by Siham Alaoui

Introduction

In a technological context in constant evolution, heritage institutions such as GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) are nowadays adopting novel approaches to facilitate easy access to cultural information to their users. Whether on digital public platforms, portals, applications or systems, information is used in various contexts, including for leisure, research, or public interest purposes. While some users would consume cultural resources such as online resources (e.g., books, periodicals, manuscripts, etc.), others would prefer to have access to administrative information relating to the operational activities of heritage institutions (e.g., transactional documents, budgets, contracts, annual reports, etc.). Thus, users—notably citizens, researchers, students, journalists, artists, and civil society members—make use of information differently according to their needs. 

However, despite the availability of cultural resources online, either on institutional websites or on specific platforms, many challenges arise regarding the discoverability of cultural content, its relevance, and its reusability. To address this, heritage institutions have adopted a new path to tackle those challenges and ensure, by disclosing information in an open, structured and reusable form, to better satisfy users’ informational needs. Releasing open culture data is viewed as an alternative to increase the visibility of these institutions, their activities, and relationships with their users. In that sense, information professionals, namely librarians and archivists, are encouraged to join up their efforts by creating collaborative projects to make culture data open, reusable, and discoverable. This contribution sheds light on the particularities of open culture data and highlights key strategies information professionals should adopt to manage their lifecycle and make them discoverable to users. 

1. Open culture data: What is it about?

Open culture data refers to the data that are related to heritage institutions’ activities (Eastermann, 2014; Sennouni, 2017). Culture data is published in an open form, that is, in a structured and reusable form, under a specified licence like Creative Commons, which allows the remixing, reuse, and reappropriation of these data by various users (Open Knowledge Foundation, n.d.). These data can be extracted from information resulting from operational activities, bibliographic and archival description of digital cultural resources, as well as the big data generated from applications and various information systems.

To be considered open, culture data should meet several requirements, chief of which are the following: structure, discoverability, intelligibility, reusability, and availability in a linked form (Open Knowledge Foundation, n.d.). Open culture data should be structured, that is, released in its primary form and in appropriate technological formats (.xls or csv: Comma Separated Values). By publishing data in these technological formats, it is possible to make data more interoperable, which means increasing their compatibility with many technological environments and multiplying their chances to get aggregated to other documentary resources online (e.g., applications, information systems, social media, etc.). The purpose of the multiple aggregations of open culture data is to diversify the perspectives from which it is used, according to users’ informational needs. For that purpose, open culture data should be discoverable, a characteristic that pertains to their relevance to satisfy users’ needs. 

Discoverable open culture data means they are relevant enough to meet the users’ respective interests. For instance, journalists’ informational needs are different from artists’ and researchers’ needs. Accordingly, data should be published in an appropriate language to increase their linguistic accessibility. The enriched data description should contain metadata meeting the users’ intellectual and digital abilities. Yet, making data more discoverable is not sufficient to guarantee its usability, since they also need to be intelligible from the user’s perspective. 

Open culture data should be intelligible. This means that appropriate metadata should be associated to those data published on public portals. More specifically, metadata should not be only related to the topic covered by those data, but it should provide enough description of several other elements. The institution’s name, the release date and the last modification date, the geographical and chronological coverages, and the conditions of data use are a few examples of metadata that should be added to the description of data to make the latter more intelligible. These metadata make it easier to reuse open culture data, as they provide users with a better understanding of the conditions that justify the creation of data and their release online.

To make open culture data more discoverable, they ought to be released in a linked form. Following the logic of the semantic web, releasing data in an open and linked form allows users to explore possible links between online resources and enrich their experience (St-Germain, 2017). By way of illustration, linked open data can help researchers discover similar scientific reports realized by the same cultural institution they are looking for in their research projects. Similarly, historians can benefit from these data to discover other heritage institutions holding manuscripts or other historical material they are using in their retrospective research.

All the above characteristics make open culture data more reusable. Reusability refers to the faculty of data to be exploitable and consumable by users. By publishing open data in a structured, discoverable, intelligible and linked form, users can benefit from open culture data according to their own preferences. Users should be informed about the types of (re)use they are allowed to make of the released culture data, either for general information needs or for specific purposes, such as leisure, accountability, scientific, or retrospective research. 

2. Opening up culture data: Why?

Opening up culture data aims to achieve several goals that support heritage institutions in their respective roles. Of note, releasing culture data in an open form supports transparency, helps generate public value, and reduces expenses relating to GLAM activities (Alaoui, 2020).  In terms of transparency, heritage institutions are public entities that must abide by freedom of information access regulations (Alaoui, 2020). By releasing their administrative data in an open and reusable form, they anticipate users’ needs in terms of access to accountability information. For instance, publishing data about financial transactions, users’ information behaviour, collections, and partnerships both at local and international levels would help users, especially journalists and researchers, to support their research with relevant data that holds evidential value. 

Releasing culture data in an open form can also help heritage institutions generate public value by fostering collaborations with their users. Publishing data about cultural resources, such as bibliographic and descriptive data relating to books, manuscripts, periodicals and other documentary resources, can help users to identify documentary resources and engage in collaborative projects with heritage institutions (Estermann, 2014). For instance, the latter can organize joint initiatives and invite users to get involved in the collaborative description of resources. By using collective intelligence, users may be engaged in crowdsourcing activities, aiming to stimulate the value of cultural resources by adding appropriate metadata, such as locations, chronological data, and thematic metadata to make resources more discoverable online. In the same vein, citizens can be involved in developing mobile applications; they can help heritage institutions increase the value of cultural content by designing applications for leisure purposes for children and teenagers, for instance, or by developing interactive maps or platforms for retrospective purposes (e.g., historical research). 

Open culture data can also be used by heritage institutions to promote their resources (Alaoui, 2020). By adopting several marketing approaches, those institutions can benefit from each other’s published data to identify, using appropriate metrics (e.g., number of downloads per resource, clicks on web pages, users’ login frequency, etc.), the most relevant resources and the less popular ones. The latter can be subject to an appropriate marketing strategy to make them more visible to users. 

Last but not least, increasing efficiency is also one of the aims of opening up culture data. Heritage institutions have limited resources, a problem that justifies the need for collaboration initiatives between those institutions and their users. Publishing data about operational activities, such as use of financial resources, can help other institutions and users understand resources management issues and get engaged in various collaborative projects. For instance, realizing financial campaigns, including crowdfunding campaigns, as well as opening calls for donations of materials (e.g., recorders, laptops, storage material, CDs, USBs, etc.) are a few examples of how opening up cultural data can increase the efficiency of heritage institutions. 

Releasing culture data in an open form can help heritage institutions increase their visibility and enhance their users’ loyalty. In doing so, many actors are involved and pursue different tasks regarding the creation, management, release, and storage of open culture data.

3. Open culture data: Who is involved and how?

In addition to users who consume data according to their respective interests, information professionals, that is, librarians and archivists, are the experts who ensure the lifecycle management of open culture data. Librarians are engaged in data curation, which means that they ensure the processing of data as a content. Through curation practices using international normative frameworks such as FRBR (Functional requirements of bibliographic description), FRAD (Functional requirements of author description), and FRSAD (Functional requirements of subject author description), they ensure the link between the described resource and its author, as well as its subject. By using these normative frameworks, librarians ensure data are more discoverable and published in an open and linked form. 

In order to ensure the quality of open culture data, especially by releasing them in a linked form, archivists can use the RiC (Records in Contexts) normative framework, which is published by the International Council on Archives and is inspired from the other frameworks stated above. Instead of focusing only on content, archivists should ensure the description of the activity that generated culture data. The use of RiC’s framework combines the description of data (datasets) from the perspective of the content, the container, and the context in one place. It describes the conditions of data creation and their properties as archival objects (Alaoui, 2021). Archivists also ensure the adoption of measures regarding the secure preservation of datasets by choosing the appropriate strategies to document the traceability of data and their secure long-term preservation.

Information professionals’ tasks are also supported by IT experts who ensure the technical requirements regarding the structuration of data and their interoperability in various digital environments. They are also involved in designing platforms and portals where data are published and managed. IT specialists have an ergonomic role in the process of open culture data management, since their role is to design platforms that are ergonomic enough for users. They also play a key role in technical security of data management systems by suggesting best practices to protect personal data extracted from online systems.

All these experts have the role of executing commands from top management, who elaborate policies and strategies regarding the disclosure of open culture data. These regulation tools concern the prioritization of data to disclose, according to financial considerations, the relevance of data and users’ needs. Experts can make choices regarding strategic orientations of heritage institutions, based on their annual strategic plan and the needs of their partners (e.g., cultural industries, public officials, etc.). They also set goals in terms of public resources use, such as financial, material, technological, and human resources. 

Figure 1 summarizes the different points discussed above on open culture data:

 

Figure 1: Open culture data : what, who, why and how?

4. Towards a collaborative approach: How can information professionals join their efforts in open culture data lifecycle management?

Open culture data projects require a collaboration between many actors that together form an ecosystem. They interact with each other and co-create initiatives using various technological tools. In order to help heritage institutions achieve their goals in terms of releasing open culture data and generating public value from it, the open culture data ecosystem should be well designed and integrate specific configurations involving many actors. This ecosystem involves three key components: (1) people, (2) technologies, and (3) initiatives.

Figure 2: The open culture data ecosystem

4.1. The open culture data ecosystem: people

Open data release requires the development of collaborative projects between archivists and librarians. Working together, they ensure the extraction, description, preservation, and dissemination of cultural data according to generally accepted standards. While librarians describe data from a subject perspective, archivists do it from a contextual perspective aiming to underline the activities that the data describe. As mentioned earlier, the use of international standards can help these professionals join up their efforts to make a complete curation of culture data in a manner that meets the users’ needs both from an archival and a library science perspective. 

While doing so, many strategies should be adopted by information professionals to better understand users’ needs. Librarians can suggest various ways to understand the user’s information behaviour, and how the interaction with open culture data is described, chiefly by answering the following question: “What type of culture data is the most requested and used?” The use of key indicators mainly used by librarians to develop their collections can be beneficial to release more relevant data. Furthermore, the development of a better digital literacy is also an activity where librarians are mostly solicited. Archivists, on the other hand, can collaborate with librarians in providing a more complete description of culture data, since the archival description covers the activity that produced these data, as well as the subject of these data.

4.2. The open culture data ecosystem: technologies

While managing and releasing open culture data, information professionals make use of IT platforms and systems aiming to manage the lifecycle of data. In that sense, they may solicit IT experts to design technological platforms that are not only effective in terms of performance but also user-friendly. In fact, in the aim of making the appropriate use of data released on public portals, those technological means should be easy to use, especially by users who do not have advanced digital skills. Furthermore, they ought to integrate web 2.0 features, such as comments, scales and short surveys, to make it easier for users to share their experience with heritage institutions. Open culture data should also be released in an open and reusable form, in compliance with open technological standards aiming to ensure the interoperability of data with various digital environments. 

The design of appropriate technological tools by IT experts in collaboration with archivists and librarians, as well as users, can help institutions integrate lean approaches in their everyday work. It is viewed as a key success factor in the implementation of IT technologies regarding information use and, more specifically, in the context of using open culture data in designing applications and website development.

4.3. The open culture data ecosystem: initiatives

Making open culture data more visible by generating public value from publicly available datasets means using them in innovative projects. It is particularly the case of hackathons, those technology-centered initiatives inviting users, such as developers and web designers, to build design projects on mobile applications that facilitate public life. For instance, open culture data can be used to design applications that identify cultural heritage institutions according to geographical patterns or even according to the cultural resources they offer to users. This helps citizens become more familiar with what their institutions can offer to them, making it easier for those institutions to gain more visibility. 

