Volume 45, Issue 4

Abstract: This project looks at the challenges of establishing a digital community archives. The case that will be explored is that of Front Runners New York, an LGBT running club. The archive documents this small slice of the New York City LGBT community, capturing the impact of the AIDS epidemic and the community's struggle for wide acceptance in the 1980s and 1990s, and more recent triumphs in the 2010s such as the success of the marriage equality movement. This project finds that establishing and maintaining a community digital archive necessitates navigating a complex set of technological and social issues, including ownership and copyright, methods for capturing records, digitization and born-digital record keeping, social media and web archiving, and digital preservation. Using an action-research approach, this paper discusses the solutions developed to address these issues, as well as those that remain unresolved.

Abstract: As one of the world's most ethnolinguistically-diverse and conflict-prone regions, the North Caucasus presents particular challenges for librarians seeking to preserve its rich and varied online news media content. This content is generated in multiple languages in multiple political and ideological contexts, both within the North Caucasus region and abroad. While online news media content in general is ephemeral, poorly-preserved, and difficult to access via any single search interface or search strategy, content relating to the North Caucasus is at additional risk due to ongoing insurgency/counterinsurgency activity, as well as historical, political and linguistic factors. Various options for preserving and searching North Caucasus web content are explored.

Abstract: In April 2016, the Israel State Archives announced the most recent stage of an ambitious project to digitize all of their holdings (potentially 400 million pages of material): the new archival website was ready online (Aderet). With the new website came the ability to request digital copies of documents, which would be available on the website within two weeks of the request (Aderet). However, researchers would now at the very least be discouraged from requesting access to the paper documents (Lozowick), or, in the worst-case scenario, be refused access to anything except the website (Baron and Newhall). Local scholars (including a prominent professor of history at Tel Aviv University), the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research, and the Middle East Studies Association of North America (which publishes the prestigious International Journal of Middle East Studies ) registered concern with the restriction of physical access to the archive and issued public calls for a reversal of the decision (Akevot Institute). The conflict was between perceived best practices of digitization and of archival stewardship (represented by the State Archivist Dr. Yaacov Lozowick) on the one hand, and standards and expectations for scholarly research on the Middle East, which largely depends on archival and rare book collections, on the other.

Abstract: This essay selectively surveys recent findings on digital preservation in special collections settings and examines the challenges that prevent widespread implementation. Using the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa’s library to illustrate the situation facing many institutions, I discuss three types of barriers to digital preservation: workflow and procedural obstacles, resource limitations, and lack of buy-in.