In recent years, a new and provocative thesis has been presented to the archival profession, to wit: to be an ethical archivist, one must pursue "social justice" in all phases of archival practice. While a professional agenda of social justice encompasses the more familiar ideology of "activist archivist," it stretches much farther and has much more profound consequences for our profession. This article challenges both the philosophy and utility of social justice as the end of archival effort and proposes an alternative goal for the profession.

This study explores attitudes of moving image archivists and digital projects managers toward the digitization and online distribution of archival moving image materials. The primary method for gathering data about this subject was through in-depth interviewing of individuals who have managed moving image digitization projects in archival settings. The investigator discusses challenges in launching and sustaining digital projects and the evolving audience for archival moving images. Archivists also must reconcile their desire to provide more access with concerns about quality of digital surrogates, legal restrictions such as copyright, and how online distribution may impact relations with creators, donors, and content owners.

The increasing emphasis on attracting new users and the development of new technologies has created both opportunities and pressures for outreach within special collections. This study describes the results of a spring 2012 survey of social media outreach by repositories in the United States and Canada. The survey sought a broad understanding of social media adoption, management, content, and audiences, and looks at how effectively special collections use blogs, Facebook, and Twitter to connect with users. Survey findings indicate that social media use varies widely by platform and institution type, that a large majority of respondents believe that social media is an effective tool for outreach, and that self-reported numerical data cautiously supports that perception of success.

Executive Order (E.O.) 12958, signed by President William Clinton in April 1995, established an unprecedented declassification procedure designed to release quickly massive numbers of executive branch records dating back to World War II. The program encountered numerous problems, however, and subsequent executive orders pushed back deadlines and created new grounds to exempt records from its operation. Relatively few high-level records have been released and made available to the public. However, modifications to the program made by E.O. 13526 in 2009 and changes proposed by the Public Interest Declassification Board in 2012 will make important progress in reversing this situation.

This article uses the Lavender Library, Archives, and Cultural Exchange of Sacramento, Incorporated, a small queer community archives in Northern California, as a case study for expanding our knowledge of community archives and issues of archival practice. It explores why creating a separate community archives was necessary, the role of community members in founding and maintaining the archives, the development of its collections, and the ongoing challenges community archives face. The article also considers the implications community archives have for professional practice, particularly in the areas of collecting, description, and collaboration.

This study examines how academic historians search for, access, and use primary source materials in their research pursuits. Recruited historians completed an online questionnaire about current information practices and potential information needs in archival settings. The results shed light on the most frequent methods historians use to search for primary source materials; the types of primary source documents they are most likely to use; whether they access materials online or in person; their use of digitized archival collections; factors they consider important in their decision to use archival collections; and what might prevent them from using collections.

The following case study examines three years' worth of data gathered by East Carolina University's Special Collections Division. The analysis focuses on the number of Unique Page Views (UPVs) reported by Google Analytics. A straightforward method to analyze this data is proposed, which ranks the frequency of UPVs received per year for each collection-level web page. The results indicate that the overall distribution of UPVs is heavily skewed toward the top 20%—or, top quintile—of online finding aids, which account for over 70% of the views. The term mass representation is introduced to refer to the disproportionate amount of visibility attained by the top quintile.

Archival literature has discussed the portrayal of archives and archivists in fiction, but has not offered a reading of a work of fiction with little-to-no overt mention of the archival profession. This article demonstrates the value of looking at such works of fiction through an archival lens by providing an "archival reading" of one famous novel that has been the subject of numerous scholarly articles and books, Bram Stoker's Dracula. Although a tale of the supernatural, Dracula's narrative portrays the importance of recordkeeping, research, and access to and organization of information. This article considers the narrative and plot of Dracula from an archival perspective, discusses literature about the portrayal of archives and archivists in fiction, and examines how Dracula reflects nineteenth-century trends in organizing information.

Amid stagnant or diminishing resources, archival repositories are increasingly expected to digitize entire collections for the Internet. Yet many cannot eliminate their backlogs of unprocessed collections, let alone digitize and post them online. This article explores the idea of coupling robust collection-level descriptions to mass digitization and optical character recognition to provide full-text search of unprocessed and backlogged modern collections, bypassing archival processing and the creation of finding aids.

Encoded Archival Description has been actively implemented for more than 15 years. Research around EAD has focused on implementation and user interaction. Encoding behavior, through the analysis of a sample of finding aids, is presented here to describe the general use of elements and attributes across the EAD structure. In total, 108 repositories submitted up to 15 finding aids for the analysis; 1,136 finding aids comprise the entire sample. Descriptive statistics on element and attribute usage are presented as well as commentary on the overall picture of EAD encoding evident in the sample.

The International Council on Archives (ICA) appointed the Experts Group on Archival Description (EGAD) in late 2012. ICA charged this group with developing a conceptual model for archival description that will reconcile and integrate the four existing ICA descriptive standards. The EGAD will build on more than twenty years of ICA standards development, national or project-based modeling work in the archival community, and the modeling work of allied professional communities. This work will have as its core objective developing a conceptual model that reflects an international professional consensus and that positions the archival community to take full advantage of opportunities presented by current and emerging communication technologies, including the opportunities to work cooperatively within and without the archival community in a shared quest to provide enhanced access to and understanding of the human record.