To do so, hackathons are to be supervised by experts, such as IT specialists, archivists, and librarians. IT experts have the role of ensuring the technological quality of web developers’ outputs, especially by assessing the interoperability of data and programs in various digital environments. Librarians and archivists have a semantic role in supervising open culture data initiatives. It is necessary to ensure that users have the correct understanding of the data produced online and to evaluate the extent to which they have made the correct interpretation of it. As metadata specialists, information professionals can join up their efforts to provide a better understanding of data released on public portals.

Open culture data ecosystems involve many actors who interact with each other and make use of their digital abilities while using specific technological resources to generate public value from released data. To ensure a better achievement of open data release objectives, information professionals should collaborate with each other in the lifecycle management of data, as well as in the supervision of its use. 

Conclusion

Digital transformation has led heritage institutions to adopt new strategies to make their resources more discoverable and their activities more visible. With the technological developments and the social pressures regarding freedom of information access, these institutions have started to release their data in open and reusable forms. Open culture data allows users to get more familiar with heritage institutions’ activities and their cultural offerings. They can make use of these data in various contexts, according to their interests. However, to ensure a better reuse of these data, information professionals should reduce the gaps between them and build on collaborative initiatives that make it easier to master the data lifecycle management. While archivists are concerned with the contextualisation of data and the description of the activities they are related to, librarians can add more value to this description from a subject point of view. They can also suggest relevant strategies providing a better understanding of users’ needs through the study of their online information behaviour. These two actors can solicit IT experts to assess the technological quality of data and the platforms where they are released. Therefore, openness calls for bridging the gap between information professionals and encourages them to work together to make heritage institutions more visible.

Siham Alaoui is a PhD candidate in archival science and public communication at Université Laval, Québec (Canada). She holds a bachelor's degree in Information Science (obtained in 2013 from the School of Information Science, Morocco) and a master's degree in Information Science (obtained in 2015 from the Université de Montréal). She is interested in digital documentary mediation (information and data management), particularly in the current context of universities’ digital transformation. She is the author of several scientific and professional articles published in specialized journals in information science (e.g., Archives, Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science, Documentation et Bibliothèques, Comma). She has also given papers and lectures at conferences and symposiums.

References:

Alaoui, S. (2021). La norme RiC (Records in Contexts) : fondements, applications et enjeux pour la pratique archivistique. Les Cahiers de la documentation(1), 20-31. 

Alaoui, S. (2020). La publication des données culturelles ouvertes au Québec : le cas des bibliothèques. Revue Argus 48(1), 12-20. 

Estermann, B. (2014). Diffusion of open data and crowdsourcing among heritage institutions: results of a pilot survey in Switzerland. Journal of theoretical and applied electronic commerce research 9(3), 15-31. Available at: www.mdpi.com/0718-1876/9/3/17

International council on Archives (2019). Records in contexts: a conceptual model for archival description. Available at: www.ica.org/sites/default/files/ric-cm-0.2_preview.pdf

International federation of library associations and institutions (2013). Functional requirements for authority data: a conceptual model. Available at: https://cdn.ifla.org/wp-content/uploads/files/assets/cataloguing/frad/frad_2013.pdf

International federation of library associations and institutions (2011). Functional requirements for subject authority Data (FRSAD): a conceptual Model. Available at: https://www.ifla.org/functional-requirements-for-subject-authority-data/

International federation of library associations and institutions (2009). Functional requirements for bibliographic records. Available at: https://cdn.ifla.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/assets/cataloguing/frbr/frbr_2008.pdf

Open knowledge foundation (n.d.). What is open? Available at: https://www.bing.com/search?FORM=OCWG01&PC=ATCO&PTAG=ATCOS2J3CNA3&q=open%20knowledge%20foundation%20open%20data. (Accessed 2 October 2022)

Sennouni, A. (2017). La Data au service de l’innovation dans les services d’information documentaires (SID) universitaires nationaux. Revue française des sciences de l’information et de la communication(10). Available at: journals.openedition.org/rfsic/2759 

St-Germain, M. (2017). Étapes pour le développement d’un projet de données ouvertes et liées en bibliothèque. Documentation et bibliothèques 63(4), 35–45. Available at: doi.org/10.7202/1042309ar

by Chase Nelson

What does it mean to be an activist? Is an activist someone who takes to the streets, linking arms with allies to collectively call for what is right? Do they integrate into a community in order to understand the problems that plague it and search for equitable solutions? Do they educate friends, family, co-workers, and acquaintances about important causes? The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (Oxford University, 2005) defines activism as “the policy or action of using vigorous campaigning to bring about social or political change”—but what does “vigorous campaigning” look like?  
 
International Women’s Day, celebrated on March 8th, is a product of the vigorous campaigning of working-class women in the early 20th century. The Socialist Party of America called for the first National Women’s Day in 1909 in honour of widespread demonstrations and organizing around working women’s rights and welfare. Clara Zetkin vigorously campaigned for an International Women’s Day at the 1910 International Conference of Working Women, leading to its first celebration in Switzerland, Germany, Denmark and Austria in 1911. On February 23rd, 1917 (March 8th in the New Style dating system), a Women’s Day demonstration in Russia against food shortages and rights abuses under the autocratic Romanov dynasty grew to such great heights that it led to the Tsar’s abdication from the throne a week later. March 8th was formalized as International Women’s Day by the Soviet Union in 1922 and celebrated as a holiday in communist countries around the world for decades; the United Nations formally recognized the day in 1975 (Haynes, 2019). 

[Portrait of Dina Golovanevskaya] (5 Oct. 1942), Dr. Dina Golovanevskaya fonds, https://collections.vhec.org/Detail/objects/11955

Dr. Dina Golovanevskaya, whose records are newly available on the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre’s (VHEC) collections website, was likely one of the millions of women honoured during annual Women's Day celebrations in the Soviet Union. Born in 1919 in Odessa, Ukraine during the height of the Russian Civil War, Dr. Golovan (as she often referred to herself) was a staunch patriot, decorated military veteran, and distinguished medical professional.

As many archivists do, I came to meet Dr. Golovan not face-to-face but through the records and objects she left behind. She was one of the first individuals to donate personal records to the VHEC back when it was the Vancouver Holocaust Centre Society in the early ’90s. She donated copies of photographs, a couple of letters from friends, and a few Russian-language publications from visits to Holocaust memorial sites. Last year, as part of a Library and Archives Canada Documentary Heritage Communities Program (DHCP) grant to digitize our legacy holdings and make them accessible in our collections catalogue, I reached out to Dr. Golovan’s daughter Erika Galinskaya to see if we could swap out some of the copies for originals. 

[Photograph of laboratory students in class] (1952), Dr. Dina Golovanevskaya fonds, https://collections.vhec.org/Detail/objects/11972

We received much, much more: military records, speeches, articles, identification documents, certificates, correspondence, medical paraphernalia, the original photos, and then some. From these records and conversations with Erika, we can tell a story of a woman who served in the front lines of some of the fiercest battles against fascism, dedicated her life to the medical profession, and committed to community service and advocacy until the end. 

Dr. Golovan served in the Red Army as a captain of medical service alongside other Jewish medical professionals from the Battle of Stalingrad to the fall of Berlin in 1945. After the Second World War she advanced in the medical field; she worked as the Head of Laboratories at a hospital in Odessa for fifteen years, all while raising her daughter Erika as a single mother (her husband Jakob passed away in 1949 from complications from wounds received during the War).  

[Photograph at a Remembrance Day event] (11 Nov. 1989), Dr. Dina Golovanevskaya fonds, https://collections.vhec.org/Detail/objects/11984

While Dr. Golovan’s love for her country was great, antisemitic bureaucracy prevented Erika from getting a merited job as a musician. The mother and daughter immigrated and settled in Vancouver in 1976, where Dr. Golovan committed to community work and quickly became a pillar in Jewish and Russian volunteer organizations. She was an active member and elected officer of the Shalom Branch #178 of the Royal Canadian Legion and the Workers for Zion. She frequently sent letters, published articles, and gave speeches on topics she felt were important, from the defunding of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra to the beauty of her native Odessa. While many of her medical certifications were not recognized by Canadian institutions, she never failed to address herself as “Doctor,” even inscribing the title in pen on articles where she was featured. She was a staunch advocate against antisemitism and Holocaust denial; she published multiple articles in the Jewish Western Bulletin and frequently corresponded with editors and politicians about egregious cases. Just weeks before she passed away in 1997, Dr. Golovan sent a letter to the Bulletin and the North Shore News condemning the latter for publishing articles by Doug Collins, a noted Holocaust denier; a version of the letter was published in the Bulletin.  

I’m unsure if Dr. Dina Golovanevskaya identified as an activist. Based on her records, however, it is quite apparent that she was a campaigner of vigorous extent. Learning from Dr. Golovan's life and the history of International Women’s Day, I am moved to honour this day by going beyond the recognition of a particular gender identity. Rather, we must recognize the continued oppression of the world’s most marginalized classes and celebrate individuals identifying as women around the world who tirelessly advocate for a just and better world for all. 

Community Forum Sunday examines seniors survey [select portion]. Dr. Dina Golovanevskaya fonds (RA079). Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Vancouver, BC. https://collections.vhec.org/Detail/objects/12007 

Sources: 

Haynes, S. (2019, March 7). The radical reason why March 8 is International Women’s Day. Time. https://time.com/5187268/international-womens-day-history/ 

Oxford University. (2005). Activism. In K. Barber (Ed.), The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780195418163.001.0001/m_en_ca0000600?rskey=J5mfD6&result=573 

Chase Nelson (he/they) is a recent graduate of the UBC School of Information's Dual MASLIS program. He currently works as a Collections Assistant at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

By Denise Dale, Emily Lonie, Sonia Nicholson, and Sylvia Stopforth 

In last week’s blog post, we introduced our writing group, Archivists Who Write. Today we want to share a little more about each member of the group and about the why, how, what, and where we write.  

Why? 

Why do I write? Simply put, I have to. Not because anyone tells me I have to, but because I just have to. I have to chase the feeling. When I put pen to paper (or more accurately fingers to keyboard), there is a feeling of excitement, satisfaction, and purpose that seems to exist only in the formulation of story. When I write, I am seeking a hidden well of ever-shifting creativity, desperately hoping that it hasn’t run dry. When I find it, it is pure joy and excruciating frustration in equal measure – and that’s what’s so beautiful about it.  

Writing is bringing life to the characters in your imagination. It is the attempt to convey the disordered chaos in your mind, in some sort of discernible (and enjoyable) order. And what are archivists if not controllers of chaos, order-makers, organizers? But I found, in that ordering of documentary chaos, in the rigid application of theory and practice, there were few moments of pure creativity. For many years, I felt satisfied by those precious few moments. But eventually, the dam burst and a story spilled out. I didn’t know where it came from, but it demanded to exist. I listened and I wrote. And I kept listening. It was short stories at first. One even made it into print. But it wasn’t until my love of film led me to screenwriting that I found my form of choice. I wrote my first feature film in three weeks. I couldn’t stop. There was an urgency to it that was thrilling. And I have been chasing that feeling ever since.  

It was during this time that I was welcomed into this incredible writing group, affectionately known as Archivists Who Write. Despite how lonely, how solitary the act can feel, writing is the hope of connection. As much as the characters live in my mind, as much as I feel that I have seen the film I’ve written on the page, there is always a second life to be found in the sharing. Allowing a person to read your words is an act of faith. But, my goodness, it can be rewarding, nourishing, inspiring. When you allow others to embrace your characters, love them as you do, they become truly alive. Being part of this group has given me confidence that when I seek the well once again, it will be full.  

– Emily's fiction can be found in the literary magazines Pulp Literature (Issue 21) and Door = Jar (Issue 7), and her thoughts on archives can be found at http://www.thingsimfondsof.com/. As for her screenplays, Hollywood hasn't come knocking ... yet. 

How?  

“Shut up and write!”  

