Memory, Archives, and Records

1
Memory, Archives, and Records

• Guest Lecturer
• Archer Batcheller
• Drawing from Prof. Frosts lecture Archives,
  Records, and Artifacts

2
Archives
From Northeast Ohio Broadcast Archives (NOBA).
http//www.jcu.edu/communications/noba.htm
From Archives of Ontario. http//www.archives.gov.
on.ca/ English/exhibits/archives_one/ big/big_03_c
ontainers.htm
3
Archives

• Versus libraries
• Some definitions
• Archive, collection, record
• Provenance
• Genres

4
Archives

• Originality founding fathers
• Who has archives?
• Record vs. recorded
• Act of attention capturing a trace
• Tear in time in present, of past, for future

5
Why archive?

• Organizational memory
• Identity
• Account(ability)?
• Comparison
• Unknown future uses

6
Knowledge infrastructures

• Generating, sharing, maintaining

Images from Jackson, et al. Extending Knoweldge
Infrastructures. 2008. http//hdl.handle.net/2027.
42/61201
7
Cyberinfrastructure
From http//www.ucar.edu/communications/staffnotes
/0212/ibm.jpg
8
Privacy/Accountability

• Transparency of government vs. individual vs.
  corporation
• Right to know vs. personal privacy
• Who has access when?
• Freedom of Information Act redaction
• Records and authoritarian governments

9
Redaction
From Securitas Operandi. http//peterhgregory.word
press.com/?sredacted
10
Making memories The Commissar Vanishes
Stalin with Nikolai Yezhov.
Stalin with Yezhov removed.
From NEWSEUM The Commissar Vanishes.
http//www.newseum.org/berlinwall/commissar_vanish
es/vanishes.htm
11
Making memories

• Victors write history
• Falsification
• Whats not in the archive? What cant you access?
• Who decides what to archive?
• When to archive?
• Objectivity and archives

12
Cobell v. Kempthorne

• Bureau of Indian Affairs records on Individual
  Indian Money accounts
• Quality of historical archives matter
• Current mishandling of archives

13
Cobell vs. Kempthorne
Images from the Indian Trust Brochure at
http//www.indiantrust.com/
14
Records and regulation

• Pinto
• Sarbanes-Oxley and Enron?
• Zantaz
• Data mining
• HIPAA and medical records
• Google Health, etc.

15
Classification provenance vs. hierarchies

• Contrast to normal classification systems
• Historical research reverse-engineering the
  organization
• Constructing history as detective work
• The lifecycle of records
• Generation
• Retention
• Access/Availability

16
Personal archives/memory

• What to keep, toss
• Privacy/accountability
• Identity
• Electronic vs. physical