The Web is a vast and constantly changing information landscape that by its very nature seems to resist the idea of the archive. But for the last 20 years, archivists and technologists have worked together to build systems for doing just that. While technical infrastructures for performing web archiving have been well studied, surprisingly little is known about the interactions between archivists and these infrastructures. How do archivists decide what to archive from the Web? How do the tools for archiving the Web shape these decisions? This study analyzes a series of ethnographic interviews with web archivists to understand how their decisions about what to archive function as part of a community of practice. It uses critical discourse analysis to examine how the participants’ use of language enacts their appraisal decision-making processes. Findings suggest that the politics and positionality of the archive are reflected in the ways that archivists talk about their network of personal and organizational relationships. Appraisal decisions are expressive of the structural relationships of an archives as well as of the archivists’ identities, which form during mentoring relationships. Self-reflection acts as a key method for seeing the ways that interviewers and interviewees work together to construct the figured worlds of the web archive. These factors have implications for the ways archivists communicate with each other and interact with the communities that they document. The results help ground the encounter between archival practice and the architecture of the Web.  RÉSUMÉ  Le Web est un paysage informationnel vaste et en changement constant qui, par sa nature même, semble s’opposer à l’idée de l’archive. Pourtant, depuis les vingt dernières années, les archivistes et technologues ont travaillé de concert afin de bâtir des systèmes qui feraient exactement ça. Bien que les infrastructures technologiques pour archiver le Web ont été abondamment étudiées, on en sait étonnamment peu à propos des interactions entre les archivistes et ces infrastructures. Comment les archivistes décident de ce qui sera archivé du Web? Comment les outils d’archivage du Web modèlent leurs décisions? La présente étude analyse une série d’entretiens ethnographique avec des archivistes du Web afin de comprendre comment leurs décisions concernant ce qui doit être archivé s’articulent en fonction d’une communauté de pratique. Elle utilise l’analyse critique du discours pour examiner comment l’utilisation du langage par les participants joue un rôle dans leurs processus de prise de décision d’évaluation. Les résultats suggèrent que les politiques et le positionnement des archives sont reflétés dans la manière dont les archivistes parlent de leurs réseaux de relations personnelles et organisationnelles. Les décisions d’évaluation sont l’expression des relations structurelles d’une archive et des identités de l’archiviste, qui sont forgées au cours des relations de mentorat. L’introspection agit comme méthode essentielle pour voir la façon dont les intervieweurs et les interviewés travaillent de concert pour construire les mondes façonnés des archives du Web. Ces facteurs ont des répercussions sur les façons dont les archivistes communiquent entre eux et interagissent avec les communautés qu’ils documentent. Ces résultats aident à ancrer la rencontre entre la pratique archivistique et l’architecture du Web.

The British Library Sound Archive preserves millions of audio recordings for future generations. But what does the past sound like – and can listening to it help us understand history better?

This article argues that feminist standpoint epistemologies help us rethink both the process by which archival value is determined and the archivists’ role in that process, leading towards a new methodology, epistemology, and political strategy for appraisal, which I call “feminist standpoint appraisal.” Feminist standpoint appraisal inverts dominant appraisal hierarchies that value records created by those in power to justify and consolidate their power at the expense of records created by the oppressed to document and resist their oppression and imagine liberation. As such, feminist standpoint appraisal explicitly and unapologetically gives epistemological weight (thereby assigning value to) records created and preserved by, and potentially activated in service to, those individuals and communities oppressed by capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. Furthermore, feminist standpoint appraisal shifts our thinking about the position of the archivist, from a purportedly objective “view from nowhere” (which in fact belies a dominant but unnamed white male position), towards a socially located, culturally situated agent who centers ways of being and knowing from the margins. In valuing the unique insights gleaned by people on the margins, feminist standpoint appraisal refuses the notion that archivists from oppressed communities must overcome their positionalities to meet institutional goals and professional demands for neutrality, but rather, values and leverages the insights gained from outsider status, viewing the attendant insights as assets, rather than as detriments, to the archival endeavor. Furthermore, feminist standpoint appraisal calls on archivists who inhabit dominant identities to acknowledge their oppressor standpoints and actively work to dismantle them. Pre-print first published online 08/26/2019

PROJECT STAND RESOURCE S.A.V.E Method (Outreach and Appraisal) Stop Stop and check your intentions for archiving born-digital records of marginalized identities Gaps in the record Accountability Di…

While archives and archivists have long liked to believe that we are neutral in the process of building collections, we know this is not…

The rise of academic library involvement in research data management has presented numerous challenges for academic libraries. While libraries and archives have always had collection development policies that defined what they would or would not collect, policies for selecting research data for preservation are in their infancy. This study surveyed and interviewed academic researchers. From this research an initial list of eight types of data were identified as research data that should not be preserved and made public by academic libraries and archives. These include research data that are sensitive or confidential, proprietary, easily replicable, do not have good metadata, are test, pilot or intermediate data, are bad or junk data, data that cannot be used by others for a variety of reasons, and older data that are not used and have no obvious cultural or historical value. Conclusions drawn from the study will help librarians and archivists make informed decisions about which types of research data are worth keeping.

When we first got started on Documenting the Now a few months ago Yvonne Ng raised an interesting use case of archiving video cited in…

To Save or Not to Save...  My old mentor, Tom Powers, used to say that the business of archives is not just about saving things, but also t...