Not my words, of course! But thinking about the “how” of writing, that workshop title seems on point. Because beyond that directive, to stifle your inner critic and just get on with it, “how” is personal. How it starts, how it unfolds, how it evolves. It’s a process that matures with practice and time. One that incorporates genre “rules,” how-to books, podcasts, writing festivals, support groups like “Archivists Who Write,” one-on-one help (dramaturg, anyone?), or discovering how others hone their craft. And if it helps, here is my “how”—at least as far as playwriting goes. 

The shift from non-fiction writer to “junior” playwright began after attending a series of important but difficult productions. It started something like this: 

DON and DENISE enter the lobby from the theatre. 

DON: I mean… what sort of play has counsellors standing by? 

DENISE: That one girl was crying. 

DON: Did you know it was going to be about … that?  

DENISE: (hesitantly) Well, you know, it’s Studio B, not the Mainstage, so … 

DON: For once, I’d just like to go to the theatre— 

DENISE: (cuts off) and not be traumatized? 

DON: —and laugh. 

DENISE: Tell you what: I’ll write you a play. Make you laugh. How does that sound? 

DON: Traumatic. 

DON and DENISE exit. 

DENISE figures out how to write a play. 

“How” is fuelled by ideas, sparked perhaps by overheard conversations, a nugget in the news, or work in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) sector.  My first play Weed’em and Leap (professional reading, Sept. 2021) combined the antics of a library book cart drill team with a collection de-selection project gone awry (spoiler alert: Shakespeare’s First Folio accidentally gets thrown out!). 

Before an idea turns into dialogue, it turns into a one sentence premise. Here’s an example from my current play-in-progress: The Trouble with Henry is a comedy about a librarian who champions freedom to read after a banned book, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, is discovered languishing on the library shelves. 

Sounds ho-hum? Maybe. But now, premise done, the real fun begins because as Canadian playwright/dramaturg Caroline Russell-King told me during one of our Zoom sessions, “Nobody goes to the theatre to see ordinary.” Let’s get into the fun that didn’t make into that premise ... It’s 1961, librarian Rae is on probation, Henry Miller shows up (in a bathrobe), and so does Rae’s tipsy mom, the RCMP, and Canada Customs. And then there’s Mrs. Marshall who manages to sign out Tropic of Cancer, only to return it at the worst possible moment. All that comes out in the plot details. 

For some, plotting involves post-it notes or chapter summaries. For me, a plot chart appeals to my sense of order by funnelling the creative chaos in my head into neat columns and rows, detailing each scene. Charting makes it easy to spot and rectify plot snags. And snags not caught likely won’t get past Archivists Who Write as they diligently follow the plot and can be relied upon to nurture and gently nudge (aka “shut up and write!”) as needed. 

Finally, the “actual writing” begins, effortlessly, because most of the hard work has been done. Dialogue flows as characters come to life. Written directives stage a world filling with laughter and fun. As the action ramps up from the inciting incident, pausing briefly for intermission, fingers fly across the keyboard full tilt towards the climax before the curtain falls.  

All part of how. 

– Denise is co-author of two books on information management with numerous articles published in magazines like MoneySense and Reader’s Digest. 

Weed’em and Leap by Denise Dale, professional reading, produced by Dramaturgy On Demand, Sept. 2021.

What?  

Like an alchemist, I am preoccupied with the idea of transmutation. But it’s not the glitter of gold that draws me. Rather, it’s the way that stories take true things—things like lived experiences, indefinable yearnings, emotional landscapes—and turn them into a kind of lie in order to tell a deeper truth.  

And it doesn’t stop there, because the right story, told in the right way, can root itself in our hearts and forever transform the way we see the world, ourselves, and those around us. 

Change upon change. 

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I first understood that real, flesh-and-blood people created these magical things called “stories.” But that dream felt far too grand for the likes of me.  

Determined to work in a writing-adjacent field, I took myself off to school to get the necessary degrees (a BA in English Literature followed by a Master’s in Library and Information Studies) and worked as a research librarian and archivist for more than twenty years. On the whole it was a good fit, this business of preserving and ordering at least a few of the tributaries belonging to the great river of human stories rushing over and around us. 

But that wild old wish refused to be channelled. In 2019 I finally gave myself permission to own the dream.  

If you’ve made the attempt yourself to capture some quicksilver vision in a net of words, you know how frustrating it can be. There’s always that blasted gap between how you imagined it and what it looks like, lying there on the page, unmoving. But those occasions when you nearly get it right make it all worthwhile. And I’m thankful beyond words (ironically) for the privilege of trying. 

To date I’ve written everything from essays and articles to literary shorts and even microfiction, but my heart belongs to novel-length stories—particularly those works of speculative fiction that wade into the realms of fairy tales, fantasy, and science fiction. I find that sometimes the greater the distance between reality and the story-world, the sharper the light the writer is able to shine back onto that reality.  

As the inimitable Isabel Allende observed, “You can tell the deepest truths with the lies of fiction.” 

– Sylvia has had several short pieces published and is currently seeking representation for a young adult trilogy that blends elements of science fiction with the dark, alchemical glitter of fairy tales. Visit her at https://sylviastopforth.com. 

Where? 

Where you are is who you are. The further inside you the place moves, the more your identity is intertwined with it. Never casual, the choice of place is the choice of something you crave.  

Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun 

Confession time: I hated history—aka social studies—in school. It was too vague. Distant. Impersonal. I maintain to this day that if the curriculum had focused on local history, I would have found my career much sooner. 

As a community archivist, the work I do is directly related to the places where I work, live, and play every day. For example, the house that used to be behind mine was the home of a Saanich resident killed in the First World War. The same house where his widow spent the rest of her many years, never remarrying. Our lot was empty until the late 1950s or early 1960s; I picture her husband cutting across it before he enlisted, on his way to his job as a plasterer. Maybe he brought back flowers for her using the same shortcut.  

There’s no way to know all of that for sure. But archives capture more than facts. They hold stories. The rest is left to our imaginations. 

My writing regularly explores themes of identity, family, and place; of these three, the latter in particular. It makes sense, really. These are the same themes that cross the desks of archivists daily.  

And it’s this intersection of place and people that draws me in. Relationships. Home. How they’re all connected. Every record in our care represents a small piece of someone’s story. Someone who walked the same streets I do. Who loved. Lost. Deserves to be remembered. Becoming obsessed with finding them can be an occupational hazard. 

This is the premise—with an added twist—of my debut novel. Aptly titled Provenance Unknown, its two locations (my Saanich, Vancouver Island, neighbourhood and Paris, France) have personal meaning. My experiences influence every page as the main character, an Archives Assistant named Michele, travels these places I know so well. Saanich’s Rutledge Park and Cloverdale corridor. The Pereire neighbourhood of Paris, where my husband and I enjoyed our own adventures in the City of Light. She’s there. 

Past and present. In person. On paper. These places move inside me. Define me. At times, it’s hard to separate fact from fiction.  

I wouldn’t want to.  

– Sonia 

If you happen to be in the Victoria, BC, area, join us for the Spring launch of Sonia’s novel! Details forthcoming at www.sonianicholson.com. 

Conclusion  

We are Archivists Who Write. Four writers, each on a unique literary journey. But it all boils down to an irresistible pull to the work and a desire to let the words out into the world, all with the comfort of knowing that a supportive suggestion, a potential plot point, or a carefully considered comma is but a Zoom call away. 

Because, as L.M. Montgomery’s Anne put it, “Next to trying and winning, the best thing is trying and failing.” Our little writing group encourages the trying and consoles over the (real or perceived) failing, but most importantly, our group inspires the doing! 

By Denise Dale, Emily Lonie, Sonia Nicholson, and Sylvia Stopforth 

All archivists write. They compose everything from administrative histories to website content, from online exhibit narratives to academic papers. But some archivists are drawn to create and explore fictional landscapes as well. They may anchor their new worlds in scenes or characters that draw on their professional expertise, or they may go completely off-piste, delving into half-imagined futures or poetic fantasies. But wherever the imagination leads, the business of creativity is fuelled by support groups like ours, “Archivists Who Write.” 

In a recent In the Field ACA blog post, Amy Tector, another archivist/author, emphasized the importance of writing groups. We agree and hope that by sharing some of the who, what, where, why, and how of our experience we may inspire others to forge such connections. Here’s our story.

Once upon a time; or, how it all began … 

After nearly twenty-five years as an academic archivist and librarian, Sylvia Stopforth decided to take the plunge into writing full-time. At a regional gathering of British Columbia (BC) archivists, she reconnected with Denise Dale, another hybrid archivist-librarian, who works at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. When Sylvia half-reluctantly confessed her foolhardy plan, Denise confided that she was working on a script for a play. Sylvia took note. 

A little while later she noticed the name of Emily Lonie on the cover of a literary journal in which Sylvia had previously published a story. It appeared that in addition to serving as Coquitlam City Archivist, Emily also dabbled in writing short stories. And it turned out that was just the half of it! 

Sylvia reached out to Denise and Emily and suggested they meet to chat about their various writing goals and interests. They gathered over breakfast on a wintery Richmond morning in late 2019. The connection was effortless and immediate. They agreed to make it a monthly event and started sharing their work with one another, for discussion and feedback.

COVID silver linings 

And then … COVID arrived. It would have been easy enough to call a halt. Reconnect after the pandemic. (After all, it would be over in a few weeks. Months, at most. Hah!) But they’d already learned that there’s something addictive about sharing one’s dreams, and they weren’t ready to give it up. So, like the rest of the world, they shifted from in-person to in-pixel meetings. 

Then Emily mentioned a community archivist on Vancouver Island who had completed a novel and who might be interested in joining the group. Since they were now meeting online, the lack of proximity was a moot point.   

Sonia Nicholson turned out to be the perfect addition.

Clockwise from top left: Sonia Nicholson, Sylvia Stopforth, Emily Lonie, Denise Dale.

The “R” word 

Since then, the foursome has met nearly every month, life and schedules permitting, and all agree it’s been terrific. More than terrific. Necessary. 

Why? Here’s the thing … 

With few exceptions, writing is a solitary endeavour. This makes it ripe picking for that pesky internal critic—the one that keeps telling you that you are an imposter, your work is rubbish, and your most cherished goals are nothing but pipe dreams. A group of trusted colleagues can drown out that critic—or at least transform it into a useful part of a larger chorus.  

It’s incredibly encouraging to have friends with whom to share ideas, celebrate successes, and commiserate over rejection.

Oh, the rejection … 

There is so much of it, whether you’re submitting poems or short stories to literary journals, entering your play in contests, or querying a novel to find an agent who can connect the dots to a publishing contract. 

So having a writing/critique group is not just a nice thing. It’s a necessary thing. A PFD: a Personal Flotation Device for those who’ve decided to push out to sea on a craft made of their own words… 

How to connect? 

Keep your ears open for prospective contacts. Check out local libraries and independent bookstores for announcements about writing groups, book launches, or featured writer-visits. Seek out writing groups online. (We’ve provided a few links below to get you started.) Sign up for webinars or seminars offered by writers, local community groups, or your school district’s continuing education program.  

If the budget permits, attend a writers’ conference or a writing retreat.  

While it can be scary to step out of your comfort zone, to own the dream requires a certain willingness to be vulnerable, which helps others to open up as well. And without risk, it’s hard to build trust. 

So don’t be afraid to share. It’s amazing how a chance bit of chit-chat can open up possibilities. “Archivists Who Write” is a testament to that, so be brave!  

Finding the time 

For most of us, finding time is the biggest hurdle.  

On occasion, members of our group had no new work to share, because life happened. Family needs escalated. Ribs were broken (true story). Annual reports or grant applications followed someone home from the day job.  

Some time ago, a group member (name withheld to protect the slightly embarrassed) took nearly a decade to write an epic fantasy novel, with a sizeable cast of characters. At one point, the gap between opportunities to write was so long, she forgot a main character’s name. She also found it necessary to maintain a spreadsheet of characters she’d killed off in order to avoid any unintentional—and potentially awkward—resurrections. 

