Digital and Traditional Archives Management

Archives are institutions and practices concerned with selecting, preserving, and providing access to records that document human activity, and the decisions made at each of those steps shape what counts as history and whose experiences get remembered. Archival science now sits at the intersection of information technology, cultural theory, and ethics, as practitioners grapple with how to keep electronic records legible over time while also confronting the colonial histories embedded in how many collections were originally assembled. A pressing open question is how digital preservation standards developed largely in the Global North translate—or fail to translate—to community-led and postcolonial archives working with different resources, languages, and ideas about who owns memory. At the same time, the growing field of archival activism is testing whether institutions can actively redress historical silences rather than simply maintaining whatever documentation survived.

Works

146,666

Total citations

143,916

Keywords

ArchivesDigital PreservationRecords ManagementInformation CultureCommunity ArchivesPostcolonial Archive