Archivaria

Front & Back Covers

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Inside Covers

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Letter to the Editor

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Teaching Community Archiving

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Community archiving is grounded in grassroots documentation projects. This article, collectively written by an instructor and students of a community archiving course in a professional ischool, describes a process of teaching community archiving in ways that draw on and embrace community archiving principles and ethos rather than operating in opposition to them. It argues that teaching community archiving can create a classroom community that becomes a community archive in itself, and this article acts as one artifact created in the overall process. The article also offers information on the course outline, outcomes, pedagogical approach, and projects – some of which are documented in the text – that may be useful to other archival educators. It empha- sizes the value of the personal, affective, and collaborative aspects of archival practice that are emphasized in community archiving practice and literature, and it also draws attention to the ways in which these operate as dimensions of pedagogy and classroom community, allowing both the content and delivery of the class to work in harmony.

Caring for Archives of Incarceration

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In recent years, university archives have initiated efforts to document mass incarceration in the United States. As they engage in this work, it is important to examine how archivists are responding to the ethical challenges presented by collecting and stewarding records related to incarceration. This article addresses that need by reporting on the findings of qualitative interviews with archivists working at academic repositories with major collections focused on incarceration. This study’s focus on university archives reflects their prom- inence in undertaking such work, which is likely to continue given these institutions’ comparative autonomy and access to resources. Evaluating this work is urgent because of the vulnerable position of those most impacted by the prison system. Three major themes emerged from the interview data collected in this research: (1) financial and intellectual resources available at universities to support incarceration-related archiving; (2) the university context can provoke ethical anxiety for archivists working with incarceration-related collections; and (3) obtaining meaningful consent is a particularly difficult challenge for archives that steward incarceration materials. Placing these findings within the context of the academy’s carceral entanglements and in dialogue with critical prison studies and critical archival studies scholarship, I argue that ethical incarceration archiving demands a liberatory approach. This approach begins by asking if and how incarceration archiving can help get people free.

Faro Mine Records

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The Faro mine was a large resource extraction project in central Yukon that operated from 1969 to 1998. Despite its historic relevance to the world economy and significant contemporary research interest, the Faro mine’s records (which at closure were contained in approximately 1,800 banker’s boxes) are not well understood due to a lack of capacity to process this volume of records and complex issues regarding the application of archival theory. This article provides an overview of the hundreds of thousands of records produced by and at the Faro mine, includes a history of their creation, and uses this case study to investigate the application of archival theories of provenance, respect des fonds, and creatorship. The difficulty of applying these theories to the Faro mine records reflects a broader complexity regarding ownership and account- ability in major resource extraction projects. The article concludes that the resulting lack of access to mine records hinders transparency and historical research and that further archival work is needed to ensure adequate records management in future projects.

Theoretical Approaches to the Collection and Appraisal of Graffiti Ephemera

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This article explores aspects of the archival value of graffiti and street art. It applies an intersectional feminist lens and draws upon Althusserian subject interpellation to elaborate some potential techniques for appraising graffiti. Understanding graffiti as ideological calls can help us understand how graffiti acts on us and functions for us: as a record of oppression, institutional and social relations, and individual negotiations with power. The article offers examples of graffiti acting as a form of speech for the unheard and marginalized and illustrates these examples with photographs of graffiti captured by the author and images of graffiti and street art located in various collections. It compares the appraisal and collection methods of the Urban Art Mapping Project, a North American participatory graffiti archive, with the Street- ARToronto (StART) street-art map maintained by the City of Toronto. Through these comparisons, the article argues for the evidential value of locally driven archives of the type of political graffiti excluded from the StART map.

Archival Leadership?

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Canadian archivists – members of a community that for many decades has thought deeply and widely about their profession – have published little about archival leadership. This neglect of leadership extends in fact throughout Canadian and English-language archival research journals. This short article aims to take a small step toward filling this large and perplexing gap in our scholarship. Two central questions are addressed: What does leadership in an archives look like? and Does this leadership differ at all in key respects from leadership in other institutions? In other words, do archivists have to be managed differently because the culture of an archives is sufficiently distinct from that of other workplaces? Outlining six aspects of leadership, the article addresses the qualities associated with successfully leading a team within an archives or with heading an archives. It then sketches six distinct features of the culture of an archives, arguing that archivists do need to be managed differently; leadership success hinges on sensitivity to the unique qualities of archival culture. This counterpoint closes by expressing hope that it provokes a reaction – that others will step forward to enrich reflection and debate on the distinct (or not) qualities of archival leadership.

A Conversation about the Reconciliation Framework

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SERENA KESHAVJEE (ed.), The Art of Ectoplasm: Encounters with Winnipeg’s Ghost Photographs

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The Undead Archive: 100 Years of Photographing Ghosts. Gallery 1C03, Winnipeg, MB

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The Undead Archive: 100 Years of Photographing Ghosts. Gallery 1C03, Winnipeg, Manitoba, September 7 – November 10, 2023; University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections, Winnipeg, Manitoba, September 21, 2023 – April 21, 2024; School of Art Gallery, Winnipeg, Manitoba, September 21 – November 10, 2023. Curated by Dr. Serena Keshavjee.

Mr. Dressup to Degrassi: 42 Years of Legendary Toronto Kids TV. Myseum of Toronto, Toronto, ON

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Mr. Dressup to Degrassi: 42 Years of Legendary Toronto Kids TV. Museum of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario. May 24 – September 24, 2023. Curated by Ed Conroy.

Christopher Zaste, 1988–2024

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Christopher Zaste, 1988–2024

Archives, Contents of Recent Issue

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ARCHIVES - Volume 51, No. 1

Archivaria

Front & Back Covers

Inside Covers

Table of Contents

Letter to the Editor

Teaching Community Archiving

Caring for Archives of Incarceration

Faro Mine Records

Theoretical Approaches to the Collection and Appraisal of Graffiti Ephemera

Archival Leadership?

A Conversation about the Reconciliation Framework

SERENA KESHAVJEE (ed.), The Art of Ectoplasm: Encounters with Winnipeg’s Ghost Photographs

The Undead Archive: 100 Years of Photographing Ghosts. Gallery 1C03, Winnipeg, MB

Mr. Dressup to Degrassi: 42 Years of Legendary Toronto Kids TV. Myseum of Toronto, Toronto, ON

Christopher Zaste, 1988–2024

Archives, Contents of Recent Issue