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6023 results in Facet Publishing

Page 131 of 302

  • 9 - Marketing and communications in Special Collections

  • Alison Cullingford
  • Book:
    The Special Collections Handbook
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2016, pp 169-192

  • Summary

    Introduction

    In this chapter we cover:

  • Marketing for Special Collections: an overview of the marketing mix.

  • Commodity/product and marketing themes.

  • Cost/price and convenience/place.

  • Communications/promotions, including key channels: websites, the press, exhibitions, social media and advertising.

  • Feedback and market research.

    • Other chapters relate to aspects of marketing Special Collections: metadata in Chapter 5, user services in Chapter 8, education and outreach in Chapter 10, and fund-raising and advocacy in Chapter 12.

    Marketing in Special Collections and libraries is often equated with promotion (e.g. producing leaflets), but promotion is just one element of marketing. Marketing is about every interaction a library has with its users, defining and meeting their needs. All Special Collections librarians and other staff are involved in marketing, whether they realize this or not, and even if the organization employs marketing staff.

    Librarians sometimes worry that marketing will lead to an increase in use: a concern if services can barely cope with existing levels of enquiries and visits. However, good quality communication by libraries means better informed Special Collections users who need less individual attention. Increased use can help librarians acquire funding and resources; diminishing use and hidden collections lead only to stagnation and threat.

    The Special Collections marketing mix

    A little marketing theory is helpful. The marketing mix covers all the elements that should be considered when discussing marketing. There are several variants: the 4Ps, the 4Cs, the 7Ps.

    The traditional 4Ps (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) were introduced by McCarthy in the 1960s. For service industries, Booms and Bitner added three more Ps: People, Processes and Physical evidence. Potter (2012) shows how these seven apply to libraries. In this chapter, I follow Lauterborn's structure of the more user-oriented 4Cs (Commodity, Cost, Convenience, Communication).

    Commodity: the Special Collections offer

    Special Collections can offer users the following:

  • Collections. Libraries have little control over the collections they have inherited and acquiring appealing new material is not easy (as discussed in Chapter 4). However, the rich content of existing collections can be adapted and remixed to appeal to users; suggestions appear below.

  • 12 - Influencing and fund-raising for Special Collections

  • Alison Cullingford
  • Book:
    The Special Collections Handbook
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2016, pp 239-266

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Finally we consider fund-raising and influencing, without which none of the other Special Collections activities in this book would be possible.

    This chapter will:

  • Introduce advocacy.

  • Discuss impact and metrics.

  • Introduce fund-raising and explain its importance.

  • Outline fund-raising issues.

  • Discuss sources of Special Collections funding: public programmes, trusts and foundations, individual giving, sponsorship and income generation.

  • Consider fund-raising strategy.

    • Introducing advocacy

    The key challenge in special collections … is getting the broader institution to care. How does one ensure that the university and its stakeholders will be willing to underwrite the support of special collections … Expecting an appreciation of the intrinsic goodness of special collections won't carry the day even in well off, prestigious institutions.

    Pritchard, (2012, 191)

    A common problem for Special Collections especially in large organizations is that they do good work in the areas we have discussed, for example offering excellent services to their users, but their senior managers and other stakeholders are not aware of this or do not value their contribution. This puts the service at risk of cuts and other harm. To survive, let alone develop, Special Collections services need to maintain or enhance their share of central funding and other resources. Special Collections librarians need to shout about their achievements and excellence, about the positive contributions they make, in ways that will make sense to internal and influential audiences. This is known as advocacy. Advocacy is also about influencing external organizations and governments in relation to the sector. This process is sometimes called lobbying, especially when dealing with governments.

    As with all marketing, advocacy entails finding out what matters to the audience and making sure they know you offer it, i.e. explaining Special Collections activities in language and ways that align with the organization's strategy.

    While Special Collections face many threats, they are also in the most powerful position they have ever been. In universities, they offer ‘the equivalent of unique laboratory facilities that attract faculty and research projects’ (Pritchard, 2009): unique materials that are entwined with the story of the organization, unique selling points in a time when institutions must compete more than ever.

