Recordkeeping Cultures explores how an understanding of organisational information culture provides the insight necessary for the development and promotion of sound recordkeeping practices.
Recordkeeping Cultures explores how an understanding of organisational information culture provides the insight necessary for the development and promotion of sound recordkeeping practices.
This dynamic book considers whether and how the management of records (and archives) differs from the management of information (and data). Can archives and records management still make a distinctive contribution in the 21st century, or are they now being dissolved into a wider world of information governance? What should be our conceptual understanding of records in the digital era? What are the practical implications of the information revolution for the work of archivists and records managers? Geoffrey Yeo, a distinguished expert in the global field, explores concepts of 'records' and 'archives' and sets today's record-keeping and archival practices in their historical context. He examines changing perceptions of records management and archival work, and asks whether and how far understandings derived from the fields of information management and data administration can enhance our knowledge of how records function. He argues that concepts of information and data cannot provide a fully adequate basis for reflective professional thinking about records and that record-keeping practices still have distinct and important roles to play in contemporary society. This thought-provoking and timely book is primarily intended for records managers and archivists, but should also be of interest to professionals in a range of information-related disciplines. It aims to provide a balance of theory and practice that will appeal to practitioners as well as students and academics around the world.
Record-Making and Record-Keeping in Early Societies provides a concise and up-to-date survey of early record-making and record-keeping practices across the world. It investigates the ways in which human activities have been recorded in different settings using different methods and technologies. Based on an in-depth analysis of literature from a wide range of disciplines, including prehistory, archaeology, Assyriology, Egyptology, and Chinese and Mesoamerican studies, the book reflects the latest and most relevant historical scholarship. Drawing upon the author’s experience as a practitioner and scholar of records and archives and his extensive knowledge of archival theory and practice, the book embeds its account of the beginnings of recording practices in a conceptual framework largely derived from archival science. Unique both in its breadth of coverage and in its distinctive perspective on early record-making and record-keeping, the book provides the only updated and synoptic overview of early recording practices available worldwide. Record-Making and Record-Keeping in Early Societies will be of interest to academics, researchers, and students engaged in the study of archival science, archival history, and the early history of human culture. The book will also appeal to practitioners of archives and records management interested in learning more about the origins of their profession.
Archives: Recordkeeping in Society introduces the significance of archives and the results of local and international research in archival science. It explores the role of recordkeeping in various cultural, organisational and historical contexts. Its themes include archives as a web of recorded information: new information technologies have presented dilemmas, but also potentialities for managing of the interconnectedness of archives. Another theme is the relationship between evidence and memory in archives and in archival discourse. It also explores recordkeeping and accountability, memory, societal power and juridical power, along with an examination of issues raised by globalisation and interntionalisation.The chapter authors are researchers, practitioners and educators from leading Australian and international recordkeeping organisations, each contributing previously unpublished research in and reflections on their field of expertise. They include Adrian Cunningham, Don Schauder, Hans Hofman, Chris Hurley, Livia Iacovino, Eric Ketelaar and Ann Pederson.The book reflects broad Australian and international perspectives making it relevant worldwide. It will be a particularly valuable resource for students of archives and records, researchers from realted knowledge disciplines, sociology and history, practitioners wanting to reflect further on their work, and all those with an interest in archives and their role in shaping human activity and community culture.
"The focus of this book becomes more relevant to governance every day as rational and scientific thought flounders under the weight of post-truth politics and a welter of 'alternative facts'. Traditional values of openness, transparency and accountability also face new challenges from technical change. Recordkeeping informatics supports archiving processes and few challenges are of greater significance for the survival of humanity than the adequate formation of archives that serve spacetime management, mutual associations and life chances: the major elements of authoritative information resource management as defined by the sociologist Anthony Giddens.
The systematic management of records is an important activity for 'information businesses' such as museums and galleries, but is not always recognized as a core function. Record keeping activities are often concentrated on small groups of records, and staff charged with managing them may have limited experience in the field.Records Management for Museums and Galleries offers a comprehensive overview of records management work within the heritage sector and draws on over a decade of experience in applying fundamental principles and practices to the specific circumstances of museums. It introduces readers to the institutional culture, functions, and records common to museums, and examines the legislative and regulatory environments affecting record-keeping practices. The book is comprised of eight chapters, including: a history of records keeping in the UK museum and gallery sector; the basics of records management; making a business case for records management; requirements of legislation for records management; how to conduct a records survey; strategy and action planning; how to develop a file plan, retention schedule and records management programme; and a guide to useful additional resources. - Gives practical and tested solutions to real world issues - Fills a gap in the literature as a handbook in this important sector - Provides an overview of the sector as a whole
Archives are considered to be collections of administrative, legal, commercial and other records or the actual place where they are located. They have become ubiquitous in the modern world, but emerged not much later than the invention of writing. Following Foucault, who first used the word archive in a metaphorical sense as "the general system of the formation and transformation of statements" in his "Archaeology of Knowledge" (1969), postmodern theorists have tried to exploit the potential of this concept and initiated the "archival turn". In recent years, however, archives have attracted the attention of anthropologists and historians of different denominations regarding them as historical objects and "grounding" them again in real institutions. The papers in this volume explore the complex topic of the archive in a historical, systematic and comparative context and view it in the broader context of manuscript cultures by addressing questions like how, by whom and for which purpose were archival records produced, and if they differ from literary manuscripts regarding materials, formats, and producers (scribes).
The post-digital publishing paradigm offers authors, readers, publishers and scholars the opportunity to engage with the production and circulation of the book (in all its forms) beyond the conventional boundaries and binaries of the pre-digital and digital eras. Post-Digital Book Cultures: Australian Perspectives is a collection of scholarly writing that examines these opportunities, from a range of disciplinary and methodological approaches, with the aim of engaging with the questions that define post-digital book cultures beyond the role of e-books. Examinations of digital publishing in the literary field can often be characterised as either narratives of decline or narratives of revolution. As we move into the third decade of the twenty-first century, what has become clear is that neither of these approaches accurately encapsulate the role of 'the digital' on contemporary publishing practice. Rather than upending book publishing culture, the emergence of digital technologies and platforms in the field has complicated and recontextualised the production, circulation and consumption of books.
How do people link the past to the present, marking continuity in the face of the fundamental discontinuities of history? A Time to Gather argues that historical records took on potent value in modern Jewish life as both sources of history and anchors of memory because archives presented oneway of transmitting Jewish culture and history from one generation to another as well as making claims of access to an "authentic" Jewish culture. Indeed, both before the Holocaust and in its aftermath, Jewish leaders around the world felt a shared imperative to muster the forces and resources ofJewish life and culture. It was a "time to gather," a feverish era of collecting and conflict in which archive making was both a response to the ruptures of modernity and a mechanism for communities to express their cultural hegemony.Jason Lustig explores these themes across the arc of the twentieth century by excavating three distinctive archival traditions, that of the Cairo Genizah (and its transfer to Cambridge in the 1890s), folkloristic efforts like those of YIVO, and the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden (Central or TotalArchive of the German Jews) formed in Berlin in 1905. Lustig presents archive-making as an organizing principle of twentieth-century Jewish culture, as a metaphor of great power and broad symbolic meaning with the dispersion and gathering of documents falling in the context of the Jews' longdiasporic history. In this light, creating archives was just as much about the future as it was about the past.