Sometimes small pockets of time can be sewn together. The average literary novel is 80,000 words in length. If you manage to write just 300 words five days per week, you could have the rough draft of a novel completed in a year! 

If writing a book isn’t in the cards—or doesn’t feature on your cherished list of writing goals—there are flash and micro fiction websites that publish stories anywhere from 100 to 1000 words in length. And many literary journals are looking for poetry as well as prose. 

The key thing is to begin. Get a few words down and keep going! 

Weaving the threads 

All four members of this group were drawn to the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) sector. And all are serious about wanting to improve their writing craft, about producing work and getting that work out into the world—whatever that looks like. So clearly, there are some common threads. But their differences are equally important and have a way of enriching and broadening one another’s creative horizons.  

In terms of their careers, they range from near-retirement to mid-career pinnacles. Some have children and some don’t. Some are fearless plungers, while others (names withheld to protect the cowardly) are reticent toe-dippers. Strong views are favoured by one or two, while others are quite comfortable, thank you very much, perched on the fence, considering issues from every possible angle. Morning meetings are welcomed by some, and taken stoically, with coffee thick enough to support a spoon, by others. 

This group provides proof of concept for that well-known saying about shared sorrows being halved and shared joys being doubled.  

Each member has benefited from constructive critiques, brainstorming sessions, and offers to make connections. They’ve generously shared ideas, tips, and techniques, so they’re not all constantly reinventing the wheel. 

In terms of the writing, some have strung together lopsided, sentimental stories since they could hold a pencil, while others have come to this dream more recently. The projects they are currently working on vary wildly and include a soon-to-be-published novel featuring a protagonist who happens to be an archivist.  

But more about those projects and “Archivists Who Write” in our next post to In the Field. 

To be continued… 

A few writing organizations to get you started:

• https://www.bcwriters.ca/ 
• https://www.writersguildofcanada.com/ 
• https://www.writersunion.ca/  
• https://www.scbwi.org/ 
• https://creativeacademyforwriters.com/ 
• https://poets.ca/ 
• https://playwrightsguild.ca/

Denise Dale (MLIS) is the Archives Librarian at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. An avid theatre-goer, Denise aspires to take her writing from the page to the stage. She is a member of Playwrights Guild of Canada. 

Emily Lonie (MA – Public History) is the Executive Director of the Vancouver Heritage Foundation and was formerly Coquitlam’s City Archivist. In her spare time (when she can find some), she enjoys inventing characters and crafting scenes for her screenplays. 

Sonia Nicholson (BA, French and Spanish) has worked in community and religious archives for fifteen years and is particularly interested in advocacy and outreach. Her writing includes everything from poetry to essays to short stories to novels.  

Sylvia Stopforth (MLIS) is a writer and word-obsessive who worked for more than twenty years as an archivist and research librarian in the post-secondary sector. Some of her short stories have been published, and she’s currently working on a novel. 

By J.J. Ghaddar (1)

This post (Part II of II) is based on presentations I delivered over the last year virtually, in Rome and in Accra. See Part I for more details.

For over a decade, I have been tracing the roots of archival studies in western imperialism and white supremacy, with a focus on settler colonial and apartheid state formations. I share with you this journey by telling you about my excavations of three histories: that of the modern archival profession; of archiving in settler Canada; and of the Vienna Convention on Property, Archives and Debt (1983). In the process, I outline the importance of thinking about place in relation to the provenance of archives and records in colonial contexts, as part of amplifying the struggles of indigenous peoples to reclaim colonized lands and histories, and to overcome the archival legacies of colonialism.

From Archival Fictions to Repatriation: Third World Decolonization & the Vienna Convention (2)

After tracing the archival fictions we tell ourselves about the history of the modern archival profession in Europe and Canada (see Part I), I shifted my interrogations to the history of the global debate over archival repatriation and displaced archives during the era of Third World decolonization in the 20th century, when newly independent states and anticolonial movements spent decades working to repatriate and protect archives and other material heritage from the First World. These efforts were part of an all-sided offensive to end western imperialism and decolonize the global order, including through diplomatic initiatives like the Vienna Convention. Third World actors from the eminent Algerian jurist and diplomat, Dr. Mohamed Bedjaoui, to formations like the Non-Aligned Movement were at the centre of crafting the Convention in international sites that included the UN, the International Law Commission, UNESCO and the International Council on Archives (ICA). Liberation movements from Algeria to Namibia were also involved. All of them consistently articulated a fundamental connection between archival decolonization, cultural and heritage preservation, communication and information equity, economic sovereignty, and anti-imperialism. It is impossible then to disconnect the Convention from Third World instruments on cultural heritage or from political proposals at the UN like the New International Economic Order and the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO). While the latter calls for equity in the global flows of information, the former calls for people-centred development. Hence, the Convention brings togethers archives as well as property and debt into a single framework and instrument. It calls for the repatriation of both property and archives from the colonizing state to the newly decolonized state, as well as for the cancellation of the debts of newly decolonized states from the colonial era.

Image 2: UNESCO headquarters in Paris where I conducted archival research on the Vienna Convention in the summer of 2018. Source: UNESCO/Wikipedia (April 2010).

These efforts and initiatives unfolded at a time when bloody struggles for decolonization and liberation were taking place globally, when the martyrs and prisoners of the Third World Project were counted in the millions, and when liberation movements that were not state actors had special status within the UN system. It was also a time when the Third World Bloc enshrined in international law the right of all peoples to live free from foreign interference and to resist colonialism. The Bloc also lobbied for status and recognition within the UN for national liberation movements that were not state actors, including the African National Congress and South West Africa People’s Organisation (Namibia) then struggling against apartheid South Africa’s bid for regional domination, as well as the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). Significantly, national liberation movements recognized by the Arab League and the Organization of African Unity had status at the 1983 conference where the Convention was adopted, as did the UN Council for Namibia. The accordance of special status to Third World liberation movements is one example amongst many of the tension between the aspirations and visions of decolonization within the Third World Project, and the reality of the western nation state model and global system of nation states that those aspirations and visions would be increasingly constrained by and neutralized through. Ultimately defeated by the neoliberal counterassault, the Third World Project failed to end imperialism, constrain Global South elites, ward off the power of finance capital, or realize the full promise of the national liberation movements and their call for unity. It succeeded, however, in ending direct colonial rule in many countries and territories. It also succeeded in what Angela Davis refers to, when speaking of the civil rights era in the ‘60s and ‘70s, as “chang[ing] the terrain of struggle [… and …] reconfiguring the landscape on which we now try to increase the measure of freedom all communities enjoy.” (3) It succeeded in galvanizing hundreds of millions of people over decades across all the continents of the world to work to different degrees in varied arenas with diverse visions to realize an end to colonial rule and imperial domination. Such visions, as Sajed aptly put its, “function as latent ideals of the unfulfilled potential of Third Worldism, which are still worth keeping in mind and striving towards.” (4)

Image 3: Picture of Mr. Amadou Mahtar M'Bow of Senegal, Director-General of UNESCO from 1974 to 1987. He was the first Black African to head a United Nations agency and remains to this day the only Director-General of UNESCO not representing a Global North state. M’Bow is an important figure of the Third World Bloc at the UN, which supported his election to UNESCO. Source UNESCO/Wikipedia (Nov. 1974).

The Vienna Convention is itself a latent ideal and unfulfilled promise, a legal instrument that has yet to come into force but one that provides what is likely the most radical vision of global archival repatriation ever debated on such a grand scale. It is a vision that is still worth keeping in mind as we continue discussing displaced archives today in the wake of Third World political decolonization. Let us consider the text of the Vienna Convention in more detail to illustrate this point further:

Overall, Article 28, which is focused on newly decolonized states, is undergirded by the principle of territoriality, that is of territorial pertinence, provenance or origins. It is also undergirded by the principles of retroactive sovereignty and of functional pertinence. Territorial pertinence is defined by the Society of American Archivists (SAA) as “[t]he practice of placing documents with content relevant to a region in a repository within the region. […] For example, under territorial pertinence, records relating to a newly formed country would be transferred to the new country.” This principle is related to that of retroactive sovereignty, which “means that the archives produced by administrations and institutions in charge of managing the business of the territory that has become a newly independent state are devolved to the new state.” (6) The Society of American Archivists also distinguishes territorial pertinence from that of territorial provenance, whereby “the records would remain with the agency that created them.” In line with territorial pertinence, the Convention calls for records that belonged to the formerly colonized territory to be returned there if they had been incorporated into the colonial state’s archives. This is related to the principle of territorial origin, “according to which the archives produced by the territory before it became dependent, and then incorporated in the archives of the annexing or supervising state, are bound to the successor state.” (7) The Convention also states that whatever records the colonizer had created originally in its national archives should be transferred to the newly independent state when they are vital to its ability to operate. As Kecskeméti explains, “[t]he functional pertinence principle […] means that the transfer of power and responsibilities must be accompanied by the transfer of archives that are necessary for administrative continuity to be ensured.” (8) 

At the same time, the Convention does not foreclose the possibility of acknowledging and incorporating into agreements the claims and perspectives of others depicted in the records. For example, Article 28.7 outlines that agreements on archives between the former colonizing state and the newly decolonized state “shall not infringe the right of the peoples of those States to development, to information about their history, and to their cultural heritage.” I read this provision as making room for the needs of people living outside of the decolonized state (e.g. Algeria, Ghana, Benin, Trinidad & Tobago) within the boundaries of the state that colonized it (e.g. France, Britain, Spain). They can serve as the basis for negotiating resolutions that incorporate the needs and perspectives of people residing in the latter, while still facilitating repatriation. When colonialism is involved, joint or shared heritage, or reproduction, are solutions that should be framed in a way that addresses the core of the problem, namely how archival colonial legacies help perpetuate the power imbalance between North and South. A decolonized reframing of joint/shared heritage also has the potential to help work out solutions in cases where there are multiple claims over records, including when there are competing claims by Global South communities, movements and societies.     

While I cannot give these principles the extensive treatment they deserve today, I will point out that the Convention centres land and place insofar as archives by or about a colonized territory belong to that territory even when not created in it, even when not in the custody of its governing authority, and even when located elsewhere. It calls for “repatriating the power of the knowledge held in archives” (9) by reconstituting memory, history and collectivity through an in-gathering of records pertaining to a place, as part of de-fragmenting the knowledge, people and sovereignties which were dispersed through many repositories, archives, custodians and states by colonial violence. I term this framework provenance in place, insofar as archives are to be kept together based on the place they pertain to and in that place, rather than solely arranged by creator. The Convention’s call (particularly in Article 28) for global archival decolonization seeks to operationalize the principle of self-determination in archives by connecting archival ownership and custody to the issue of whose land has been or is colonized by whom. These are powerful ideas even if the Vienna Convention never received the requisite 15 state signatories to come into force largely due to the political opposition and machinations of western states and archivists. Due to the global dynamics of power between North and South, the Convention and the Third World voices behind it have been given too little consideration, if not misrepresented and erased, in archival studies. The Convention’s history has generally been written by the white men who opposed it. Nonetheless, the Association of Commonwealth Archivists & Records Managers took a firm position about the return of displaced archives from Britain to Third World decolonized states in part by referencing the Convention, noting that the Convention “has continued to inform thinking about archives within the international archival community.”

A committee of western archival experts called together by the ICA in 1995 criticized the Convention for adopting territorial pertinence because it violates the dominant creator-centric conception of provenance: “The ownership of archives cannot be determined by or on the basis of the information contained in them, but only by their provenance.” (10) This statement evidences the tendency to conflate or collapse ownership and provenance, which is why reconceptualizing provenance is often at the core of arguments for archival repatriation. More recently, Kecskeméti, who opposed the Convention for political reasons, considers the principles of territorial origin, retroactive sovereignty and functional pertinence to be “based on provenance.” (11) Indeed, much has changed between the ICA’s 1995 criticism of the Convention for being in violation of provenance and 2017, when Kecskeméti wrote about the principles undergirding the Convention based on a more expansive understanding of provenance. Since the turn of the last century, a range of archival scholars from Bastian and Nesmith to Hurley and Drake have been thinking more expansively of provenance, about how to locate the pluralistic histories and dynamic relationships of records, or whether to discard the notion altogether, as captured in concepts like societal provenance, parallel provenance and community of records. Nonetheless, the fundamental theoretical validity of the western theory of provenance continues to be accepted almost universally. This more expansive yet still creator-centric understanding of provenance is reflected in major descriptive standards like the ICA’s ISAD(G): General International Standard Archival Description and the Canadian Rules for Archival Description.