  • 10 - Supporting open scholarship and open science

  • Robin Rice, John Southall
  • Book:
    The Data Librarian's Handbook
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2016, pp 147-160

  • Summary

    The notable rise in the perceived value of data sharing across disciplines at the present time, as demonstrated in Chapter 9, probably has two distinct origins, which influence disciplines in tandem: the open access movement in its broadest sense; and data science, with its roots in computational methods and its embrace of the ‘data revolution’ (Hey, Tansley and Tolle, 2009). Both of these are having a positive and potentially powerful effect on data sharing and re-use. In this chapter we draw evidence from the broader area of scholarly communication in order to bring the discourse about the nature of data librarianship right up to the present, and peer into a possible future – one where technologies may be harnessed in ways that lead to an acceleration of not just data accumulation but knowledge creation and dissemination. This would benefit not just scientists and scholars but – through increased transparency and accessibility – potentially the full range of human endeavours. Concepts discussed in this chapter in particular may be usefully explored using the Open Research Glossary (www.righttoresearch.org/ resources/ OpenResearchGlossary) for those unfamiliar with them.

    Going green: impact of the open access movement

    The primary reasons for and against open access to digital content can be summed up in this famous quote by Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and The WELL, an early internet community network based in San Francisco: ‘Information wants to be free – because it is now so easy to copy and distribute casually – and information wants to be expensive – because in an Information Age, nothing is so valuable as the right information at the right time.’ The quote has been attributed to Brand at the first Hackers Conference, 1984 (www.rogerclarke.com/II/IWtbF.html).

    This summarizes the conflict between those who wish to access information over the internet at the click of a button without paying for it and those who wish to build paywalls around commodified information products for profit. Libraries normally help users get over paywalls simply by paying for access to digital content on behalf of a community, sometimes getting the price lowered through negotiation, consortia-building, buying products in bundles and building collections as discussed in Chapter 4.

  • 7 - Legal and ethical issues in Special Collections

  • Alison Cullingford
  • Book:
    The Special Collections Handbook
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2016, pp 127-146

  • Summary

    Introduction

    This chapter will cover:

  • Basics of legal and ethical issues in Special Collections.

  • Intellectual property, particularly copyright.

  • Data protection and freedom of information.

  • Cultural property.

  • Personal integrity.

  • Ethics in fund-raising.

  • Equality, health and safety, and working with children.

    • Coping with legal and ethical matters is one of the most important and difficult aspects of managing Special Collections. These matters are important because they crop up throughout Special Collections work and, if not managed properly, can have serious consequences for the organization. ‘Furthermore, Special Collections librarians have extraordinary responsibilities and opportunities associated with the care of cultural property, the preservation of original artifacts, and the support of scholarship based on primary research materials’ (Association of College & Research Libraries, 2003).

    The following factors make legal and ethical issues difficult to manage:

  • Complex legal situations (especially, as we will see, copyright law). It can be hard to be sure whether an action is legal or not. Legislation is frequently amended, and understanding of the law is further refined via interpretations in court decisions.

  • Grey areas: often there is no ‘right’ answer and a balance between conflicting values has to be found. ‘When values come into conflict, librarians must bring their experience and judgment to bear on each case in order to arrive at the best solution, always bearing in mind that the constituency for special collections includes future generations’ (Association of College & Research Libraries, 2003).

    • How can librarians cope with these challenges? By understanding the law, building effective policies and practices, and collaborating with others in and outside their sector.

    This chapter covers the elements of law most commonly met with in Special Collections practice and for which the management is generally devolved to the library. I have not attempted to cover the complexities of contract law, beyond the areas of donation and deposit, already discussed in Chapter 4. Librarians generally engage with this element as part of large capital projects such as digital libraries or new buildings, and their institutions should be seeking qualified legal advice as part of the process.

  • 3 - Supporting data literacy

  • Robin Rice, John Southall
  • Book:
    The Data Librarian's Handbook
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2016, pp 35-52

  • Summary

    Information literacy with data awareness

    Academic librarians have excelled in promoting the information literacy agenda and developing bibliographic instruction as part of learning research skills. Not only is it quite common for library sessions to be a key part of new student inductions, but examples abound of successful partnerships with university instructors for getting library-based training into the classroom and coursework, and sometimes even assessed. Virtual learning environ - ments, online courses and distance learning all offer new ways for librarians to interact with learners and teachers as well. A little bit of ‘data awareness’ can go a long way in extending traditional information literacy and bibliographic instruction programmes.

