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
New book: Record-Making and Record-Keeping in Early Societies
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 →
ICHORA 2020, DAY 1: Marisa Elena Duarte, “How the Archives…Remind Us Who We Are”
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 →
ICHORA 2020, DAY 1: Michael Riordan, “Copying and Surrogacy in English Archives”
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 →
ICHORA 2020, DAY 1: James Lowry, “Registration across Technologies”
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 →
ICHORA 2020, DAY 1: Jenny Bunn, “How Archivists Invented the Semantic Web”
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 →
ICHORA 2020, DAY 2: BOOK LAUNCH and CELEBRATION of Richard J. Cox
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 →
ICHORA 2020, DAY 2: Hannah Turner, “Cataloging Culture…in an Ethnographic Museum”
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 →
ICHORA 2020, DAY 2: Ciaran Trace, “Archives, Classification, and the Digital World”
Note: This presentation was part of a three-person panel entitled "Histories of Ordering, Classifying, and Connecting." Ciaran Trace (University of Texas-Austin) in a paper on “Archives, Classification, and the Digital World,” based on a forthcoming article in the American Archivist, examines the development of classification and arrangement in the United States from the 1960s to... Continue Reading →
ICHORA 2020, DAY 2: Patrick Egan, “Enriching Metadata for Irish Traditional Music”
Note: This presentation was part of a three-person panel entitled "Histories of Ordering, Classifying, and Connecting." Patrick Egan (Pádraig Mac Aodhgáin), PhD, focuses on “Enriching Metadata for Irish Traditional Music at the American Folklife Center.” How does the digital revolution impact traditional Irish music, which is now very popular, shared and accessed worldwide? Egan suggests... Continue Reading →