ABSTRACT

The concept of records is foundational to archival studies, yet empirical research on how members and volunteers of community and grassroots archives conceptualize records remains limited. To understand how members and volunteers of community archives conceptualize records, this study asks how members and volunteers of the Black Bottom Archives (BBA), the Detroit Sound Conservancy (DSC), the Faulkner Morgan Archive (FMA), the Hula Preservation Society (HPS), and The History Project (THP) conceptualize records and how these conceptualizations inform their programs and practices. Based on ten semistructured interviews with five archives in the United States, this research reveals that members and volunteers view records as multifaceted and contingent on ongoing negotiation, borrowing, and intervention for larger goals rather than strictly being tied to abstract, institutional, or professional notions of records. Such a view also points to a recursive and generative relationship between records, programs, and practices and keeping track of power and legitimacy.

ABSTRACT

Congressional papers constitute some of the most unique archival collections to find their way into American repositories. Often voluminous, complex, and appended by donor stipulations and financial considerations, they have been the subject of decades’ worth of archival conferences, scholarship, legislation, and practical manuals. These discussions have long upheld the belief that congressional papers retain inherent research and historic value, largely due to their documentation of legislative processes and topical subject areas. This article interrogates the origins of that presumptive value, positing that archivists have customarily drawn on traditional narratives of American identity and democratic governance to justify and inform the acquisition, appraisal, processing, and deployment of congressional collections. The article first reviews the robust history of the congressional papers community, surveying the evolution of rhetoric around archivists’ assignation of inherent value to congressional papers and critically examining the ways in which that value is shaped by American practices of myth-making. Drawing from memory studies and concepts of the mythic imagination, the article then problematizes the passivity of American democracy in congressional archival praxis, taking into account burgeoning national reckonings and re-reckonings with the nature of American government itself. Implicating archival praxis in the perpetuation of narratives that do not reflect or represent the current state of the nation, the article then suggests modes of alternative intervention for archivists working with congressional papers, calling for a critically contextual reimagining of the field.

ABSTRACT

Oral history release forms are critical for documenting narrator intentions around access to and use of interviews, a key component of ethically managing this document type. Unfortunately, repositories are full of interviews with missing or problematic releases. To explain this phenomenon, the author reviews historical archival and oral history literature to trace the development of release form conventions and the historical trends in practice that explain the current state of documentation in archives. Important trends in this trajectory include professionalization of oral history, decades of inconsistent application of best practices, siloed discourses of archivists and oral historians, institutional review boards, and changing access expectations in the age of the Internet. The author also assesses current positive professional trends to prevent future release form problems and analyzes release form scenarios that may remain stubbornly at the discretion of archivists’ professional judgment or values.

THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST EDITORIAL BOARD

Editor

Amy Cooper Cary (2020–2026), Marquette University

Reviews Editors

Rose Buchanan (2021–2024), National Archives and Records Administration
Stephanie Luke (2021–2024), University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

Editorial Board

Natalia Fernández (2023–2027), Oregon State University
Shirley Franco (2022–2026), University of Brasília
Amanda Greenwood (2024–2026), University of Virginia
Rebecca Hankins (2023–2027), Texas A&M University
Eric Hung (2020–2024), Music of Asian America Research Center
Jessica Lacher-Feldman (2020–2024), University of Rochester
María Matienzo (2021–2025), University of California, Berkeley
Marlee Newman (2021–2025), Archival Consultant
Jordon Steele (2023–2027), Johns Hopkins

On Stephen King, and the “What” and “Why” of American Archivist

Lovers in a Dangerous Time: Archives, Archivists, and Community

Conceptualizing Records: Community Archives Describing Themselves

ABSTRACT

Excavating Myth and Memory in Congressional Papers

ABSTRACT

Forms, Formations, and Reforms

ABSTRACT

Redefining Archival Reference: Relationship-based Reference 1

ABSTRACT

“The Career Does Not Love You Back”: Impacts of Contingent Employment on Workers, Cultural Heritage Institutions, and the Archival Profession

ABSTRACT

(Re)Appraising Our Archival Identity: Demystifying the Process and Changing the Dialogue about Promotion and Tenure for Academic Archivists

ABSTRACT

“Taking Our Own Measure”: Archival Engagement and Storytelling

ABSTRACT

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Archives

Exceções legais ao direito de acesso à informação: dimensões contextuais das categorias de informação pessoal nos documentos arquivísticos

Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship after State Violence

War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War

In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s

The Materiality of the Archive: Creative Practice in Context

The Remaking of Archival Values

Archiving Cultures: Heritage, Community, and the Making of Records and Memory

Front Matter

THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST EDITORIAL BOARD

Front Matter

Teaching Primary Source Research Skills to 21st-Century Learners

An Individual Approach: A Case Study on Oral History Accessioning

Another Throat: Twenty-First-Century Black US Persona Poetry & the Archive

Accessioning: The Always-Already Function of Archival Practice

Front Matter (Front Cover, Masthead, Table of Contents, From the Editor)

MicroMARC:amc: A Case Study in the Development of an Automated System

Front Matter (Front Cover, Masthead, Table of Contents, From the Editor)

Professional Reading

Reviews