Not that long ago almost all political advertising was clearly visible in the physical world. Posters, newspaper ads and pamphlets were widely circulated, collected and preserved. It is not unlikely that you are able to walk into an antiquarian book shop and find examples of political propaganda hundreds of years old. Other copies will end …

Author(s): Caswell, ML | Abstract: Much recent discussion about social justice in archival studies has assumed a legalistic, rights-based framework to delineate the role of records, archives, and archivists in both the violation of human rights and in holding individuals and governments accountable for basic human rights, such as the right to life, privacy, and freedom of expression. Yet decades of feminist scholarship have called into question the universality of a rights-based framework, arguing instead that an ethics of care is a more inclusive and apt model for envisioning and enacting a more just society. This article proposes a shift in the theoretical model used by archivists and archival studies scholars to address social justice concerns – from that based on individual rights to a model based on feminist ethics. In a feminist ethics approach, archivists are seen as caregivers, bound to records creators, subjects, users, and communities through a web of mutual affective responsibility. This article proposes four interrelated shifts in these archival relationships, based on radical empathy.

Joy Reid is why we need multiple web archives.

Open sharing of social media data raises new ethical questions that researchers, repositories and data curators must confront, with little existing guidance available. In this paper, the authors draw upon their experiences in their multiple roles as data curators, academic librarians, and researchers to propose the STEP framework for curating and sharing social media data. The framework is intended to be used by data curators facilitating open publication of social media data. Two case studies from the Dryad Digital Repository serve to demonstrate implementation of the STEP framework. The STEP framework can serve as one important ‘step’ along the path to achieving safe, ethical, and reproducible social media research practice.

"We like to think of ourselves as the paper of record, but then it’s important that we actually keep those records."

Hosted on the Open Science Framework

Archivists are working to document our chaotic, opaque, algorithmically complex world—and in many cases, they simply can’t.

It’s complicated.

The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold recently broke the news of a series of fake 2009 Time magazine covers featuring Donald Trump, framed copies of which were hanging in several of Trump’s golf clubs. Comparisons with real Time covers revealed visual flaws: the fakes’ red border is too thin, and the bar code came from an […]

When a crappy change to a business model does in a large swathe of the historical web.

by Sylvie Rollason-Cass, Web Archivist, Archive-It This year marked the 9th season of the K-12 web archiving program. Students from 11 schools around the country worked together to think critically about information on the web and to select websites to archive for the future. Their collections are centered around topics that reflect their interests, their […]

An Awesome List for getting started with web archiving - GitHub - iipc/awesome-web-archiving: An Awesome List for getting started with web archiving

On May 18, Twitter announced changes to its Developer Policy that has significant impacts for researchers and archivists. The goal of this blog post is to describe the change and its implications.

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