    In some ways existing forms of library instruction lend themselves easily to the addition of concepts of data management and re-use. For example, in teaching about doing a literature search in a given discipline, librarians may give instruction in using standalone or online reference management tools, such as EndNote, Reference Manager, Zotero or Mendeley. For some disciplines in which the data used are mostly in textual form (e.g. law, history), such tools may even be the best method of conducting data management throughout a research project. For disciplines using other data types, further organizing options may need to be explored, such as those described in the Research Data MANTRA training course Organising Data (HYPERLINK “http://datalib.edina.ac.uk/mantra/organisingdata”).

    Bibliographic search methods may also be useful for teaching skills in data discovery. Students will not find all of the references needed for a literature search solely by consulting Google or Wikipedia, nor will they find all the supporting non-textual data for their research that way. Data librarians can teach the use of specialized data portals, disciplinary data centres, government statistical websites and repository registries alongside the use of specialized publication databases to aid discovery of published literature and data. Besides, in the case of many online databases, licensed products, or datasets requiring permission to access, content cannot be indexed by Google, and so familiarity with potential sources is essential. Training in data sources may be offered to particular classes or as part of information skills programmes. Alternatively web-based resources may be offered, for example the Bodleian Data Library web pages (www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/data).

  • 7 - Essentials of data repositories

  • Robin Rice, John Southall
  • Book:
    The Data Librarian's Handbook
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 December 2016, pp 103-120

  • Summary

    Repository versus archive?

    What is a data repository and what is a data archive? We do not have any definitive answers and opinions often vary, but it is useful to note how the terms are used in practice. Certainly in one sense the two terms are synonymous. Each term carries with it certain implied characteristics, and is used within its own contexts and traditions. Social science data archives, as we discussed in Chapter 1, have a tradition going back decades. They can be established at various levels, most commonly national or sub-institutional, such as departmental. The term ‘archive’ to some implies rigorous long-term preservation procedures, and can also be associated with long-term storage that is not publicly accessible. In some cases these are collections intended to become open at some point in the future for legal reasons, also known as ‘dark archives’. To others, ‘archive’ is seen as a simple IT storage service akin to long-term back-up, but without any of the added curation that helps keep data usable and understandable over time and across communities (‘keeping the bits safe’). Of course the word archive is both a noun and a verb and the demand to ‘archive research data’ is a common one; but we suggest that on closer examination there is not enough shared understanding among communities about what it means to ‘archive your data’. For this reason we feel the term is best avoided, except as part of a name of a known institution.

    Data repositories have a different provenance. Digital repositories came into fashion in the early 2000s to manage and disseminate publications and other types of digital assets. The use of ‘repository’ rather than ‘archive’ may in part indicate a desire to differentiate them from traditional physical archives managed within institutions. Electronic or digital repositories such as these were usually based on open source software such as DSpace, EPrints, Fedora and others, and were broadly established in institutions, championed by academic libraries in support of the open access movement. In addition to publications repositories, other specialist collections such as e-learning repositories began to flourish as well. Some repositories are subject-based, such as the well known arXiv service, established in 1991 for disseminating e-prints (electronic preprints) of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy, computer science and related fields.

  • 11 - Reflecting on practice: artists’ experiences in the archives

  • from PART 2 - ENGAGING RECORDS AND ARCHIVES
  • Edited by Fiorella Foscarini, Heather MacNeil, Mak Bonnie, Oliver Gillian
  • Book:
    Engaging with Records and Archives
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    23 November 2016, pp 211-232

  • Summary

    IT IS NOW MORE than a decade since attention was drawn to the presence of a distinct archival impulse in contemporary art (Foster, 2004). This chapter examines how the practices of the archive and archiving have been encountered and reframed by contemporary artists. As well as the artistic practice there is a growing body of literature in which it is receiving critical attention. However, as Breakell (2011) notes, the majority of publications on art and archives tend to focus on the artists and critical theorists and do not include writings by archivists. The example she gives is The Archive (Merewether, 2006), a compilation of texts on the subject by 30 different authors, not one of whom is an archive professional (Breakell, 2011, 35). This chapter explores what can be learned from reflecting on artists’ practice with archives from a perspective that combines within and without the archival field. It explores the theorizing of archives through practice by artists via one particular thread of artists’ engagement with archives – artists’ experiences with archives where the subject matter itself is art.

