Archival Management
Margot Note
The Power of Oral Histories and Embodied Memory ...

Written documents have long occupied a privileged position in archives as the most authoritative memory source. However, this excludes vast repositories of knowledge that reside outside the written word, especially within Indigenous communities, where memory is often preserved and transmitted through oral traditions, performance, storytelling, ceremony, and embodied practices.

The Power of Oral Histories and Embodied Memory in Archives
Archival Management
Margot Note
Rethinking Archival Description Through ...

Archival description is often treated as a neutral or technical task: summarizing contents, assigning subject headings, and organizing metadata for retrieval. However, description is actually far from neutral. It shapes how users interpret records, which narratives are centered, and whose voices are made visible or erased.

Rethinking Archival Description Through Decolonial Lenses
Archival Management
Margot Note
Honoring Cultural Protocols in Archival Practice

As the archival profession reckons with the legacies of colonialism, more institutions and practitioners are turning toward Indigenous and decolonial approaches that reframe traditional archival practice. Central to this shift is recognizing cultural protocols and community-defined rules governing how knowledge is created, shared, accessed, and preserved. Cultural protocols are foundational to ethical, respectful, and reciprocal relationships between archives and Indigenous communities.  

Honoring Cultural Protocols in Archival Practice
Archival Management
Margot Note
Decolonial Approaches to Indigenous Knowledge

In recent decades, Indigenous communities and archivists have challenged the dominant frameworks that have long shaped archival practice. Traditionally, Western archival models have prioritized state authority, institutional control, and the presumption of neutrality. These models often fail to reflect Indigenous worldviews, community needs, or the rights of Indigenous peoples over their records and heritage.  

Decolonial Approaches to Indigenous Knowledge
Archival Management
Margot Note
The Ethical Use of Born-Digital Materials in ...

As archival practice shifts to meet the challenges of the digital age, the ethical use of born-digital materials has become one of the most pressing concerns for archivists. These materials—emails, websites, text messages, digital photographs, spreadsheets, social media posts, and more—are created and stored digitally from their inception.   

The Ethical Use of Born-Digital Materials in Archives

Archival Arrangement Principles

Archival Arrangement Principles

Archivists provide clarity to collections. They help users understand records of enduring value: what they are, who created them, and what events they represent.

To do so, they identify groupings of records. Then, they explain aggregations of records through appraisal, processing, and description. Through the archival process, archivists transform complex groupings of primary sources into insightful and succinct information through arrangement and description.

Archival Program Advantages

Archival Program Advantages

Organizations benefit from records and archival management programs in both tangible and intangible ways.

The purpose of an archives is to preserve and make accessible the various elements of the historical and enduring value of a business, organization, agency, family, or other entity. Significant components include files, photographs, correspondence, legal documents, press clippings, and a wide range of informational items in between.