Archivaria

Front & Back Covers

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 01:05:51 -0800

Inside Covers

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0800

Family Archives, Fateful Options

Michael Piggott — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 -0800

This article presents reflections prompted after the writer, a retired archivist, began work during 2020 on family papers passed to his care following his parents’ deaths, conscious in doing so that many of the baby boomer gener- ation (born between 1946 and 1964) must be undertaking similar exercises and facing similar needs for decisions about the legacy of the last truly analog generation. The resulting autoethnography draws on his own family story, the emotional experience of working on the papers, archival theory, biographies, and autobiographies. The reflections are structured around the three options all families face in actively dealing with their archives: to cull them; to seek to outsource or deprivatize their custody to a library, archives, or more specialist heritage body; or to manage them within the family. He also identifies various psychological, societal, and random factors influencing individual approaches to the choices and shaping what was created and survived, which the children can consider “round the kitchen table.” An additional dimension speculates about the notion of family, and family pets, within descriptive standards and ideas of provenance.

Tacit Narratives in the Manuscript Collections of Matthew Parker and Robert Cotton

Heather MacNeil — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0800

Over the past two decades, the history of early modern archives has been a topic of considerable interest among historians, and their research has drawn attention to the complex motives and commitments that inspired individ- uals, communities, and institutions to create, collect, preserve, and use archives in the early modern period. Their research also offers insights into what Eric Ketelaar has called the “tacit narratives of power and knowledge” woven into the formation, preservation, and use of archives and opens up new avenues for exploring the social history of archives. The English Protestant Reformation has provided the backdrop for some of this work, highlighting the ways in which post-Reformation libraries functioned as “polemical weapons” in political and religious struggles to control the historical narrative about the roots of the Reformation. The libraries built by the antiquarian collectors Matthew Parker and Robert Cotton in the 16th and 17th centuries furnish useful examples of the kinds of tacit narratives embedded in the selection, preservation, and use of post-Reformation manuscript collections. This article draws on the research undertaken by early modern historians into the collecting and compiling practices underpinning the formation and use of the Parker and Cotton manu- script collections to demonstrate how their work is helping to illuminate the tacit narratives embedded in early modern archives as well as broadening and deepening the social history of archives.

Be Kind Rewind

Julia Gilmore — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 16:35:32 -0800

Magnetic media, once democratizing documentary tools for marginalized communities, now face degralescence due to the physical degradation of magnetic tape and the obsolescence of playback equipment. However, these are not the only concerns when it comes to these media; while digitizing and providing online access have increasingly become requirements for major funding bodies and strategies adopted by archives, the contemporary neoliberal orientation toward open, online access poses additional risks for vulnerable communities.

The impending magnetic media crisis presents a critical opportunity to contend with neoliberal archival impulses; re-envision approaches to preservation, digitization, and access; and acknowledge the aective values of magnetic media for communities who have produced and cared for them. Largely unexplored in archival literature, the unique promise and precarity of magnetic media created by vulnerable communities require ethical consideration of issues of privacy, exposure, and decontextualization and an understanding of the complexities of preserving magnetic media. This article explores these considerations and issues, advocates for the adoption of a feminist ethics of care, and introduces the VHS Archives Working Group as a generative model for caring for magnetic media from vulnerable communities.

Probing a Dark Decade

Bill Russell — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 16:53:04 -0800

At the end of the Second World War, the Indian Affairs Branch (IAB) launched a significant administrative renovation. As a result, during the first post-war decade, it introduced a number of notable changes in the manner in which records were managed both at headquarters in Ottawa and in the wide network of field offices. These achievements are documented in the archival record available today at Library and Archives Canada (LAC). What is less well understood is the records management environment out of which these changes emerged. This study describes aspects of the challenges that faced the IAB’s records staff during the later years of the Great Depression and those of the Second World War. Its centrepiece is a file that provides a chronicle, in the form of monthly reports, of recordkeeping in the headquarters central registry office of the Indian Affairs Branch during the years 1937–1947. This record shines additional light on the information management activities of the branch during a particularly difficult decade in the administration’s history.

CCPERB Perturbed

Loryl MacDonald — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 16:36:37 -0800

GEOFFREY YEO. Record-Making and Record-Keeping in Early Societies.

Nicole Kapphahn — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 16:37:16 -0800

Record-Making and Record-Keeping in Early Societies. Geoffrey Yeo. New York: Routledge, 2021. xx, 205 pp. 9780367706272

Archives de Quarantaine. Exposition virtuelle en ligne réalisée par l’Association des archivistes francophones de Belgique.

Yousra Riahi — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0800

Archives de Quarantaine. Exposition virtuelle en ligne, 18 mars – en cours. Réalisée par l’Association des archivistes francophones de Belgique.

Apparition Room. Western Front, Vancouver, BC.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0800

Apparition Room. Western Front, Vancouver, BC. January 14 – April 1, 2023. Curated by Lee Plested. Scenography by Nile Koetting

Evergon: Theatres of the Intimate. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Québec.

Marie-Lise Drapeau-Bisson — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 16:39:07 -0800

Evergon: Theatres of the Intimate. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Québec. October 20, 2022 – April 23, 2023. Curated by Bernard Lamarche.

Woven In: Indigenous Women’s Activism and Media. Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria, BC.

Genevieve Weber — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 16:39:42 -0800

Woven In: Indigenous Women’s Activism and Media. Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria, BC. November 19, 2022 – May 7, 2023. Curated by Gerry Ambers, Marianne Nicolson, and Siku Allooloo.