    The artist-in-residency model is examined through Bob and Roberta Smith at the Epstein Archive at The New Art Gallery Walsall. The commission was to reawaken an archive and the project also set out to explicitly explore new ways of collaborating between an artist and an archivist. What, if indeed anything, can be learned in terms of theory and practice by professional archivists from such creative artistic activations of the archives? Brixton Calling! was a collaborative, participatory project to explore and archive the history of Brixton Art Gallery and Artists’ Collective in London in the 1980s, initiated by former members of the Collective. The self-conscious mediation of legacy through archive creation exhibited in the Brixton Calling! project can be seen as symptomatic of a wider and cultural archival consciousness Using as a lens the particular and self-referential perspective of artists on archives of art practice, can we learn more about the wider archival trend towards participatory practice?

    The archival impulse in contemporary art

    Over a decade ago, prominent art critic and historian Hal Foster drew attention to the presence of a distinct archival impulse in contemporary art as artists sought to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present by reorganizing bodies of alternative knowledge or counter-memory (Foster, 2004).

  • 3 - ‘Records in context’ in context: a brief history of data modelling for archival description

  • from PART 1 - RETHINKING HISTORIES AND THEORIES
  • Edited by Fiorella Foscarini, Heather MacNeil, Mak Bonnie, Oliver Gillian
  • Book:
    Engaging with Records and Archives
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    23 November 2016, pp 41-62

  • Summary

    IN THIS SHORT paper, I attempt to identify some historical factors that combine to explain current differences in certain of the data modelling practices of the archives, library and museum (ALM) communities. I am prompted to do this out of interest in the work of the International Council on Archives’ Experts Group on Archival Description (ICA-EGAD; see Gueguen et al., 2013; Pitti et al., 2014). This group is engaged in the design of a new model of data that is descriptive of archival holdings, with the intention that eventually it shall supersede older models that are deemed less useful in contemporary contexts. Reading between the lines of EGAD's ‘Interim Report’, some observers initially speculated that this new model may be more in line with those developed in the library and (in particular) the museum communities.

    It occurred to me that a historical analysis might help us to weigh up the pros and cons of adopting the new model. It certainly seems prudent to ask in what ways such a development might be construed as a positive one whose benefits outweigh its costs; and my assumption is that a historical analysis could help us to answer that question. If we were to come to an understanding of the historical conditions for the distinctive direction taken by developers of archival standards since 1987 (so the argument goes), and compare them with advances made in libraries and museums, then that would help us to account for differences in the data models that have been produced in each domain, and perhaps also help us to understand the need for a new archival model.

    There is an ethical subtext to all of this, which arises from asking the question whether, ceteris paribus, data models should be (a) more like one another or (b) less like one another than they currently are. My characterization of this as an ethical question derives from a conviction that one's answer will depend on how much one values uniformity above or below diversity. I believe that this valuation will be a complicating factor in determining one's feelings about different data models.

  • 1 - Moving the margins to the middle: reconciling ‘the archive’ with the archives

  • from PART 1 - RETHINKING HISTORIES AND THEORIES
  • Edited by Fiorella Foscarini, Heather MacNeil, Mak Bonnie, Oliver Gillian
  • Book:
    Engaging with Records and Archives
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    23 November 2016, pp 3-20

  • Summary

    THE EMERGENCE OF the ‘archive’ in the late 20th century as a focus of academic enquiry has given rise to a variety of responses from the archival profession. Rejection, indignation, speculation and even amusement have characterized the reactions of archivists to what has often seemed to them to be a misguided, misdirected, poorly understood and overly theorized construct of a primarily practical pursuit. Yet, academic fascination with the archive has lingered and in the early decades of the 21st century only grown stronger, so that the ‘archive’ now appears to be firmly established as a central identifier and research focus of many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

