assigned human and institutional responsibility. The model provides an instrument for analyzing AI initiatives, designing safeguards, and guiding future empirical validation through case studies.
This article examines how recordkeeping infrastructures mediate institutional continuity across the Ottoman, Republican and digital periods in Turkey. It asks how successive systems for creating, organising and mobilising authoritative records have enabled administrative logics to persist while their material and technological forms changed. The study combines historical institutionalism with records continuum scholarship and draws on qualitative analysis of a 427-item corpus of archival, legislative and digital-governance documents. The analysis identifies four analytical patterns: centralised coordination, registry-based administration, state-led modernisation and data-mediated governance. The first three recur across periods to varying degrees, whereas data-mediated governance becomes most visible in the contemporary digital period. Representative documentary examples make the basis of these interpretations explicit. Ottoman Mühimme registers connected inscription with central oversight; Republican legislation and development plans recodified administrative authority in statutory and planning records; and MERNİS (the Central Population Administration System) and TAKBİS (the Land Registry and Cadastre Information System) carried established registration functions into electronic form, while the e-Devlet Kapısı (Turkey’s e-government gateway) connects services and information across institutions. A reading of the official instructions shows which recordkeeping properties they address for MERNİS (electronic signature, linkage of scanned documents, permanent retention of registers, restricted access and correction) and where they are silent. These examples support an interpretation of continuity through layering and conversion, but do not establish an unbroken or exclusively endogenous trajectory. The article contributes to archival scholarship by treating two registry systems, MERNİS and TAKBİS, not only as service-delivery technologies but also as recordkeeping infrastructures that carry established registers into electronic form, and by treating the e-Devlet Kapısı as an exchange layer through which institutions share records held elsewhere. “Historical recoding” denotes the reconfiguration of inherited recordkeeping and administrative logics within new infrastructures. The single-country, interpretive design limits causal and statistical generalisation; the findings instead offer a historically grounded account of how recordkeeping arrangements can condition digital state formation.
The expansion of artificial intelligence in archives, documentation systems and media archives has intensified a transformation that cannot be understood solely as technical innovation or task automation. In television audiovisual documentation, this shift is particularly visible because of the convergence of high production volumes, time pressure, continuous editorial reuse, descriptive granularity and multiplatform circulation. Drawing on a critical-conceptual approach supported by documentary analysis and based on a comparative reading of recent academic literature, broadcaster-sector studies, and professional and institutional documents, this article examines the loss of sufficiency of standardisation as the exclusive centre of professional documentary value. The argument advanced is that standardisation remains indispensable as an infrastructure of consistency, interoperability and retrievability, but that professional value increasingly tends to be recentred around documentary judgement, contextualisation, provenance and traceability, access mediation, and the critical governance of automation and AI.
In this article I interrogate how various technologies for accessing archives for genealogical research have been presented in 20 years of a Swedish radio programme, Släktband (‘Family Ties’), where genealogists share stories about finding information about their ancestors. My focus is the technologies presented as new by the programme. How have new technologies been presented on the programme? How have they been discussed relative to traditional genealogical practices? The material consists of 106 episodes aired on Swedish Radio between 2004 and 2025. The method used to answer these research questions is reflexive thematic analysis, with a theoretical framework based on Strandgaard Jensen’s concept of digital archival literacy (2021). I find there are three themes in how new technologies have been presented on the programme: (1) introducing actors, projects, and services; (2) giving instructions and explaining usage; and (3) critiques of new technologies. I find that family history can function as a vehicle for public education about new technologies for understanding, accessing, and using archives.