Building on that more expansive thinking about provenance, however, my research into the Vienna Convention invites us to consider the possibility of reconceptualizing provenance partly by centring place as context and origin even when that means de-coupling provenance from respect des fonds. Of course, place is not the only important aspect of the provenance of archives, but it is one that is too often disregarded, minimized or elided altogether. This tendency to elide place is a common colonial move, one that frames place as simply backdrop, or abstractly as timeless and decontextualized space, to divert attention away from the question of who is occupying and controlling whose land. This tendency has led indigenous and anticolonial thinkers around the world to highlight the importance of centring place in challenging and dislodging colonial and imperial projects, all of which require the remaking of political geography. The Vienna Convention reflects this anticolonial ethos albeit within a restrictive statist framework. The extensive archival and documentary trail of the debates and activities associated with its crafting can enrich our thinking about displaced archives and our dominant archival paradigm beyond the horizon of the west and its legal traditions. Given its statist focus, however, it is important to consider how we can bring contemporary theories, frameworks and practices about community archiving, diasporic archives and Indigenous Data Sovereignty to bear on these discussions and our interpretations of the Convention. 

Future Directions: Rethinking Provenance in Archivy

This text has traversed vast historical periods, and physical and conceptual terrain, from the archival fictions produced about archives and archivists to forge white nationalist states like France and Canada, to the insurgent histories of the Third World Project and the decolonizing ethos of the Vienna Convention. My singular goal has been to unearth hidden histories and produce critical knowledge that can aid in the project of creating a more liberatory archival landscape and world. My anticolonial rethinking of place and archives, which I gloss under the term provenance in place, asks us to attend to the relationship between records, their place and the people of that place. This intellectual intervention serves as a strategic move whereby an understanding of provenance that takes place as seriously as creator, if not more, supports claims that archives removed from a place by colonizers through colonial violences should be returned to that place (as origin and context). Provenance in place is about creating archival regimes and infrastructures that begin by asking, what land(s) do the archives pertain to? What people and nations are connected to that land historically and today? And among them who, if any, has been or is dispossessed or colonized, and by whom? Most importantly, it is to ask, how can the archives support efforts to end that dispossession and colonization today, and to undo the archival legacies of such colonization in the past?

(1) This text is based on research outlined in the following publications: J.J. Ghaddar (2022) “Provenance in Place: Crafting the Vienna Convention for Global Decolonization and Archival Repatriation,” in James Lowry, ed., Disputed Archival Heritage, Volume II (New York: Routledge); Ghaddar (2021) Provenance in Place: Archives, Settler Colonialism and the Making of a Global Order. Thesis (University of Toronto); and Ghaddar (2020) Total Archives for Land, Law and Sovereignty in Settler Canada. Archival Science 21(1): 59-82.  

(2) This section is based on Ghaddar, "Provenance in Place: Crafting the Vienna Convention."

(3) Angela Davis (2008) Angela Davis: How Does Change Happen? University of California Television, around 39 to 44 minutes.

(4) Alina Sajed (2019) Re-remembering Third Worldism: An Affirmative Critique of National Liberation in Algeria. Middle East Critique 28(3): 243–60, 16.

(5) Article 25 provides the caveat that, “Nothing in the present Part shall be considered as prejudging in any respect any question that might arise by reason of the preservation of the integral character of groups of State archives of the predecessor State.”

(6) Charles Kecskeméti (2017) “Archives Seizures: The Evolution of International Law,” in James Lowry, ed., Displaced Archives (London, New York: Routledge), 14. Emphasis in original.

(7) Ibid.

(8) Ibid.

(9) Evelyn Wareham (2001) “Our Own Identity, Our Own Taonga, Our Own Self Coming Back": Indigenous Voices in New Zealand Record-Keeping. Archivaria 52: 26-46, 46.

(10) ICA, Committee on Legal Matters (1995) Reference Dossier on Archival Claims. Compiled by Hervé Bastien, Committee Member, for the Council of Europe, 53.

(11) Kecskeméti, “Archives Seizures”, 14.

By J.J. Ghaddar (1)

This post (Part I of II) is based on presentations I delivered between March and November 2022 at the Provenance in Place: A Symposium co-hosted virtually by CUNY’s Archival Technologies Lab and Dalhousie University’s School of Information Management; at the International Council on Archives 9th Annual Meeting in Rome; and at From Archival Pasts to Archival Futures Interdisciplinary Workshop hosted at the University of Ghana’s African Studies Institute in Accra. Many thanks to Nadia Caidi, Eve Tuck, Raymond Frogner, James Lowry, and Mariam Karim for their encouragement and conversations over the years that helped shape this work. I am also grateful to the feedback of the respondents, panelists and audience members at the various events. Any mistakes or omissions are solely my responsibility.

For over a decade, I have been tracing the roots of archival studies in western imperialism and white supremacy, with a focus on settler colonial and apartheid state formations with their segregationist and annihilative drives. I have also been thinking about whether and how we can disentangle the field from these oppressive systems and structures. Here, I share with you this ten-year journey by telling you about my excavations of three parallel and overlapping histories: One is the history of the modern archival profession, or at least the story we tell ourselves about this history. Another is the history of archiving in settler Canada and the struggle for land at its core. The last is about the Third World Project, insurgent histories, and the struggle for liberatory archives and futures captured to some extent in the United Nation’s Vienna Convention on Property, Archives and Debt (1983). In the process, I outline the importance of thinking about place in relation to the provenance of archives and records in colonial contexts as part of amplifying struggles of indigenous peoples to reclaim colonized lands and histories, and to overcome the archival legacies of colonialism.

Archival fictions from the French Revolution to the Fifth Republic (2)

Image 1: Picture of the Musée des Archives nationales I took during my doctoral fieldwork in Paris. The museum is run by the official state repository, the Archives nationales. It is part of the French state machinery that fabricates an innocent white history for the nation. Source: J.J. Ghaddar (May 2018).

First, I began tracing the history of archival studies and the emergence of our dominant creator-centric understanding of provenance as others have done—from when it is said to originate since the French Revolution and its codification in the Dutch Manual in 1898, to the first International Congress of Archivists & Librarians in Brussels in 1910 and the subsequent globalization of provenance along with the nation state archives model with Third World political decolonization over the last century. The difference is that I brought into the story some of the many racialized and colonized peoples and spaces within and beyond Europe that are usually erased in how we talk about our professional history. This allowed me to demonstrate the crucial role of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and Algerian Revolution (1954-1962) in the creation of archival studies, western modernity and the French Republic from its first to its current fifth iterations. Doing this research made painfully obvious the role of not just western archives but also archivists in the fabrication of archival fictions, that is the creation and mobilization of archives to fabricate innocent histories for white nationalist projects like modern France and, significantly, for archival studies itself. The fabrication of innocent histories for nation, archives and archivist where none exist requires at a fundamental level erasing and remaking the places of colonized and racialized people and collectivities. It also requires the simultaneous erasure of the colonized and racialized from the places and spaces claimed for white nationalism, which entails a disavowal of the history and afterlife of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.  By interrogating this history, I learned how white archivists, in privileging creators, facilitated the expansion of western empires along with the establishment of white nationalist state formations in Europe and globally. I also learned that the Eurocentric stories we tell ourselves about this history allows us to whitewash or sanitize the methods and practices of our field, as if it is just technical, natural and right that we do things this way. In fact, the dominant way of doing things was explicitly developed to serve the political projects of white supremacist states. Archival methods and principles like our creator-centric paradigm of provenance have always been pragmatic; the ends, and not the means, are the point.

Archival fictions from Canadian Confederation to total archives (3)

Second, I traced the history of British North America, which becomes Canada in 1867, uncovering the settler colonial structuring of Canada’s state archives, and of the Canadian archival profession and its total archives tradition. From the era of Confederation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to our contemporary period when the Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC) had to take Canada to court multiple times over records and archives—across this historical trajectory, I demonstrate the archival fictions that facilitated the reconstitution of a colonial frontier (British North America) into a settler nation state (Canada). By archival fictions, I refer to how Canadian archivists fabricated both archives and history at the service of a genocidal white nationalist project. Archival fictions facilitate the erasure of Indigenous nations from their lands so these can be claimed for settlement, as well as the Anglo imperialism and racialism required to make Canada. They also work to remove all those not deemed white from national historiography and consciousness, including people of African descent as part of erasing the history of slavery and whitening, in the national imagination, the labor and population that built the country. Hence, today we still have this myth of the pioneer—hardworking, stalwart, brave and, invariably, white. For whoever works the land, liberal western thinking tells us, can claim the land. It is a lie of course and a very convenient one. Those who have shaped, cared for, and worked the land over the last few centuries, if not millennia, are usually the last to have legal or political claim to it.

Archival fictions also refer to the process of professional mythmaking and history writing that started in the 1970s reframing the varied practices employed over decades at the explicit service of settler colonialism as the foundations of a continuous tradition of Canadian archiving known as total archives. This tradition, it is often said, creates a more inclusive and democratic national documentary heritage. This archival fiction provides a sanitized way of talking about the history of our profession in Canada. Significantly, the fabrication of a national archival heritage and national history where none existed required generations of Canadian archivists to gather records according to subject. Concretely, they copied and gathered in Ottawa any record or document pertaining to the European settlement of what became Canada. Most of these records, notably, were created before Canada or much of its settler population was in existence. So what exactly is national or Canadian about them? The prevalent legislative framework for archives from 1912 to 1987 emphasized the historical rather than administrative value of records, their content over their function. It deemed material as archival by virtue of its acquisition regardless of the nature or method of its creation, whether its creator was a public or private entity, or if it was original or a copy. Generally, records were acquired with little regard for the coherence of collections or the need to maintain the records of a single creator together or in their original order. These ideas were anathema to the emerging consensus in Europe codified in the canonical Dutch Manual of 1898, which required archives of the same creator to be maintained together.Yet long after the International Congress of Archivists & Librarians adopted in 1910 a definition of provenance in line with the Dutch Manual,Canada’s state archivists were reclassifying acquisitions from their original systems within repositories like Britain’s Public Record Office and the Archives nationales de France so that “individual documents and even entire fonds were grouped together in large thematic, alpha-numeric classes.”(4)

Table 1: Summary of key milestones in the development of total archives and the Canadian national archival system.

Tracing this history reinforced the point to me that Canadian archival practices and laws have been driven by the pragmatic imperative to archive in whatever way serves settler colonialism. For the first few generations after Confederation, that meant archiving by subject as territory since there was no such thing as a Canada until then. Hence, an archival heritage had to be retroactively invented alongside a nation and history. Once the Canadian state and its archives had been cohered circa the 1970s and ‘80s, there was a shift to archiving within a creator-centric provenance paradigm as a more effective way of maintaining the state and its functioning. Evidently, then, to forge a new nation and collectivity, it can be helpful to archive by place or territory, rather than creator. I began to think if that is the case when you are making up a country like Canada, then would it not be even more so when you are attempting to recohere long established nations and native collectivities in the wake of colonialism, to revitalize cultures and reaffirm sovereignties? At least in such cases, the population is already established with a long history on the land, usually long before the records are created or gathered. In sum, I began to think of the ethical imperative to decenter creator in provenance and to consider place as crucial when land occupation and colonialism is or has been central to the context of the creation, use, acquisition and displacement of records. To elaborate these ideas, I turn to the Vienna Convention, and the Third World Project from which it emerges, in Part II of this blog post.

