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This is the policy and fee schedule for doing research on the McRae Collection at the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Museum. There is no research fee for in person research. However, a one time fee of $10 for members and $20 for nonmembers will be charged for all research requests completed by email, phone call, or mail.

Digital archives are transforming the Humanities and the Sciences. Digitized collections of newspapers and books have pushed scholars to develop new, data-rich methods. Born-digital archives are now better preserved and managed thanks to the development of open-access and commercial software. Digital Humanities have moved from the fringe to the center of academia. Yet, the path from the appraisal of records to their analysis is far from smooth. This book explores crossovers between various disciplines to improve the discoverability, accessibility, and use of born-digital archives and other cultural assets.

Digital archives are transforming the Humanities and the Sciences. Digitized collections of newspapers and books have pushed scholars to develop new, data-rich methods. Born-digital archives are now better preserved and managed thanks to the development of open-access and commercial software. Digital Humanities have moved from the fringe to the center of academia. Yet, the path from the appraisal of records to their analysis is far from smooth. This book explores crossovers between various disciplines to improve the discoverability, accessibility, and use of born-digital archives and other cultural assets.

Welcome to the first release of Archival Practice, a new peer-reviewed, open-access journal. Archival Practice provides a scholarly forum for discussions of real-world applications of archival theories and practices in the modern archival repository. This may include archival acquisitions, processing, reference, outreach, instruction, preservation, or management in any archival setting (special collections library, government archives, university archives, corporate archives, etc.).

The study investigated access to digitised archival collections in two selected institutions in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. This study is significant because it sought to generate insights on adaptability of technology in archives and library operations, and accessibility thereof. This is important for monitoring the accessibility of digitised archival collections at institutions to improve their operations and maximize the global visibility. This study adopted qualitative research methodology. The researcher followed a rigorous methodological path that began with a thorough literature review and the careful and thoughtful posing of research questions and objectives. A purposive sample was chosen from National Heritage and Cultural Studies Centre (NAHECS) and International library of African Music (ILAM) (staff members) and interviewed through face-to-face interviews. The collected data was analysed thematically. The study established that, the type of materials digitised at NAHECS and ILAM are bound books, fragile papers, photographic prints, slides, audio-visual materials,artefacts and documents such as personal letters of early travellers,missionary's records,traders writing personal file and political parties documents. Secondly, the study established that end users of digitised materials are researchers, students, archivist, librarians, international and local community, composers, musicians, and historians. It also emerged that awareness programmes used to increase public knowledge about access to digitised content in the two study sites include conferences, social media, and television advertisements. However, there are challenges faced in providing access to digitised materials at NAHECS and ILAM. Some of these challenges include lack of funding, unavailability of resources, lack of awareness, and information insecurity. These challenges have made access to digitised archival materials difficult. Based on these findings, it is recommended that archives facilities should be well resourced and ...

The Swedish government has decided that all research results in the form of research data and scientific publications financed with public funds should be openly accessible as far as possible. The question is whether the responsible actors and if the universities are ready to implement the change. The significance of open access has amplified in Sweden. Earlier research has brought to light that the collection and preservation of research data are often surrounded by ambiguous rules and lack a comprehensive structure. For example, archiving is not given enough consideration in connection to research projects and researchers often tend to save their material on platforms that are not persistent over time. This article is based upon a qualitative research approach where 15 semi-structured interviews have been used as primarily data sources to investigate the implementation of open access of research data and scientific publications. The article investigated how Swedish universities and public authorities were working with archiving and implementation of open research data and their opinions on open access. The results displayed a lack of coordination, resources and infrastructure but also that common agreed nomenclature were missing. The management of research data was not part of an overall recordkeeping strategy. One explanation could be differences in the information culture among researchers and archivists. Social sciences theory has been combined with archival theory in order to explain the reasons to this. These have been put in relation to the principles of the open data directive. ; This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

This paper presents the second phase of the project Co-archiving Flight Documentation, aimed at exploring and prototyping co-archiving practices for involving underrepresented voices in sharing stories of our times from their point of view. The prototypes developed can be iterated and put in use, but may also potentially contribute to challenging the role of the archivist. What parallels can be drawn between the practices of a co-designer and an archivist interested in becoming a co-archivist? Building on outcomes from previous design interventions within the co-archiving research theme, we will run a co-design process involving practitioners and newcomers. Since the design process is not yet completed, we cannot present any concrete prototypes. This paper suggests imaginative ways of ReDoing by applying co-design approaches in other disciplines, and contributes to the discussion of how co-designers can step into other domains and be part of developing practices and approaches in other fields.

AbstractThis article aims to study the modern system of archives development in China and to determine a promising model of its adaptation to global challenges in the post‐truth era. The research methodology is based on a mixed qualitative and quantitative analysis of statistical data that show the development dynamics of archives system in China concerning public access and the formation of modern views on the problem of fact‐checking, as well as their reliability in the new historical post‐truth era. For effective verification of archival facts, researchers developed an adaptation model of China's archives to global challenges of information reliability in the post‐truth era. It is based on the idea of using artificial intelligence and the expert opinion of archivists. The practical use of the proposed model will contribute to improving the efficiency of archives, as well as the development of digital technologies in this area.

