Volume 46, Issue 1

Abstract: On July 8–12, 2016, the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) at Kent State University hosted the eighth Archival Education and Research Institute (AERI). AERI is an annual event that brings together researchers, educators, students, and professionals from North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand to share knowledge, promote collaboration, and mentor new and emerging scholars in the areas of archival research and pedagogy. The conference was attended by ninety-five participants from eight countries, including faculty members, doctoral students, post-doctoral fellows, and ten undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in the AERI-affiliated Emerging Archival Scholars Program (EASP). The five-day event included sixty-three paper presentations, fifteen posters, seven workshops, two plenaries, and a half-day unconference event. In this introduction, the hosts of the conference and co-editors of this issue, Leisa Gibbons and Karen F. Gracy, provide a brief overview of the conference highlights and introduce the research papers presented here.

Abstract: Archiving digital objects consists of maintenance and conservation: the job of arresting a cultural object in time, maintaining it as closely as possible in the state in which it was created. Hardware and software provide the context in which digital objects are created, and other hardware and software provide the context in which they must be maintained, but practitioners of digital preservation are only now beginning to move seriously into the area of deciding how to perform digital objects for users. In this paper I discuss a personal effort at stopping time for hardware and what it has taught me about approaching construction of preservable platforms that can replicate the context of creation for digital objects. I will also discuss what we lose when we decide to discard environment in favor of some generalized idea of content.

Abstract: Changes in technology challenge the preservation of personal military communication and documentary records. The Virtual Footlocker Project addresses this issue through the development of an open-source, cross-platform system or application for capturing and preserving the personal communication and documentary record of the modern soldier. This article discusses the preliminary findings of the project’s survey of veterans’ and active-duty personnel’s use of communication and documentary methods.

Abstract: This paper investigates cultural, social, and technological issues created by the increasingly widespread circulation of digital records documenting the deaths of black Americans in the United States. This research takes as its foundation questions about ritual, embodiment, memorialization, and oblivion in digital spaces. Further, it examines the interplay between the permanence of the digital sphere and the international human rights concept of the “right to be forgotten,” paying particular attention to black and brown bodies as records and as evidence. Methodologically, the work engages critical race theory, performance studies, archival studies, and digital culture studies, asking how existing technologies reflect the wider social world offline, how they create new cultural interactions, and how those new interactions reshape the real (non-virtual) world.

Abstract: Extensive media coverage has focused attention on the disproportionate frequency and severity of police use of force against black communities in the United States. Video documentation captured by public officials and private citizens aided by the ubiquity of cell phones has made this violence inescapable, enabling conversations of system-wide problems within a mainstream context. Video documentation has been posed as a means of increasing transparency on the part of police and the district attorneys tasked with the decision of whether or not a police shooting requires the indictment of an officer. This documentation is also simultaneously posed as a check against the unmitigated authority of officer testimony, as a financial windfall for companies selling the technology, and as the ultimate exoneration for police officers attempting to justify their decisions in the field. These concurrent rhetorical registers operate in different domains and rarely overlap. The enormous amount of attention that has been focused on body-camera programs belies a techno-utopian impulse, an investment in a technological fix to complex and interlocking historical and socio-political realities. With this attention, funding has followed, pre-existing body-camera programs have been extended, and pilot programs have launched, presenting new challenges for police departments whose resources cannot meet the fiscal demands of a dramatic technological shift in a short period of time. Similarly, policies and laws regarding these devices themselves as well as the footage they capture have been sluggish to coalesce around coherent principles. This paper examines the emergent markets, policies, and laws governing the footage captured by police-worn body cameras in the United States and employs this footage as a way to reckon with complex ethical issues for information professionals.

Abstract: The Archival Education and Research Institute (AERI) supports research and education in the archival field. This paper describes highlights from the the eighth annual meeting, which was hosted by the School of Library and Information Science at Kent State University, Kent, Ohio.