Education for Information

Arguing that records and other forms of evidentiary documentation are increasingly being ‘weaponized’ against various communities and categories of people, this essay addresses diverse calls for the recognition of personal and community rights in records and recordkeeping. After reviewing some prominent examples and the growing literature on information rights, the essay introduces a framework for human rights in and to records and recordkeeping designed to support refugees. It then examines its potential applicability in restoring internationally acknowledged human rights to US Indigenous groups seeking federal sovereignty recognition. This approach suggests where there might be potential for convergence and highlights important areas of divergence between these two different rights discourses. In both cases the authors argue that affected individuals and communities might be empowered through different, and culturally appropriate, forms of educational outreach. The essay concludes by emphasizing the importance of preparing future archival and other information and computing professionals to navigate and respond to the complexities and potential incommensurabilities of the growing multiplicity of calls for rights in records.

This paper calls for a global community of practice to support people to enact trauma-informed practice in the archival profession. Building on the literature around archives and affect, decolonising spaces, and centring communities, it proposes trauma-informed practice is implemented in archives, and a community of practice be established to support those doing the work. It recognises the emotional labour of many in the archival field, and furthers conversations held at the Archival Education and Research Institute 2019 where the value of a community of practice was evidenced. The community of practice would bring together communities, academics, researchers, practitioners, volunteers, users, donors, and anyone with an interest in improving archival theory, education and practice to support trauma-informed approaches in archives, and support those undertaking the work. It ends with a call for co-creators of a trauma-informed community of practice.

Information governance provides a framework of accountability for the effective and efficient use of information to meet organizational objectives and compliance requirements. While information functions are often carried out by separate units that frequently work in silos, information governance is based on an interactive approach, taking into account notions of participation, power, and negotiation. Power and political competencies, and organizational realities are inherent to effective governance. Not all actors, however have the same political weight and the same skills to assert themselves as important players. The implementation of an information governance framework should enable records managers and archivists to position themselves as key players in the organization.

Based on a research project conducted in two phases (a statistical survey in 2015, enriched by interviews in 2017–2019 with information professionals and IT professionals), this paper presents the organizational actors of information governance, the influencing factors that allow them to exert some power over each other, and what competencies are required in context from records managers and archivists to play a strategic role. We also examine the integration of these competencies into university-based archival training programs in Québec, Canada.

Educators and archivists in Africa have repeatedly raised the need for redeveloping university curricula to reflect local and global best practice. An African education curriculum case study by the InterPARES project (2013–2018) that covered 38 countries out of 54 revealed the existence of few available archival training programmes in the continent. Literature further reveals that where educational programmes are available, the curriculum is mostly Eurocentric and thereby addresses archival issues from a Western perspective. As a result, the infinite problems facing archivists on the continent such as resources, skills, technology, infrastructure, advocacy, holdings, collaboration, displaced archives and many more (the list is endless) are not fully engaged. The archival programmes at the institution of higher learning appear not to address grand societal challenges such as unaccountability, poor governance, service delivery, as well as the low usage of archives repositories in the continent. In South Africa, there has been a call to use African epistemologies such as Ubuntu, a philosophy that provides an African overview of societal relations or the Batho Pele, principles adopted by the post-apartheid South African government to guide and direct its public service and address imbalances of the apartheid regime. This study utilised the Africanisation pillar of Sibanda (2016)’s model to analyse the infusion of curriculum transformation into the ten modules for archives and records management in an open distance e-learning (ODeL) environment. In this regard, the content of ten archives and records management modules for a bachelor’s degree in an ODeL environment is analysed to explore the transformation of archival curriculum. Only one university in South Africa offers a fully-fledged bachelor’s degree with a major in archives and records management. The study established that an attempt was made to transform the archival curriculum at study material development and module delivery level. This resulted in a missed opportunity to transform archival curriculum in the development of the new bachelor’s degree being implemented in 2017. The study concludes by arguing that failure to decolonise the archival curriculum will result in archivists being highly unlikely to contribute to solutions to societal problems that are difficult to solve confronting South Africa using local solutions. It is recommended that transformation of the curriculum should start at a programme level rather than module level.

Since the granting of Native American materials – excavated in archaeological projects sponsored by federal and state governments across the United States in the 20th century – to public repositories, museum professionals have sought to manage such collections with care. At the University of Missouri, students responding to the local mandate of NAGPRA advocated a public investigation into the issue of Native American collections repatriation in the early 1990s. Their activism in part transformed campus praxis in three ways, effecting ethical shared decision-making, appropriate public access, and policy-level leadership. This paper examines the primary sources generated by students, faculty, and local and national journalists to broadly comprehend how community members continue to address Native collections management and access in a public land-grant university setting.

Our paper consists of two parts. First, we review the history of the Royal United Service Institute (RUSI) museum, its collections, its closure and the dispersal of its collections. Second, we synthesize this analysis with a summary and reflection on the challenges of undertaking a collective memory project that represents the rise and fall of empire. To synthesize these two points, we discuss the museum’s history and highlight how digital cultural heritage initiatives have catalyzed an interest in digitizing and archiving RUSI’s collection records. Following our review of RUSI and its museum collection, we discuss the value of academics forming partnerships with cultural heritage institutions, and we analyze our experiences managing two student projects hosted at RUSI. Our discussion of student work will reflect on methods for designing engaging curriculum that encourages students to practice record keeping for cultural heritage institutions.

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) are established to document violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in post-conflict societies. The intent is to excavate the truth to avoid political speculations and create an understanding of the nature of the conflict. The documentation hence results in a common narrative which aims to facilitate reconciliation to avoid regression to conflict. TRCs therefore do a tremendous job and create compound documentation that includes written statements, interviews, live public testimonies of witnesses and they also publish final reports based on the accumulated materials. At the end of their mission, TRCs recommend the optimal use of their documentation since it is of paramount importance to the reconciliation process. Despite this ambition, the TRCs’ documentation is often politicized and out of reach for the victims and the post-conflict societies at large. The TRCs’ documentation is instead poorly diffused into the post conflict societies and their findings are not effectively disseminated and used.

The article presents detailed description of methods of arrangement and description of archival materials in three community archives from Poland: the Foundation of General Elżbieta Zawacka, the Association “History Tellers from the Lower City in Gdańsk”, and the Civic Archive in Podkowa Leśna. Information presented in the article are part of a research project entitled “Community archives in Poland: multiple case study” (2016–2019). Research data was collected during field studies, using methods of semi-structured interviews, on-site direct observations, and desk research. The article also provides information about the context of operation of contemporary community archives in Poland, especially the phenomenon of professionalization of community archives and its impact on methods of their archival work. As a key finding, the study stresses the importance of knowing the community archive’s context in understanding its archival practices.

The COVID-19 outbreak has heightened several challenges in higher education. In this paper, we focus on the use of technology, teaching methodologies and literacy skills. The challenges relating to the use of technology in higher education include the digital divide created by unequal access to the internet in many countries. In terms of teaching methodologies, distance learning may be faced with additional challenges in student evaluation or in the learning process itself, as in some educational disciplines face-to-face teaching is essential. Literacy skills with an emphasis on digital skills will be a part of the solution going forward if lock-downs persist. Finally, librarians are in an excellent position to engage with their communities by teaching literacy skills and digital skills in effectively using technology, which will be a much-needed part of the educational system as new teaching methodologies emerge.

This essay is an overview of three lessons that the author learned while teaching during the pandemic. In making adjustments to her courses, she realized the importance of purposeful care, creativity, and community-building. As the title implies, all three can be achieved by committing just thirty minutes.