There has been a widespread shift to electronic ways of conducting business that has transformed existing relationships between governments, governments and citizens, and governments and business. This move to electronic interactions is supported by new busi- ness systems that streamline and automate transactions, enable integration of information and service delivery and enhance collaboration between participants. Such changes in the way government business is carried out have significant implications for how public ad- ministrations document their activities and make that information available to both gov- ernment and citizens to aid future decision making and accountability. Because digital rec- ords are particularly vulnerable to technological obsolescence and media decay, ensuring future access to the information created by government is a challenging issue for all juris- dictions. This paper focus on the E-ARK project, a European endeavour to standardise and create tools for consistently transferring digital records between business systems and digi- tal archives. The E-ARK approach has the potential to simplify and make consistent diverse approaches to solving the issue of how to transfer information between the ICT systems in use in government, and the archives charged with the responsibility for ongoing and man- agement of the information considered to be of long-term significance. ; This work was co-funded by KEEP SOLUTIONS, ...

Information technology and political motives, e.g. e-governance, freedom of information legislation, has recent years lead to an increasing emphasis on users and access to records, but little research based knowledge about those issues exist so far. The main focus of the previous research is the use of non-current records in archival repositories. The aim of this thesis is to make a contribution to the research field, in order to gain a better understanding of the information behaviour of users of records in contemporary organizational settings. The research questions addressed are: § How are records used in contemporary organizations?- In what context and for what purposes are records used?- What user categories can be identified? § How is the search for records mediated?- What intermediaries are used in the search process?- How well do the features of the artefactual intermediaries serve the users' information needs?- What is the role of human intermediaries? An additional purpose of the study is to contribute to theory development, and to provide a conceptual model of the information behaviour of users of records that can form the basis for further research. The thesis is based on explorative case studies undertaken in two contemporary Swedish public organizations, one municipality and one governmental agency. Data was collected through interviews, analysis of documentary sources and complementary observations. The analysis of the findings was guided by a theoretical framework consisting of activity theory informed by concepts from archival theory and models of information behaviour. The results of the cases studies showed that information behaviour of users of records and the search process could be described as a part of an activity system. The search process was a sub-ordinated activity of other activities. The needs for records was generated by a task or accomplishment of anykind with purpose to achieve something. Those needs motivated the purposes of use of records: material, operational, accountability seeking or knowledge enhancing purposes. The subjects, users in collaboration with the registrars and archivists, seeked to obtain records with help of different mediational means, e.g. artifactual intermediaries as the journal and the archives inventory that could be defined as representational systems, in order to reach a certain outcome: fact-finding, re-construction of past actions and events, regaining experience and knowledge, verifying status, or illustrating and exemplifying. A variety of user groups, internal as well as external, could be identified in both organizations. Those could act as direct or indirect users, and indirect use by one part meant direct use by another who acted as a mediator between the records and the end users. The external users could be defined as stakeholders of the organizations or other users. Users showed, with occasional exceptions, a preference for informal means of mediation, particularly personal communication. Certain features of the formal representational systems, journals and inventories, could be identified, which made them less useful as search tool. Those were generated by contradictions and tensions within the organizations: contradictions within the representational systems; contradictions between the tasks of the users and the representational systems; contradictions between user requests and the access points in the representational systems; contradictions between external users and the activities of the organizations; contradictions between exogenous institutional conditions and the the activities of the organizations; and contradictions of a temporal character. These circumstances necessitated an active intervention of human intermediaries. This could be seen as an example of the division of labour in the organizations. Search and retrieval of records were part of the registrars' and the archivists' specific professional knowledge, but were not considered as primary tasks of other employees or, especially not, of the external users. The results of the study contributes to to the knowledge about the use of records, and how records are approached. It provides a model of the search process that can form the basis for further research. The practical implications of the findings could be improved search tools and user services, i.e. enhanced access. The thesis can also contribute to theoretical enrichment of the field by combining a more comprehensive social theory with archival theory and concepts from information science. ; Utveckling av arkiv- och informationsvetenskap

Archival Silences demonstrates emphatically that archival absences exist all over the globe. The book questions whether benign 'silence' is an appropriate label for the variety of destructions, concealment and absences that can be identified within archival collections. Including contributions from archivists and scholars working around the world, this truly international collection examines archives in Australia, Brazil, Denmark, England, India, Iceland, Jamaica, Malawi, The Philippines, Scotland, Turkey and the United States. Making a clear link between autocratic regimes and the failure to record often horrendous crimes against humanity, the volume demonstrates that the failure of governments to create records, or to allow access to records, appears to be universal. Arguing that this helps to establish a hegemonic narrative that excludes the 'other', this book showcases the actions historians and archivists have taken to ensure that gaps in archives are filled. Yet the book also claims that silences in archives are inevitable and argues not only that recordkeeping should be mandated by international courts and bodies, but that we need to develop other ways of reading archives broadly conceived to compensate for absences.Archival Silences addresses fundamental issues of access to the written record around the world. It is directed at those with a concern for social justice, particularly scholars and students of archival studies, history, sociology, international relations, international law, business administration and information science.

Historical or political science research using primary source evidence faces a major barrier to transparency and replicability: the archival documents used are often difficult to access. The Annotation for Transparent Inquiry Initiative developed a digital overlay tool that enables researchers to create enhanced annotations in articles and link to digital copies of archival sources in trusted repositories. Dr Joseph O'Mahoney was involved in the project to pilot this tool and has published a practical guide based on his experience.