(1) This text is based on research outlined in the following publications: J.J. Ghaddar (2022) “Provenance in Place: Crafting the Vienna Convention for Global Decolonization and Archival Repatriation,” in James Lowry, ed., Disputed Archival Heritage, Volume II (New York: Routledge); Ghaddar (2021) Provenance in Place: Archives, Settler Colonialism and the Making of a Global Order. Thesis (University of Toronto); and Ghaddar (2020) Total Archives for Land, Law and Sovereignty in Settler Canada. Archival Science 21(1): 59-82. 

(2) This section is based on the introduction of my doctoral thesis, J.J. Ghaddar (2021) Provenance in Place: Archives, Settler Colonialism and the Making of a Global Order. Thesis, University of Toronto; and Ghaddar (2021/2020) Total Archives for Land, Law and Sovereignty in Settler Canada. Archival Science 21(1): 59-82. 

(3) This section is based on Ghaddar, Provenance in Place: Archives, Settler Colonialism and the Making of a Global Order; and Ghaddar, Total Archives for Land, Law and Sovereignty.

(4) Danielle Lacasse and Antonio Lechasseur (1997) The National Archives of Canada 1872-1997 (The Canadian Historical Association Historical Booklet No. 58 (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association), 5.

By Katherine Schlesinger

As guest editors of the special issue of Archivaria on person-centred archival theory and praxis, we, Jennifer Douglas, Jessica Lapp and Mya Ballin, are pleased to share a series of blog posts that reflect on the nature and enactment of person-centred approaches to archival materials and work. These blog posts complement the articles in the special issue, presenting a variety of perspectives on how centring the person in archival processes happens and why it matters. We're grateful to the authors for sharing their research and experiences! 

It is fitting that on the 100-year anniversary of the birth of Howard Zinn, the “People’s Historian,” archivists are purposively centring people in their own work, most notably in the service of formerly marginalized and silenced communities. Zinn was a fierce advocate for the oppressed, and an opponent of the notion of “neutrality” in the archives. In a paper presented to the Society of American Archivists in 1970, Zinn characterized the archival profession as an “inevitably political craft” whose biases privileged the records and stories of powerful people and institutions over those of ordinary people and equated archival claims of neutrality with passive complicity (Zinn, 1977).  One can draw a line from Zinn’s work to current people-centred, social justice-focused archival projects addressing reconciliation, repatriation, reparations, redescription, and gaps about the lives of those previously misrepresented or excluded from the archives. Moreover, Zinn’s rejection of the notion of archival neutrality opened the door to the recognition of affect and emotion in the archive, which are vital aspects of people-centred archival praxis, in all their wonderful and terrible manifestations.  

While most Library Information Science (LIS) students read and discuss the views of Howard Zinn, fewer are advised of the potential connection between social justice archival work and the emotional risks inherent in such endeavors for archivists and users of the archive, including the risk of trauma. This begs the question, is archival education sufficiently preparing the newest generation of archival professionals?  

Trauma is medically defined as “an emotional reaction to incidents of death, physical or sexual violence,” or to “extreme or repeated exposure to aversive details of traumatic events which only applies to workers who encounter the consequences of traumatic events as part of their professional responsibilities,” (Pai, North & Suris, 2017, p.3). It is the latter part of this description, a phenomenon also termed secondary or vicarious trauma, that puts archivists at risk while either working directly with aversive materials, or interacting with the people described in the records, or their survivors.  

Archives are full of traumatic materials, records describing the ordeals suffered by individuals, families, or communities, at times the direct relatives or ancestors of the very patrons wanting to access these records. What is considered aversive materials is subjective in the context of both cultural and personal terms.  However, they are most often associated with collections of documents about police violence, state-sponsored terrorism, or systematic societal abuses of power, such as slavery and forced family separations.  As communities begin to demand accountability for such actions, archivists are called upon to engage with these archival documents as evidence of past wrongdoings, for the purposes of reconciliation, reparations, or healing.  Repeated engagement with materials that document trauma can elicit a powerful emotional response from the archivist and the user, leading to serious mental stress disorders, including trauma.  

In the past, the archival profession suppressed the notion of emotional response, a shadow that still lingers over the profession and is compounded by society’s stigma surrounding mental health disorders or needs. However, archivists can embrace their humanity and acknowledge their emotional response to archival material while balancing the important work of people-centred, social-justice-focused archiving.   

To their credit, archivists and archival educators have recently initiated open and supportive discussions about archival trauma and recognize the need to create supportive environments and mindsets to care for those impacted by archival trauma. The profession is in the early stages of developing training and resources, mostly geared towards working professionals. Pilot programs for trauma-informed archival management have met success most notably in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.   

However, is the archival community overlooking the necessity and the opportunity to educate its newest members? Knowledge about the risk of trauma in the archive and training in trauma-informed archival management should ideally be provided at the LIS graduate student level, to prepare the next generation of people-centered archivists before they encounter traumatic materials in their first internship or job. As new archival literature is published on archival trauma and management, and workshops are more readily available online, it’s time to begin to extend this knowledge and training to LIS students. Newly minted archivists are eager to take up the call for social justice archival work. Trauma-informed training can only enhance their ability to approach such projects in a safe, effective, and truly people-centred manner. 

References

Pai, A., North, C. & Suris, A. (2017). Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in the DSM-5: Controversy, Change, and Conceptual Considerations [Review of the book Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed.; American Psychiatric Association: Arlington, VA, USA, 2013]. Behavioral Sciences 7(1); doi:10.3390/bs7010007. Retrieved from https://www.mdpi.com/2076-328X/7/1/7/htm 

Zinn, H. (1977). Secrecy, Archives, and the Public Interest. The Midwestern Archivist, 2(2), 14-26. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41101382. 

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Katherine Schlesinger is a Master of Library Science candidate at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Her academic interest is in emotion and affect in the archive. She is a member of Trauma-Informed Archives: A Community of Practice. 

By Siham Alaoui

As guest editors of the special issue of Archivaria on person-centred archival theory and praxis, we, Jennifer Douglas, Jessica Lapp and Mya Balin, are pleased to share a series of blog posts that reflect on the nature and enactment of person-centred approaches to archival materials and work. These blog posts complement the articles in the special issue, presenting a variety of perspectives on how centring the person in archival processes happens and why it matters. We're grateful to the authors for sharing their research and experiences!

Current technological developments have changed the way heritage institutions are conducting their activities. Those institutions are undertaking new strategies to involve citizens in the description and enrichment of cultural heritage. This is particularly the case in archival institutions, where citizens are invited to donate their archival materials such as personal diaries, manuscripts, photographs, and videos, to document the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on social, economic, and cultural levels. This contribution sheds light on the various manifestations of the collective documentation of the COVID-19 pandemic and describes how the archivist’s role is to be reinvented for a better citizen archives management. We also identify and describe the key challenges relating to this person-centred archival praxis, and how archivists can play simultaneous roles as stewards, mediators, and participants in this context.

Collective documentation of the COVID-19 pandemic: an enrichment of common documentary heritage

The collective documentation of the pandemic is viewed as a response to the statements published in April 2020 by UNESCO and the International Council on Archives (ICA), inviting policy makers, health authorities, managers, research institutions, and citizens to transform the COVID-19 threat into an opportunity to enrich the documentary heritage of nations (ICA, 2020; UNESCO, 2020). Since then, many citizens have been involved in those collective initiatives, that is, by sharing their personal archives with heritage institutions in the aim of describing how they are living their quarantine and illustrating their experiences and emotions. Examples of those institutions are several, chief of which are the Civilisation Museum in Quebec (Musée de la civilisation) and the Association of Belgium French-speaking archivists (Association des archivistes francophones de la Belgique), which have established collaborative approaches to collect, manage, and disseminate COVID-19 pandemic citizens’ personal archives. The virtual exhibitions on their respective websites show the diversity of content generated by citizens, including letters, diaries, and photographs. All those archives reflect citizens’ thoughts, emotions, and even memories, describing how the pandemic affected their everyday life. To take part in those initiatives, citizens were invited to log on to the platform and upload their personal archives. The latter should be described using various metadata such as the document type, its topic, and release date. Furthermore, archival material should be accompanied with a relevant description reflecting how the donated objects can help document the social, cultural, and economic impacts of the pandemic on citizens.   

Figure 2 The Civilisation Museum: collective documentation of the COVID-19 pandemic 

The donated archival material contributes to the enrichment of the documentary heritage these institutions are responsible for. To do so, citizens are to be involved in the description of their personal archives, as they are the actors able to enhance their intelligibility and highlight their archival value. In that sense, as creators, citizens are in the best position to describe their own archives and determine their value, whether it is emotional, informational, or evidential. Thus, considering the central role played by citizens in archives description, the collective documentation of the pandemic is viewed as a person-centred archival practice that can also be positioned between participatory archives and community archives. While the first one aims to solicit citizens to describe archives via an online platform (Huvilla, 2008; Theimer, 2011), the second illustrates the autonomous archival practices of sociocultural groups sharing common interests, ideologies, or identity traits (Iacovino, 2015). In both cases, citizens have more autonomy in describing archival materials, as they upload the latter according to their personal perceptions, generating heterogenous archival outcomes. Moreover, these actors have various sociodemographic backgrounds, which may influence their interests, needs, and power relations over personal archives. Henceforth, this collective practice might generate a series of challenges that are to be tackled by archivists to establish a balance between cultural institutions’ strategic objectives and citizens’ needs.

The collective documentation of the COVID-19 pandemic: what roles for the archivist?

The collective documentation of the COVID-19 pandemic raises a series of issues at the ethical, archival, social, and cultural levels. To tackle them, archivists must play several roles qualifying these actors as nomads: they can be viewed as stewards, participants, or mediators. Each role helps address specific challenges and, thus, requires different archival, social, managerial, and digital abilities.  

Figure 3 The archivist as a nomad 

On the ethical level, some citizens may not agree to get their photographs used by a third party in a different context and may want to claim their exclusive use by archival institutions. It is therefore important to be aware of the ethical aspects related to personal archives use. In this context, archivists play an institutional role as stewards, since they are concerned with regulatory requirements surrounding the dissemination of archives on digital platforms, particularly with respect to existing copyright laws. They ought to increase awareness about the legal considerations regarding personal archives use.

Moreover, from an archival perspective, donated personal archives should be described by citizens, as they are in the best position to express their thoughts and emotions in the most accurate way. Yet, while citizens are given more autonomy to describe their personal archives, it is also important to assess archival outputs’ compliance with recognized best practices. In this context, archivists are viewed as participants, since they are involved in the participatory description of citizens’ personal archives, with the aim of respecting the accurate description of the emotional, affective, historical, and artifactual values those objects may have. Thus, archivists are to engage in a continuous dialogue with citizens to ensure a better archival description of the donated material.

Furthermore, archivists can also play a role of mediators. This is particularly the case when it comes to helping citizens improve their digital and archival skills, as they might not have the same required abilities to use digital platforms to donate their own archives. Archivists should help users identify and describe their personal archives through the establishment of some guidelines regarding, for instance, recommended metadata, file formats and sizes, as well as the required details to be added to archives to enhance their discoverability and intelligibility.

Last but not least, considering the limited financial resources heritage institutions have, archivists are to play a mediation role while selecting archives to publish online. It is vital to establish a balance between both the strategic objectives of those institutions and social expectations regarding the pandemic collective documentation. Archivists should develop opportunities for a better understanding of citizens’ needs regarding the dissemination of pandemic personal archives. They may conduct periodical surveys with users to assess the quality of the donated material made online and adjust, if necessary, the prioritization process after getting the approval of their institution’s top management.