    What each discipline means by ‘the archive’ or the ‘archival turn’ may differ slightly, but sufficient commonalities suggest a general understanding that ‘the archive’ – in both the digital and analogue realms – is recognized as an essential knowledge space to be approached, constructed and even confronted in numerous ways and from many perspectives. Environmentalist/ historian William Turkel (2007, 66) expresses this broad understanding when he claims that ‘every place is an archive, one that bears material traces of the past in the very substance of the past’, but this is not a view that archivists or the archival profession have traditionally embraced.

    How have archivists responded to the challenges to their traditional theories and practices posed by the theorized ‘archive’? Archivists often seem reluctant to stray too far beyond their comfort zones, frequently emphasizing the differences between ‘the archive’ as conceptualized by non-archivists, and ‘real’ archival practice. Interrogating the commonalities between both, however, suggests that, for archivists, embracing ‘the archive’ in all its diversity and latitude could open valuable pathways towards a more inclusive and all-encompassing understanding of the variety of records that communities create and the many ways in which they tell their stories.

    This essay attempts this interrogation, investigating developing multidisciplinary concepts of ‘the archive’ as well as their divergence from and impact on traditional archival theory and practice. It proposes to identify and map evolving concepts of ‘the archive’, seeking to reconcile them with traditional archival theory while exploring ways in which archival theorizing from other disciplines could expand archival thinking by archivists, and to some extent already has done so.

  • 4 - Mapping archival silence: technology and the historical record

  • from PART 1 - RETHINKING HISTORIES AND THEORIES
  • Edited by Fiorella Foscarini, Heather MacNeil, Mak Bonnie, Oliver Gillian
  • Book:
    Engaging with Records and Archives
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    23 November 2016, pp 63-82

  • Summary

    RECENT THEORIZATIONS OF archival silence signal a heightened and expanding concern with information that is lost, concealed, destroyed or simply not available for scholarly use. For a dynamic and interdisciplinary group of artists, scholars and theorists, archival silence serves as a productive metaphor as well as a kind of shorthand to refer to gaps, omissions and distortions in the historical record. Like the term ‘archive’ itself, ‘archival silence’ has a certain elasticity and ambiguity that lends itself to theoretical speculation and manipulation. As digital capacity fosters the expansion of the archive, archival metaphor and archival theory proliferate. And as our access to the archive becomes more dependent upon the technologies of the interface, scholars exhibit increasing concern about the impact of digital affordances and constraints on recordkeeping, research and artistic production. Because digital technologies introduce a variety of new elements – material, social and technological – into questions of archival access, they vastly expand the possibilities for both creating and redressing archival silence.

    As digital archives are techno-cultural artefacts, developments in the field of science studies can provide insight into the interdependence and coevolution of the social, cultural and material factors shaping archival access. By the 1990s, Donna Haraway (1991a) had initiated a rethinking of the complex relationship between the human and the non-human. Haraway and other science studies scholars describe instruments and devices as complex assemblages of human and non-human elements. Karen Barad (2006), Bruno Latour (1999) and others have helped us to see how machine and human agents form tightly linked networks that must be understood as dynamically integrated wholes. These scholars view physical matter and social meaning as so deeply intertwined that they cannot be understood separately. They believe that disciplinary boundaries may serve as impediments to understanding both technology and culture. Digital archives lend themselves to this kind of exploration of the entanglement of matter and meaning, content and device, human and machine elements. Digital archives are the product of multiple mutually conditioning factors, including the intentions of document creators, the professional practices of librarians and archivists, the structure of archival institutions, the behaviour of corporate content owners, the judgements of computer designers and the properties of the materials used in the production of digital infrastructure (Manoff, 2015).

