Due to the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic, the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists' Archival History Section continued the trend from last year and went virtual once again. The meeting featured two presentations focused on pandemics and the response of the archival community. The 2020-2021 Archival History Section Chair, Sebastian Modrow (Curator of... Continue Reading →
TUNE in to the Facebook or YouTube livestream of the State Archives of Milan (ITALY) on the following dates this week: Conference Program: https://www.archiviodistatomilano.beniculturali.it/getFile.php?id=2598 Conference Schedule (converted to Eastern Time, United States) Nov. 3 (Wednesday)6:00-6:30am Introduction/Greetings from Milan State Archives 6:30-8:00am Session 1 - Archives, wars and diplomacy. Carmela Santoro Chair Carmela Santoro, Giovanni Vittani,... Continue Reading →
Dear section members, I am happy to announce that Susan Tucker has been elected as the section's new vice chair/chair elect. Susan comes to us with a wealth of SAA steering committee and task force experience and will take over the section's leadership after this year's annual meeting. Congratulations, Susan! Sebastian Modrow, Chair
A new book by Geoffrey Yeo, Record-Making and Record-Keeping in Early Societies (published this week), investigates the beginnings of human recording practices and provides a survey of early record-making and record-keeping in societies across the world. It investigates the ways in which human activities were recorded in different settings using different methods and technologies. Many archivists... Continue Reading →
Note: This presentation was one of three Keynote Addresses delivered at ICHORA 2020. Marisa Elena Duarte’s (Arizona State University) poetic keynote, “Meditations on the Screen: How the Archives Around Us Remind Us Who We Are,” addresses the many complex issues that arise with the ease with which digital information is accessed on a myriad of... Continue Reading →
Note: This presentation was part of a three-person panel entitled "Re-Imagining Materiality: Three Histories of Archival Technologies." The panelist is also a member of Archival Discourses, an international research network for the International Intellectual History of Archival Studies. Michael Riordan (Oxford University) provides a fascinating review of the history of copying of archival documents in a presentation entitled “Pre-digital... Continue Reading →
Note: This presentation was part of a three-person panel entitled "Re-Imagining Materiality: Three Histories of Archival Technologies." The panelist is also a member of Archival Discourses, an international research network for the International Intellectual History of Archival Studies. In a presentation on “Registration across Technologies: The Inscription of Value in Paper and Digital Records Systems,” James Lowry (City University... Continue Reading →
Note: This presentation was part of a three-person panel entitled "Re-Imagining Materiality: Three Histories of Archival Technologies." The panelist is also a member of Archival Discourses, an international research network for the International Intellectual History of Archival Studies. Jenny Bunn (National Archives, United Kingdom) introduces the topic of “Differentiation in Description or How Archivists Invented the Semantic Web” by... Continue Reading →
Book Launch and Panel Discussion: Defining a Discipline: Archival Research and Practice in the 21st Century – Essays in Honor of Richard J. Cox, eds. Jeannette A. Bastian and Elizabeth Yakel (Society of American Archivists, 2020), and “Archival Science – Discipline or Profession” (with David Wallace, Lindsey Mattock, Joel Blanco-Rivera, and Ricky Punzalan, as panelists). The... Continue Reading →
Note: This presentation was part of a three-person panel entitled "Histories of Ordering, Classifying, and Connecting." Hannah Turner (University of British Columbia) starts a presentation on “Cataloguing Culture: Histories of Documentation in an Ethnographic Museum,” based on Turner's recently-published book, Cataloguing Culture: Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Documentation (UBC Press, August 2020), by arguing that... Continue Reading →
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