Conclusion

In light of what has been said above, the collective documentation of the COVID-19 pandemic is viewed as a person-centred archival praxis that makes archivists revisit their roles in the digital universe. From stewards to mediators, archivists are to develop multiple collaborative opportunities with citizens, who are nowadays more involved in the enrichment of common documentary heritage, thanks to web 2.0 features. It is legitimate to wonder to what extent archivists will have to control the heterogenous archival outputs generated by citizens, as those actors are getting more involved in heritage institutions’ collaborative projects.

References

Association des archivistes francophones de Belgique (2020). Archives de quarantaine: l’exposition virtuelle. Retrieved from: https://archivesquarantainearchief.be/expoaqa/s/expovirtuelle/page/expovirtuelle 

Eveleigh, A. (2017). Participatory archives. In H. McNeil and T. Eastwood (eds.), Currents of archival thinking, (2^nded.). Santa Barbara, CA Libraries Unlimited, 299-325. 

Huvila, I. (2008). Participatory archive: Towards decentralised curation, radical user orientation and broader contextualisation of records management. Archival Science, 8(1), 15-36. Retrieved from: link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10502-008-9071-0.pdf 

Iacovino, L. (2015). Shaping and reshaping cultural identity and memory: maximising human rights through a participatory archives. Archives and Manuscripts, 43(1), 29-41, DOI: 10.1080/01576895.2014.961491 

International Council on Archives (2020). COVID-19: the duty to document does not cease in a crisis, it becomes more essential. Retrieved from: https://www.ica.org/en/covid-19-the-duty-to-document-does-not-cease-in-a-crisis-it-becomes-more-essential 

Musée de la civilisation (2020). Documentez la pandémie. Retrieved from: https://uneheureaumusee.ca/documentez-la-pandemie/appel-a-objets/ 

Theimer, K. (2011). A different kind of Web: new connections between archives and our users. Chicago, IL: Society of American Archivists. 

United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (2020). Turning the threat of COVID-19 into an opportunity for greater support to documentary heritage. Retrieved from: https://www.ica.org/sites/default/files/dhe-covid-19-unesco_statement_en2.pdf   

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Siham Alaoui, MLIS, is a PhD candidate in archival science and public communication and a sessional lecturer at Université Laval, Québec, Canada. She is interested in digital documentary mediation and citizen participation in heritage institutions’ projects.

By Catherine Barnwell & Jacinthe Pepin

As guest editors of the special issue of Archivaria on person-centred archival theory and praxis, we, Jennifer Douglas, Jessica Lapp and Mya Balin, are pleased to share a series of blog posts that reflect on the nature and enactment of person-centred approaches to archival materials and work. These blog posts complement the articles in the special issue, presenting a variety of perspectives on how centring the person in archival processes happens and why it matters. We're grateful to the authors for sharing their research and experiences!

Catherine: When I attended the Association of Canadian Archivists [ACA] Conference for the first time in 2021, I had been working in the field for about a year and a half. I participated in a panel session focused on “Acknowledging Emotions in Archival Education,” led by Elizabeth Bassett, Ted Lee, Christina Mantey, and Jennifer Douglas. Though I was still unfamiliar with much of archival theory, acknowledging the emotional aspect of archival work seemed like a novel approach that helped me make sense of some of the realities I experienced (and still experience) in my daily work on the reference desk.

It seemed that there were parallels to be drawn between this perspective of archival work and the health field, but more specifically with nursing practice and theory. The concept of care is primordial to the discipline of nursing – and has been used in recent years by some thinkers to describe the affective relationships that are at the heart of archival work (Caswell & Cifor, 2016). This led me to ask what archivists could learn from research in nursing regarding person-centred care. Consulting existing frameworks for person-centred care from the field of nursing, and opening a dialogue with our colleagues in that discipline, could be the firsts steps in identifying the building blocks of a person-centred framework for archivists.

First, Jacinthe, can you tell me a bit about yourself and your field of research?  

Jacinthe: Early in my academic career, I was asked to reflect and write on the nature of nursing. With colleagues, we gathered responses given by nurse scholars and theorists in both French and English. A recurrent answer to the question was that nursing is both an art and a science, a relational and scientific practice, and that “le soin” [care] is the main focus of the nursing discipline together with the person and family’s health experiences (Pepin et al., 2017). Person-centred care/nursing and family-centred care/nursing are among the well-known frameworks guiding the clinical nursing practice.

C: How would you define care in the field of nursing? And what is person-centred care?

J: Many definitions of care can be found in the nursing literature but invariably, the patients and families and their health are at the centre of what we mean by care: listening to patients describing their specific health situations and contexts, evaluating patients’ health and their health projects or suggested treatments with them in relation with their values, beliefs, and habits, and joining reflection and knowledge to action in life transitions and life-threatening situations. McCormack and McCance (2006) were among the first authors to propose a person-centred nursing framework, whose processes include “engagement, sharing decision-making, having sympathetic presence, providing for physical needs, and working with the patients’ beliefs and values” (p. 476). What the authors call the care environment includes power-sharing and the potential for innovation and risk-taking.

Further, in their Clinical Best Practice Guidelines, the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario [RNAO] (2015) raised the ethical perspective where health-care providers demonstrate “person-centred-care attitudes and behaviours that are respectful of the whole person and their preferences, are culturally sensitive, and involve the sharing of power within a therapeutic alliance to improve clinical outcomes and satisfaction” (p. 7). With events such as the death of the Atikamekw woman Joyce Echaquan in a health care milieu in Quebec, cultural safety and cultural humility are now at the forefront of what we mean by patient- and family-centred care. How do you envision the place that care occupies in the field of archives?

C: It strikes me that these definitions, though they emerge from an entirely different field of research and practice, resonate with the Reconciliation Framework for Canadian archives in response to the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission [TRC] (The Steering Committee on Canada’s Archives, 2022). Among the strategies proposed for improving professional archival practice, the framework includes “providing First Nations-, Inuit-, and Métis-led cultural competency training” for archival staff (p. 35) and ensuring that reference archivists are trained to provide trauma-informed services to researchers consulting “emotionally distressing archival material” (p. 38).

When I think of the place that care occupies in archival work, I think first and foremost of my interactions with researchers in my role as a reference archivist at The Archive of the Jesuits in Canada. Of course, care is not limited to the relationship between archivist and researcher: it extends to all types of interpersonal relationships that form the fabric of our work. As Marika Cifor and Michelle Caswell (2016) write, archivists have “affective responsibilities” towards creators and donors of archival material, users of archival material, the people who are documented within the records, as well as broader communities (p. 24-25). For example, at The Archive of the Jesuits, I work with many researchers looking for genealogical information. Notably, The Archive holds material that speaks to encounters between Jesuits and various Indigenous communities across North America since the 17th century, including materials regarding the residential school operated by the Jesuits in Ontario. Ensuring that these archival documents are made accessible to Indigenous researchers and communities, and ensuring that researchers feel safe and welcomed in the reading room, is a priority.

Are culturally competent care and person-centred care currently being integrated into nursing curricula? If so, how are they being taught?

J: In nursing, actions are gradually being implemented throughout Canada to meet health-related recommendations of the TRC: 22 (integration of Indigenous healing practices into nursing care), 23 (recruitment and inclusion of Indigenous professionals and cultural safety education for all health professionals) and 24 (requirement for all to learn about Aboriginal health issues, including the history and legacy of residential schools, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples). At the last national day for Truth and Reconciliation, the Faculty of Nursing at Université de Montréal, together with the Centre intégré universitaire de santé et de services sociaux [CIUSSS] Centre-Sud-de-Montréal, held a Cercle de parole with Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants to share health experiences in the hope of regaining trust; this was an event open to our students and to all nurses and health professionals. Our planning committee included Indigenous and non-Indigenous members of the Faculty and the CIUSSS. Only through collaboration and power-sharing can we create authentic learning activities.

In proposing a person-centred care framework for nursing as well as for archives, one key concept would be cultural safety, which includes cultural humility.

C: It’s interesting that the Cercle de parole event brought together students, academic researchers, and nurses who practise in different clinical environments.

In addition to my position at The Archive of the Jesuits, I worked as a research assistant under the supervision of Anne Klein at Université Laval in 2021-2022. This project, focusing on the archives of the Québécoise playwright Pol Pelletier, entailed taking stock of her documents and compiling an inventory, with a view to assembling her fonds and preparing it for donation. Since I was unfamiliar with the history of theatre in Quebec, we decided to survey the documents together so I could better understand their context and meaning. Our method of working evolved as Pol began to understand the how and why of archival practice, and as I began to understand her artistic career and the makeup of her archive. Some days we had the stamina to go through many files; other days, one of us would be tired, or had something else on our mind. Some files also touched upon heavier topics that demanded more mental and emotional energy. The nature of this project required that I be attuned to Pol and to her needs and wants. This experience speaks to Caswell and Cifor’s (2016) proposition to rethink the archivist’s role as that of a caregiver.

J: It seems that the relationship you are developing with Pol is one of true presence, of journeying with her as you go through her files: it reflects engagement from both of you towards the same goal. McCormack and McCance (2006) wrote that engagement is a marker of the quality of the nurse-patient relationship and is one of the patient-centred care processes. Nurses often find it hard to not be able to spend as much time with their patients and families as they see would be required. It could even lead nurses to lose some of the meaning they find in their work, since care is so ingrained in nursing.

C: Engagement could be a second building block for a framework of person-centred archival practice. This would inevitably look different in different working contexts. In the case of the project with Pol Pelletier, we had no hard deadlines. Building upon the work of Christian Hottin (2003), who considers that the acquisition process can be viewed as the establishment of an interpersonal relationship, we were able to first spend time getting to know each other, which then facilitated the process of working through her archives together. However, I am conscious that archivists working within institutional settings would have to balance engagement with donors or researchers with the myriad of other tasks they have to accomplish within their work hours.

Another interesting aspect of the project surrounding Pol Pelletier’s archives has been the possibility of integrating Pol’s own ideas about her archives into my way of working. When I began to compile the inventory, the archival decisions I made were not based on institutional policies, but rather were rooted in my conversations with Pol and reflected the particularities of this work environment. Together, we brainstormed what the “final product” of this project would look like: for instance, where she would like her archives to be kept and what type of researchers would use them – historians, but also artists and the general public. We have not yet arrived at the final stages of transferring the fonds to a repository, but these discussions between Pol and myself have been vital to the development of the project and of my own archival practice.

J: Interesting. In her Strengths-based approach to nursing and health care, in which person-centredness is a pillar, Gottlieb (2013) insists on collaborative partnership where knowledge and decision-making are shared. It requires that partners set goals jointly and work together to determine a course of action that is right for the patient or family. Sharing decision-making almost inevitably leads to patients’ and families’ satisfaction with care, involvement with their own care, feeling of well-being, and feeling culturally secure, all of which are person-centred outcomes (McCormack and McCance, 2006). Equally important is the context in which the nursing practice takes place; a care environment that supports person-centred practice is one that allows for risk-taking and innovation together with patients and families. We mentioned earlier that cultural safety is essential to person-centred nursing as well as archival practice. I would add that by learning cultural safety with Indigenous communities, we are also enriching the person-centred practices that we adopt with all people and with other diverse communities.

C: In addition to cultural safety and engagement, sharing decision-making to work towards person-centred outcomes is a third building block that archivists could borrow from nursing frameworks.

In the ACA 2021 panel session mentioned earlier, one of the key points that emerged was that archivists sometimes feel unprepared to deal with difficult or emotionally charged situations. This aspect of archival work, as Jennifer Douglas and her research team highlighted, is not necessarily approached in archival education, though there are now concerted efforts to integrate trauma-informed practice, for example, into archival work (The Steering Committee on Canada’s Archives, 2022; Wright & Laurent, 2021). As culturally competent care and person-centred care have been integrated into nursing education, the concepts of person-centred archival practice that we have begun to draft here could become part of a more holistic and humanistic archival science curriculum. 