  • 6 - The use and reuse of documents by chancellors, archivists and government members in an early modern republican state: Genoa's Giunta dei confini and its archives

  • from PART 2 - ENGAGING RECORDS AND ARCHIVES
  • Edited by Fiorella Foscarini, Heather MacNeil, Mak Bonnie, Oliver Gillian
  • Book:
    Engaging with Records and Archives
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    23 November 2016, pp 107-126

  • Summary

    IT IS GENERALLY accepted that the transformation of the archives’ function from self-documentation memory to source memory occurred following a long process which started during the French Revolution and matured when archives started to be mainly perceived as cultural institutions (Bautier, 1968; Zanni Rosiello, 1987). Nonetheless, it is equally true that even before the French Revolution, the function of self-documentation memory had an impact on the physical shape of the archives, changing it over the time.

    In this perspective, the Genoese Giunta dei confini is a particularly relevant case which illustrates the relationship between the idea of the history of a specific archive (Zanni Rosiello, 1987, 44) and the concept of historical sedimentation of archives that has been suggested (Bologna 2014) by recent scholarship. The case provides important insights into the relationship between the slow progression towards the scientific and cultural use of an archive and its previous administrative and political uses: so much so that the papers of the Giunta's archive eventually became one of the most important sources for the history of many Ligurian communities.

    The following pages discuss a single case study against the backdrop of an archive characterized by an extremely complex process of sedimentation, which, through further study of other aspects and fonds, could add important elements to the debate.

    Territorial control in early modern Italy: producers, functions and archives

    During the early modern age the state progressively increased and improved its instruments of territorial control and the exercise of sovereignty. Among them, those institutions that were charged with the settlement of territorial disputes were of great significance. So much so that the archives produced by these institutions should be considered as fully fledged state instruments in themselves. Between 1560 and 1742 the Duchy of Florence, the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Genoa, the Duchy of Milan and the Kingdom of Sardinia all established magistracies charged with overseeing borders, all of which exercised similar functions.

  • Editors’ introduction

  • Edited by Fiorella Foscarini, Heather MacNeil, Mak Bonnie, Oliver Gillian
  • Book:
    Engaging with Records and Archives
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    23 November 2016, pp xi-xvi

  • Summary

    THIS BOOK OFFERS a selection of papers from the Seventh International Conference on the History of Records and Archives (I-CHORA 7), which took place in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, from July 29 to 31, 2015. I-CHORA was established in 2003 as a biennial conference series to encourage and promote interdisciplinary research into the history of records, recordkeeping practices and recordkeeping institutions. Conferences to date have taken place in Toronto; Amsterdam (twice); Boston; Perth, Australia; London; and Austin, Texas, each attracting between 100 and 130 scholars and professionals from around the world.

    According to the organizers of the first I-CHORA, ‘the impetus for the conference came from the archives community’, which felt the ‘need for greater sophistication in conceiving the history of records to address the issues of human communicative practices and the artefacts themselves as material and social products’ (Craig et al., 2005, 2–3). It was evident from the outset that investigating the origins and evolution of archival ideas and practices, documentary forms and structures, and recordkeeping methods and technologies not only supported archival work and archival thinking but also had a much broader and all-encompassing relevance in that the history of archives is the history of culture. Thus, throughout the years, the conference series has increasingly been promoting an interdisciplinary approach to the study of record making and keeping in different historical contexts.

    By entitling this book Engaging with Records and Archives: histories and theories, which was also the theme of I-CHORA 7, we wanted to emphasize another characteristic of this conference series; that is, the strong belief shared by all conference organizers and participants that engaging in scholarly research around histories and theories of archives and records is essential to ‘develop the maturity and self-awareness of those who work with records’ (Craig et. al., 9). Today, more than ever before, this suggests that everyone, not only archives specialists, would benefit from a deeper and better informed engagement with archival objects and practices as they become increasingly engrained in our daily lives, from the pervasiveness of archival materials on the web, to the use of archive-based knowledge in all sciences, to the uncertainty about the preservation of our digital memories that we may all experience sooner or later.

