Cultivating archives: meanings and identities

Abstract

By cultivating archives through successive activations, people and communities define their identities. In these activations, the meanings of archives are constructed and reconstructed. Archives are not a static artifact imbued with the record creator's voice alone, but a dynamic process involving an infinite number of stakeholders over time and space. Thus, archives are never closed, but open into the future. Furthermore, digital archives are always in a state of becoming, being created and recreated by technologies of migration and reconstruction.

Introduction: Archive and Method(s)

“…To meet the epistemological challenge of simultaneously analysing several layers of time at once, the researchers in this issue depart from ethnological or folkloristic standpoints; positions that include an outspoken self-reflective approach (Sandberg & Jespersen 2017: 7ff). Recognising that images of the past are constantly produced and reproduced in the archive (Ketelaar 2012), we understand that through working in the archive, we have taken active part in the process. Performing the research, the authors have thus had a double scholarly focus, by both scrutinising the historicity of the archive in itself and critically reflecting on the practical procedure of conducting research in that archive.…”

Information Science in Dialogue with Archival Science, Library Science and Museum Studies: The Recent Brazilian Experience

“…Shortly thereafter, the expression "post-custodial" was coined to designate a new phase of archival science (Cook, 1997). Other recent studies focused on the relationship between archives and oral history, the field of personal and family archives (Cox, 2008), the archive mediation (Duff, 2016) and the discussion of the discipline's object as "archivalization" (Ketelaar, 2012).…”

“…Thus, the broader dynamics of processes occurring at these institutions became the object of research, which now examined the production of records (even without physical existence), the composition of the collections, the users' appropriation of the collections, and the different layers of meaning construed with professional intervention and the instruments of description and classification. In museum studies, this development is evident in the turn from "museum", "museality", or "musealization" as in the classical definition of Stránský (2008); in archival science, in the concept of "archivalization" (Ketelaar, 2012) or archival mediation (Duff, 2016); and in library science in the notion of mediation or dialogue, as in the recent discussions of information literacy, or in the new librarianship (Lankes, 2011).…”

Keepers of Ghosts: old signs, new media and the age of archival flux

“…It is now a collection that is continuously 'activated': edited and updated; exhibited; and re-visualised. 35 The meanings and understandings of the Lewis & Skinner documents have evolved with the ongoing generation of new contexts. GPS location data in the Omeka system has facilitated visits to former sign sites by users, leading to contemporary photographs of sites being added to the archive by way of the Omeka comment facility.…”