Thank you for sharing your theoretical knowledge of person-centred care frameworks, Jacinthe. It seems we have only begun to touch upon the possibilities for dialogue between our two fields of research and practice. As you said earlier about nursing, archival practice is not a “hard science”: it is a relational practice that is inevitably shaped by the people who create, use, and are documented within records, and the relationships among them.

References

Caswell, M. & Cifor, M. (2016). From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives. Archivaria, 81, 23-43.

Gottlieb, L. N. (2013). Strengths-Based Nursing care: Health and healing for person and family. Springer Publishing.

Hottin, C. (2003). Collecte d’archives, histoire de soi et construction de l’identité : autour de deux fonds d’archives de femmes. Histoire et Sociétés, 6, 99-109.

McCormack, B. & McCance, T.V. (2006). Development of a framework for person-centred nursing.

Journal of Advanced Nursing, 56(5), 472–479.

Pepin, J., Ducharme, F., Kérouac, S. (2017). La pensée infirmière (4e édition). Chenelière éducation.

Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario. (2015). Person- and Family-Centred Care. Toronto, ON: Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario. 

The Steering Committee on Canada’s Archives. (2022). Reconciliation Framework: The Response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Taskforce. https://archives2026.files.wordpress.com/2022/02/reconciliationframeworkreport_en.pdf 

Wright, K. & Laurent, N. (2021). Safety, Collaboration, and Empowerment: Trauma-Informed Archival Practice. Archivaria, 91, 38-73.

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Catherine Barnwell is an archivist at The Archive of the Jesuits in Canada. She has also worked as a research assistant with professor Anne Klein at Université Laval, focusing on acquisition and donor-archivist relations through a case study of the archives of Québécoise playwright Pol Pelletier.

Jacinthe Pepin is a professor at Université de Montréal’s Faculty of Nursing who was until recently the scientific leader of an interdisciplinary research team funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec, Société et culture (FRQSC, 2013-2025) that focused on health care professionals’ learning. She also happens to be Catherine’s mother.

By Itza A. Carbajal

As guest editors of the special issue of Archivaria on person-centred archival theory and praxis, we, Jennifer Douglas, Jessica Lapp and Mya Balin, are pleased to share a series of blog posts that reflect on the nature and enactment of person-centred approaches to archival materials and work. These blog posts complement the articles in the special issue, presenting a variety of perspectives on how centring the person in archival processes happens and why it matters. We're grateful to the authors for sharing their research and experiences!

At first glance the child appears insignificant in archival practice - not yet a finalized preservation-worthy version of itself, full of unknowns and unfulfilled potential. Or the child appears as the part of a whole, with children as study subjects representing bountiful sources of information for research or scholarly advancement. But where is the child as a member of our community, one that contributes their own learned experiences, hurdles, and growth for other children to lean on? For this ACA blog post, I ask the archival community what it would mean to include the child as a person into the archive. To see the child as a person means to view the child not only as a mere subject for analysis, but also as a creator whose work is worth preserving and as a user whose participation merits attention, resources, and inclusion. This inclusion, like many others of underrepresented and neglected populations, asks the archival community to abandon previous principles such as exceptionality, rarity, or order in hopes of centering the needs of the child subject, user, and creator - no matter how messy, incomplete, or insignificant their stories might seem. Like other epistemological shifts where attention moves away from the objects (i.e. records) to the people behind or within the object, this post calls for concern for how and why the archival field should pay attention to its literal future.

I begin with a brief exploratory review of existing archival literature on children available through one of the longer standing American archival academic journals, the American Archivist. Then I will assess the types of records currently found in the country’s prominent archival institution, the National Records and Archives Administration (NARA). The combination of literature and available collections, while limited to only two institutions, helps situate the current conditions of child visibility in the American archival context. For purposes of this post, I define children or the child as a human being under the US legal age of 18 years old. Child then also refers to babies as well as adolescents with the precaution that generalization across ages (and other demographic markers) should be avoided as children exist as a diverse population of people from various backgrounds, abilities, races or ethnicities, and other demographics. The grouping of all these youth categories under the age of 18 as children rests on the assumption that archivists take different classification approaches when describing or discussing a young person or young people. When searching for literature or collections and materials, the following list of terms were used: child, children, kid, kids, youth, adolescent, adolescents, baby, babies, toddler, toddlers, teen, teens, boy, boys, girl, and girls. These terms themselves denote the constantly changing perception of childhood and adolescence as well as the complexities of describing people of multiple ever shifting identities.

The Child as Subject

As an archival subject, the child can be found in family portraits or as part of news stories and artistic sketches. We might find the child frolicking in the background of a home movie or noted as a dependent in some government form. Children might be found in school yearbooks or as study participants mentioned in a published book. In the National Archives and Records Administration catalog, children appeared in roughly 15, 927 photographs or other graphic materials. These ranged from photos of children with animals, children in school, children with adults, or children in promotional materials. Textual materials on the other hand showed children as evidence of atrocities or historical events from Native boarding schools and programs for impoverished children to children’s discussions with President Nixon or efforts to establish child labor laws (McCracken, 2015). Like other objectified people, children can be commonly found as subjects of research, from photographs of deceased children to those with medical conditions serving as at times unwilling participants (Jordan, 1960; Mifflin and Pugh, 2011). Children also show up as members of other marginalized groups such as those of early immigrant communities, incarcerated youth, and survivors of violent acts. (Daniel, 2010; Farley and Willey, 2015; Holden and Roeschley, 2020). These children as subjects remain part of a larger whole of ignored or harmed populations such as women and domestic abuse survivors. Rarely do we see the child expressing their lives, their accomplishments, their valuable memories as simply a child contributing their knowledge rather than as an object in need of study. In most cases, we tend to encounter the child through an adult self, recounting what they now see as memorable through the lens of their adult perspectives. 

The Child as Creator

It may then come as little surprise that the child as an archival creator does not get a chance to appear as an active subject when archival institutions still heavily rely on adult donors. Few instances exist where an archival collection boasts of its young creator, with even the most famous of children waiting until adulthood to find merit in sharing their life stories. The instances where the child creator emerges may be part of an art project intentionally using child artists or as unwilling contributors producing objects and records for or with adults. For example, in the NARA catalog, children appeared in materials such as letters detailing their reactions to nuclear bombs or as signatories to a scroll pledging allegiance to George Washington as part of the US Constitution Bicentennial commission (Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, ca. 1987; President Reagan, 1982 – 1983). Given NARA’s focus on government records, many records created by children are those directed towards presidents such as the letters on nuclear bombs to Reagan or the drawings sent to Ford (President Ford, 8/1974 - 1/1977). Few records created by children exist within this archival institution’s collection, likely a result of both children’s resource restrictions such as a lack of owning documentation equipment like cameras and lack of consideration of the child as an active contributing citizen. Luckily, as technological use and access increases, more children now gain access to creating records from photographs to videos and social media posts. 

The Child as User

Overall, the child has received a relative amount of attention as a user given the field’s increased concern for diversifying their user base beyond the traditional historical scholar. As an archival user, the child normally exists as a student, part of a larger group of children first corralled by the ever-watchful eye of an educator and then by the archivist. Given the age limitation for children noted in this post, this section did not consider articles primarily focused on college students despite its dominance in discussing the topic of student users. More generally, archival literature looks at student users, specifically those in grades K-12, in relation to increased incorporation of primary sources into educational instruction and teaching standards (Gilliland-Swetland, 1998; Hendry, 2007; Garcia, 2017). Despite the lack of records about children by children, institutions like NARA provide many archival materials that aid in the advancement of the child as a student. For example, by creating supplemental teaching units archival institutions encourage younger users to explore archival materials when needing to accomplish educational goals (Corbett, 1991). Exploration has also extended to children, especially high school students, to explore personal and family history through archival materials (Culbert, 1975). Sadly, unlike libraries, archival spaces do not provide safe kid or teen spaces, oftentimes forcing the child to act more like an adult than is necessary. This has limited the expansion of the archival child user since current expectations of users may require subject expertise, specific cognitive or tactile skills, as well as resources like mobility or technology access, all assumed characteristics of the established adult user. 

Ultimately, the child remains to be included fully in archival practices and in archival scholarship as a subject, creator, and user. But a word of caution must be said  before we proceed to rush these people into this field. As childhood studies warns us and feminist thought has reminded us, the child cannot be treated as a mere object of passive, patronizing care. Rather the child, in order to avoid ongoing victimization, objectification, and marginalization, must be welcomed as an active agent seen as capable of contributing, critiquing, and questioning the very field that wishes for their participation. Otherwise, the care we claim to afford others remains merely a care for our own image and sake. 

Bibliography

Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. (ca. 1987). Scroll. Records Relating to Publications, Reports, and Meetings, 1985 – 1991Record Group 220: Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, 1893 – 2008 (6850912), National Archives and Records Administration, United States.

Corbett, K. (1991). From File Folder to the Classroom: Recent Primary Source Curriculum Projects. The American Archivist, 54(2), 296–300. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.54.2.1657t38867754355 

Culbert, D. (1975). Family History Projects: The Scholarly Value of the Informal Sample. The American Archivist, 38(4), 533–541. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.38.4.w20j37111k256780 

Daniel, Dominique. 2010. “Documenting the Immigrant and Ethnic Experience in American Archives.” The American Archivist 73 (1): 82–104. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.73.1.k2837h27wv1201hv.

Farley, L., & Willey, E. (2015). Wisconsin School for Girls Inmate Record Books: A Case Study of Redacted Digitization. The American Archivist, 78(2), 452–469. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.78.2.452 

Garcia, P. (2017). Accessing Archives: Teaching with Primary Sources in K–12 Classrooms. The American Archivist, 80(1), 189–212. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.80.1.189 

Gilliland-Swetland, A. (1998). An Exploration of K-12 User Needs for Digital Primary Source Materials. The American Archivist, 61(1), 136–157. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.61.1.w851770151576l03 

Hendry, J. (2007). Primary Sources in K-12 Education: Opportunities for Archives. The American Archivist, 70(1), 114–129. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.70.1.v674024627315777 

Holden, J., & Roeschley, A. (2020). Privacy and Access in the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Records. The American Archivist, 83(1), 77–90. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-83.1.77 

Jordan, Philip D. 1960. “The Challenge of Medical Records.” The American Archivist, 143–51. 

Juliani, R. (1976). The Use of Archives in the Study of Immigration and Ethnicity. The American Archivist, 39(4), 469–477. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.39.4.bv1313755u726704 

McCracken, K. (2015). Community Archival Practice: Indigenous Grassroots Collaboration at the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre. The American Archivist, 78(1), 181–191. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.78.1.181

Mifflin, Jeffrey. 2011. “‘Visible Memory, Visual Method’: Objectivity and the Photographic Archives of Science.” Edited by Mary Pugh. The American Archivist 74 (1): 323–41. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.74.1.e56q052870087625. 

President (1974-1977 : Ford). (8/1974 - 1/1977). AR 4: Paintings – Drawings. White House Central Files Subject Files on Arts, 8/1974 - 1/1977Collection: White House Central Files Subject Files (Ford Administration), 8/9/1974 - 1/20/1977 (4504963), National Archives and Records Administration, United States. 

President (1981-1989 : Reagan). (1982 – 1983).[Letters from Children re: Nuclear Bombs]. William P. Barr's Office Files, 1982 – 1983Collection: Records of the White House Office of Policy Development (Reagan Administration), 1/20/1981 - 1/20/1989 (135838336), National Archives and Records Administration, United States.

Yaco, S. (2010). Balancing Privacy and Access in School Desegregation Collections: A Case Study. The American Archivist, 73(2), 637–668. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.73.2.h1346156546161m8 

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Itza A. Carbajal is an American doctoral student at the University of Washington Information School focusing on children and their records. Carbajal’s proposed dissertation analyzes how records embody childhood trauma and whether archival records may provide release or relief from traumatic memories. She is also on the board of the Children’s Photography Archive (https://cpa-staging.childhoodpublics.org/)