  • 9 - History and development of information and recordkeeping in Malawi

  • from PART 2 - ENGAGING RECORDS AND ARCHIVES
  • Edited by Fiorella Foscarini, Heather MacNeil, Mak Bonnie, Oliver Gillian
  • Book:
    Engaging with Records and Archives
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    23 November 2016, pp 173-194

  • Summary

    COLONIALISM, DECOLONIZATION AND economic adjustments in Africa are some of the major factors that have enabled public administrations in sub-Saharan Africa to experience four distinct eras. These are: the period prior to colonization; the period around the late 1880s when original African institutions were radically altered and replaced by the Western bureaucratic models; the 1960s, when the colonial bureaucracy was redefined and expanded after independence; and the period from the 1980s and beyond (structural adjustment and New Public Management programmes) when Africa's economic situation tumbled to its lowest ebb and needed major interventions for recovery and growth.

    A sub-Saharan African nation, Malawi (formerly Nyasaland) has experienced four administrative epochs – the pre-colonial, colonial, postcolonial one-party and post-colonial democratic administrations. Through a careful analysis of the literature and official archival records, this chapter traces information sharing and recordkeeping practices during the four administrative dispensations in order to see how information generation and recordkeeping have evolved. While the chapter builds on the works of Mazikana (1986), who presents the development of archival services in Central Africa from the 1920s to the 1960s, and Lovering (2010), who discusses the development of Secretariat registry systems in Zambia and Malawi from the early colonial period to the early 1960s, it looks at pre-colonial information generation, sharing and preservation and offers a more detailed account of the developments of recordkeeping during the colonial and post-colonial periods than is provided by these two authors.

    Pre-colonial administration and ‘record’ keeping

    A description of the native system of government in the Yoruba country by ‘A Native of Yoruba’ (1902) is analogous to most of the pre-colonial tribal governments, such as those of the Chewa, Ngoni and Yao in Nyasaland. According to ‘A Native of Yoruba’, each tribe in the Yoruba country occupied a particular territory, which was regarded as a country on its own. At the apex of the native government was the supreme ruler, the king of the tribe. Different areas of the country were ruled in the name of the king by subordinate chiefs. Under each subordinate chief's jurisdiction were a number of villages, which were headed by village headmen.

  • 10 - History of community archiving in Poland

  • from PART 2 - ENGAGING RECORDS AND ARCHIVES
  • Edited by Fiorella Foscarini, Heather MacNeil, Mak Bonnie, Oliver Gillian
  • Book:
    Engaging with Records and Archives
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    23 November 2016, pp 195-210

  • Summary

    HISTORICALLY, ARCHIVISTS IN Poland have not paid much attention to community archives. Nowadays, however, this challenging area has become a more and more popular field of study for those engaged in research in archival science. I believe, and am supported in this belief by other Polish archivists (e.g. Stępniak, 2012; Czarnota, 2014; Chorążyczewski, 2015), that community archives play an important part in Polish archival reality, due to their considerable number (estimated to be several hundred) and remarkable variety. Moreover, this type of activity – setting up a memory institution from below, spontaneously – is intertwined with a specific stage of development of civil society, as well as historical/archival consciousness. This community archives phase got underway in the West in the latter half of the 20th century (Gilliland and Flinn, 2013; Vitali, 2015), but started much later in Poland, due to its recent history.

    The definition of ‘community archive’ still causes some debate, both in countries that have longer traditions of research in grassroots archiving endeavours (Letimer, n.d.; Flinn, 2007; Flinn, Stevens and Shepherd, 2009; Flinn, 2011; Gilliland and Flinn, 2013; Newman, 2012) and in Poland (Czarnota, 2011; Czarnota, 2012; Ziętal, 2012a; Ziętal, 2012b; Czarnota, 2013; Wiśniewska, 2013; Ziętal, 2013; Chorążyczewski, 2015). In this chapter I use the term ‘community archive’ to describe archives endeavouring to ensure ongoing preservation (or at least those that believe their materials deserve long-term preservation) and set up at the grassroots level, often housed by non-governmental organizations, but also by informal groups and, in some cases, private individuals.

    There has not been any research to date exploring the history of community archiving in Poland as a whole, complex phenomenon, although in the archival literature one can find isolated studies on individual community archives (mostly the large and influential ones) that touch also on the issue of their origins and history. However, they are not rigorous case studies but are rather superficial and of little value. Minimal work has been done relating to the history of individual community archives; similarly, it is not possible to write a complete history of community archiving in Poland, treating grassroots documentary endeavours as a whole phenomenon.

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