Louis Armstrong exerted a defining influence on one of the most influential products of the American imagination: jazz. As noted by one of Armstrong's biographers, however, Armstrong's character was "buffeted by the forces of racism and commercialism." From the perspective of the archives, Armstrong's reaction to these influences was a form of psychological withdrawal that often coalesced around his interaction with recording technologies. Armstrong developed an intimate relationship with audio recording and relied upon its particular form of capture to shape a posthumous identity that was beyond the distortive influences that shaped his public and commodified image, and that was appreciably honest in its relationship with, to use Armstrong's word, "posterity"

The diversity and geographic dispersion of nations and peoples in the Pacific Rim pose fundamental conceptual and logistical challenges to archival education throughout the region. These challenges prompt us not only to give more attention to local and regional needs in developing our education programs, but also to examine more broadly their implications for archival education, theory, and practice globally. This paper begins by discussing the diverse nature of Pacific Rim countries, cultures, and communities, and then raises issues relating to the archival educational needs of its Indigenous and minority communities. It then reports the findings of the first phase of "Pluralizing the Archival Paradigm through Education," a collaborative project examining archival education in Pacific Rim nations and whether it meets the needs of Indigenous and local ethnic communities. Its findings to date suggest a need to develop and deliver culturally sensitive and responsive archival curricula and associated pedagogy inclusive of local and Indigenous knowledge and practices. They also suggest a need for the integration of such knowledge and practices into the global paradigm within which archival theory and practice are situated, thus making that paradigm more inclusive and less in danger of being a hegemonic or even neocolonial force.

This paper argues that, within the recordkeeping community, perceptions of records are subject to the "prototype" effects identified in recent psychological studies. Archivists and records managers perceive certain records as prototypical, while other records are more distant from their mental prototypes. Prototype effects apply both to item-level records and to record aggregations. Moreover, the boundaries of the record concept are fuzzy, and some records are "boundary objects" shared with other communities. The characterization of records as persistent representations embraces nonprototypical records as well as those more central to the concept.

This article reports on the second phase of a study concerned with developing standardized questionnaires for user-based evaluation for archives. Based on a review of current practices used by archivists to gather feedback and focus-group sessions held with archivists, this phase of the study concentrated on archivists' attitudes and concerns about user-based evaluations. It identified archivists' opinions about user-based evaluation of archives including the type of feedback they value, methods they currently employ to gather feedback from users, benefits and problems posed by conducting formal evaluation studies, and ways archivists would use standardized questionnaires for user-based evaluation if these tools were available. The paper also provides some recommendations to help archivists evaluate their services and systems.

The archival profession has paid a great deal of attention to electronic records management. Yet, from a professional perspective, archivists have not gathered adequate information regarding the readiness of repositories to acquire digital records created outside of their control, or to preserve and make such records accessible. The profession lacks baseline data regarding the state of electronic records planning within the community of repositories that acquire materials outside institutional recordkeeping programs, frequently labeled "collecting" repositories. This paper reports the results of a survey of academic libraries, historical societies, and libraries between 10 July and 12 August 2006. The author developed the survey to determine the level to which these repositories are working with born-digital records. The data indicate that repositories are indeed acquiring born-digital materials, but are proceeding on a case-by-case basis rather than developing specific policies for their acquisition, access, and preservation.

The relatively recent realization that archivists are more often shapers of the past than neutral keepers of the past has its root in the intersection of appraisal theory and professional identity. This paper explores the relationship between the two through an analysis of the literature on archival documentation strategy. Though ultimately unworkable, documentation strategy caught archivists' attention because, as this paper argues, it represented a practical application of a larger identity shift within the profession.

Can one be an ethical archivist and work for a corporation? Richard Cox, in his letter to the editor about the contested Sun Mad poster published on the cover of the Fall/Winter 2003 American Archivist, contended that this is not possible because of the tension between maintaining the integrity of the archives and the pressure to bury any information that casts an unfavorable light upon the corporation.¹ The purpose of this paper is, first, to argue that if it is challenging to be an ethical archivist working for a corporation, the challenge is not due to something inherently unethical about corporations, but to difficulties with the field of ethics itself. The secondary purpose is to suggest what can be done to foster continued improvements in the ethical climate of the archival profession in the face of these difficulties in the field of ethics.

Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) is the first descriptive standard in the United States to apply to all forms of archival description, including finding aids. This article contains three cases studies from diverse repositories of the implementation of DACS as a content standard for finding aids. They show the flexibility of DACS and its usefulness in standardizing descriptive practices while respecting different descriptive traditions.