Archives have long been viewed as bastions of memory, preservation, and historical accountability. However, archivists must confront ethical questions in an era of digital surveillance, data harvesting, and global information flows.
As archival institutions evolve from custodians of information to facilitators of memory and meaning-making, emotional engagement has become a vital, though often overlooked, dimension of archival design.
Archival reading rooms have long been the centerpiece of public access to collections. They are where researchers engage with historical documents, where discovery becomes tangible, and where the institutional identity of an archives is most visibly embodied.
Archival discovery tools, such as catalogs, finding aids, search interfaces, and digital repositories, are often the first point of contact between users and collections. These tools serve as maps and compasses, guiding users through vast and often complex holdings.
Design thinking has become a widely adopted approach in fields ranging from technology to education, prized for emphasizing empathy, experimentation, and iterative problem-solving. For archives, traditionally shaped around internal workflows and professional conventions, design thinking presents an opportunity to reimagine outreach and engagement strategies from users’ perspectives.
Archival management originated in the 1930s with the establishment of the National Archives and the Society for American Archivists, as well as the Historical Records Survey (HRS) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
The subsequent evolvement of records management as a specialized enterprise occurred in the 1950s. The expanse of governmental activity and its subsequent records spurred a need to reduce the number of records while retaining the quality of records of enduring value.
I've compiled some of my best post posts on archival management. I love being a consultant who can help organizations fund, set up, or expand their archives programs.
Interested in learning more? Explore my services.
The role of archivists has always been in flux, responding to the needs of the information world and providing the unique skill sets that librarians, historians, and records managers may understand but do not hold. Archivists are colleagues to librarians, historians, and records managers, but are a distinct class unto themselves.
The ability to automatically categorize records is very powerful, but autocategorization is not well understood and needs to be executed properly if it is to succeed. Autocategorization “attempts to assign electronic records to either predefined file structures or to self-defined categories through computer-based processes” (Lubbes 2003, 60).
Deaccessioning of archival holdings, the process in which an archives removes accessioned materials from its holdings, is one potential result of reappraisal. Ideally, deaccessioning would occur regularly in the course of archival collections management practices. As a routine procedure, it would allow archival institutions to remove materials determined to be unworthy of retention.
I recently watched R.I.P.: Rest in Pieces: A Portrait of Joe Coleman, a 1997 documentary about the painter and performance artist. Coleman paints detailed, overwhelming, and chaotic scenes in a similar style to Hieronymus Bosch. Coleman's work is categorized as "outsider art," a condescending way of saying an artist is talented, but without the usual pretension of being an artiste.
