Within the pages of this special issue are select papers from the ninth International Conference on the History of Records and Archives (ICHORA 2020), which was hosted by the University of Michigan’s School of Information from October 26 to 30, 2020. Contributions to ICHORA 2020 focused on the theme Archives and the Digital World (https://www.ichora2020.com).
ICHORA started in 2003 at the University of Toronto and has since been held in various locations, including Amsterdam (2005; 2015), Boston (2007), Perth (2008), London (2010), Austin (2012), and Melbourne (2017). Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic that has affected almost every facet of our lives, the program committee decided to hold ICHORA 2020 as a virtual conference. The event nevertheless attracted over 300 registrants, a record attendance for this conference. With ICHORA 2020’s thematic focus on the relationship between archives and the digital world, it was rather fitting that the conference was moved online.
Following the ICHORA 2020 theme, the conference generated papers that explored the different ways of historicizing and theorizing recordmaking, recordkeeping, and archiving practices in the digital age. Taking cue from the organizers of the inaugural conference, Barbara L. Craig, Philip B. Eppard, and Heather MacNeil:
Digital formats, easily communicated through electronic networks, are also caught in faster cycles of innovation and change. The results of such a highly competitive market is a digital past that is quickly unreadable and lost. Many of the larger questions raised by computers underscore our need to understand the history of communication practices and the experience of earlier generations in dealing with similar revolutionary challenges (Craig et al. 2005, p. 3).
Digital technologies have been in use for over seven decades and were, in fact, late additions to a whirlwind of new recordmaking and recordkeeping technologies that began a century before that transformed the creation, transmission, preservation, representation, and interpretation of records and archives. In turn, these technologies mediated how we document, remember, and commemorate the past. Despite claims of ubiquity, digital infrastructures are culturally, linguistically, and historically specific, often maintaining, and reinscribing longstanding power imbalances that have favored some groups and marginalized others. But sometimes, digital technologies afford new opportunities for resistance to the mainstream or use by subcultures to advocate for their continued survival. The six articles included in this special issue cover these wide-ranging issues made apparent in examining the critical intersections and relationships between Archives and the Digital World.
Scholars of archives have over the years given attention to the preservation and access of research data, particularly in the wake of increasing focus on the value of their reuse. Indeed, data curation has become one important strand in archival scholarship. Adam Kriesberg and Jacob Kowall’s contribution in this special issue focuses on scientific datasets, and their related archival records, created through collaborative research between the US and the USSR during the Cold War era. Their article reflects not only the more recent attention to the value of research data in terms of access and reuse, but also the importance of understanding the larger historical and political contexts of data creation that are often found in archives (in this instance, records at the US National Archives and Records Administration). In presenting the history of scientific research data, the authors demonstrate the relationship between archives and the digital world by tracing the ideologies and government structures that affect data access, representation, preservation, and use/reuse. Kriesberg and Kowall’s work underscores the apparent linkages between archival records and legacy of scientific data, more importantly the value of collaboration between archivists and data curators.
Access to archival content through digital platforms has only increased in recent years. Some of the articles in this issue tackle the changing nature and practice of archival access and representation online. Katharina Hering’s paper probes the complex issues with partnership between public archives and private companies in developing online access portals. Hering’s contribution carefully unpacks the ethical concerns surrounding the presentation of genealogical information in Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) records held by the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in a commercial database portal, Ancestry.com. As the World Wide Web has allowed for the greater accessibility of archival content, Patrick Egan presents how linked data can facilitate the connections between related materials for Irish traditional music. He shares the exciting possibilities that linked open data technologies can offer in representing the diversity of musical traditions across geography and cultures. In addition to online access databases and linked data, this special issue also pays attention to the impacts of cloud computing in archives. Dallas Pillen and Max Eckard discuss the administrative, policy, and organizational consequences of one university’s shift from locally hosted services to cloud computing technologies, and the custodial implications of this transition, for the university archives.
The important intersections between archives and the digital world would not be complete without examining the impact of this relationship with communities. The last two articles in this issue have notable contributions in this area. Diana E. Marsh looks at archival access, primarily focusing on Native American and Indigenous community perspectives on how they value and use digitized collections. The digital world has also given us possibilities for expanding traditional archival concepts, such as the principle of provenance. In this vein, Jessica M. Lapp introduces the concept of provenancial fabulation to accommodate the multiplicity of contexts and actors in archival creation by presenting insights from the study of two digital archives of feminist materials: Alternative Toronto and Rise Up! Feminist Digital Archive. Readers will find the four dimensions of provenancial fabulation as critical concepts to reshape archival theory in contemporary world.
Archival Science has published some of the most notable papers presented in previous ICHORA conferences (Anderson et al. 2006; Sassoon and Burrows 2009; Foscarini and Frings-Hessami 2019). This special issue continues this tradition by offering articles that tackle ICHORA 2020’s theme from diverse institutional and community perspectives. Contributors discuss issues examining cases in various organizational settings, ranging from a national institution such as the US National Archives and Records Administration in its efforts to provide online access to immigration records, to community-based efforts to preserve feminist collections, to a university repository grappling with cloud-based technologies. The digital technologies they study also vary greatly, from scientific data to online access portals, to digitized content, to cloud storage, to linked data, to name some. This foray into the intersections between Archives and the Digital World opens many exciting and challenging possibilities.
Ricardo L. Punzalan
is an associate professor in the University of Michigan School of Information. His research and teaching focuses on archives and digital curation. He conducts community-based, participatory research to understand access to digitized anthropological archives and ethnographic legacy data by academic and community users. He currently codirects ReConnect/ReCollect: Reparative Connections to Philippine Collections at the University of Michigan, a project that develops the framework for, and the practice of, reparative work for Philippine collections acquired by the university during the US colonial period. His work has been published in American Archivist, Archival Science, Archivaria, International Journal of Digital Curation, and Library Quarterly.
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