promoting reflexivity and inclusivity in archival education, research, and practice

Promoting Reflexivity and Inclusivity in Archival Education, Research, and PracticeAuthor(s): Kelvin L. White and Anne J. GillilandSource: The Library Quarterly, Vol. 80, No. 3 (July 2010), pp. 231-248Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/652874 .

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[Library Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 3, pp. 231–248]

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PROMOTING REFLEXIVITY AND INCLUSIVITY IN ARCHIVALEDUCATION, RESEARCH, AND PRACTICE1

Kelvin L. White2 and Anne J. Gilliland3

The area of archival studies today transcends the professional field of archivalscience. It encompasses an ever-broadening array of disciplinary discussions andmethodological approaches that are identifying, critiquing, and addressing theshifting social, cultural, philosophical, and political, as well as the technological,imperatives of record keeping and remembering in the twenty-first century. Re-porting on two recent research projects and three ongoing educational initiatives,this article suggests ways in which research and education in archival studies canplay a central role in promoting more reflexive and inclusive ideas, practices, andresearch, not only within the archival profession, but also within the various libraryand information science (LIS) and iSchool settings in which archival educationand research might be situated.

Introduction

Archival studies is one of the most rapidly expanding, interdisciplinary,and multimethodological areas of research within iSchools as well aslibrary and information science (LIS) programs in North America, andthe same phenomenon is occurring in comparable schools around theglobe [1]. Beginning with a brief preamble on the development and

1. A version of this article was originally presented at the iConference 2009 at the Universityof North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in February 2009. The authors would like to acknowledgethe support for this research of an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant, “Buildingthe Future of Archival Education and Research,” and a University of California Office ofthe President’s Pacific Rim Program grant, “Pluralizing the Archival Paradigm throughEducation.” The authors would also like to acknowledge the contributions of all the par-ticipants in the latter project.

2. University of Oklahoma School of Library and Information Studies, 401 W. Brooks, BizzellLibrary, Room 120, Norman, OK 73019-6032; Telephone 405-325-3921; E-mail [email protected].

3. University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Information Studies, 212 GSE&ISBuilding,Los Angeles, CA 90095-1520; Telephone 310-206-4687; E-mail [email protected].



232 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

maturation of professional archival education in the United States, thisarticle highlights the unprecedented volume and richness of scholarshipin archival studies that is now emanating from these programs. It posits,however, that while archival studies research has been flourishing withinboundary-crossing iSchools, archival education within both iSchool andlibrary and information science programs still focuses too narrowly on thetraditional paradigmatic aspects of archival science (i.e., the professionalcanon of theory and practice). As such, it fails to engage wider scholarshipin ways that might help to broaden and pluralize the construction of ar-chival education and practice and perhaps, by example, of the informationfields more generally.

Drawing upon the findings and recommendations of two recent researchprojects, we suggest ways in which archival education—both professionaland research—together with pedagogy (i.e., how educational content isconveyed and internalized) can play a central role in promoting morereflexive and inclusive archival ideas, practices, and research. We arguethat such reflexivity and inclusivity also encourage beneficial interactionswith those in other academic and professional fields with shared interestsor concerns. The article concludes with a brief discussion of three currenteducational initiatives that are seeking to address some of these consider-ations.

Background on the Development and Nature of Archival Education andResearch within U.S. Library and Information Programs

The archival profession developed comparatively later in the United Statesthan the library profession and considerably later than the archival pro-fession in Europe, where formal archival education began as early as thelate eighteenth century in Bologna, Naples, and then, in 1821 most notablyat the Ecole des Chartes in Paris. The development of a distinct professionalarchival field in the United States only began in earnest after the 1934founding of the National Archives and the establishment in 1936 of theSociety of American Archivists as an outgrowth of the American HistoricalAssociation, which itself was not founded until 1884.

While the need for some form of archival education and training in theUnited States was acknowledged from the late nineteenth century onward,there has been continuous debate among both archivists and historiansabout the appropriate location, nature, and duration of that education.In 1938–39, Solon Justus Buck, publications director for the National Ar-chives, taught the nation’s first archival administration course at ColumbiaUniversity’s library school. In the following year, he cotaught a similarcourse for American University’s Department of History with Ernst Posner,



PROMOTING REFLEXIVITY AND INCLUSIVITY 233

a former senior archivist with the Prussian Privy State Archives who hadrecently emigrated to the United States after being removed from hisposition in Germany because of his Jewish heritage. In 1941, when Buckbecame the second Archivist of the United States, Posner took over teach-ing the course for American University on his own, joining the faculty ofAmerican University and eventually becoming dean. The American Uni-versity program became the first formal, ongoing graduate archival edu-cation in the United States [2].

In 1958, however, at the annual meeting of the Society of AmericanArchivists in Salt Lake City, Theodore Schellenberg, assistant archivist atthe National Archives, and the man who would come to be viewed as thefather of American archival theory, called for separate archival trainingcourses incorporating archival techniques and principles to be taughtwithin library schools. In 1960, he taught at the Archives Institute hostedby the library school of the University of Texas at Austin, thus initiatingwhat was to become a half century of entrenched professional debate overwhether archival science or archival administration should best be taughtas a component of history or public history programs or of library andinformation science [2]. Either way, archival education was taught as anancillary and practice-oriented area of the larger field within which it washoused, as both the terms “administration” and “science” might indicate,and really only came into its own as a field of education and research inthe 1990s.

Prior to the 1990s, history-trained archivists dominated the archival pro-fession. Since that time, graduates from archival education programs lo-cated within library and information science and, more recently, iSchoolsand information studies programs have accounted for the largest numbersof entrants into the archival profession. With this change has come a newdiscussion about the nature and purpose of archival education. Shouldarchival education focus on archival science, which “studies the charac-teristics of records in their social and cultural contexts and how they arecreated, used, selected and transferred through time” [3] and be basedaround practice-based concerns, principles, and techniques? Could it alsoencompass disciplinary, transdisciplinary, and professional studies of topicsrelevant to archival ideas, roles, and interests, that is, broaden its scopeinto archival studies?

A study of archival education programs by Elizabeth Yakel, published in2000, demonstrated the considerable growth in archival education offer-ings within LIS and other information-based programs [4]. However, thateducation was still quite traditional in terms of its content. By contrast,reviews of recent archival research indicate that archival studies appearsto occupy much broader intellectual territory that can be located at variousnexuses between the following:




• texts (regardless of their media and format) that serve to record, doc-ument, narrate, educate, and entertain;

• axiomatic constructs, such as evidence, memory, culture, identity, ac-countability, trust, ethics, space time, enterprise, and power relations;

• processes, such as testifying, remembering, forgetting, representing, in-terpreting, investigating, adjudicating, storytelling, and believing;

• technologies for communicating, recording, creating, disseminating, re-trieving, socializing, monitoring, and controlling; and

• structures and surrogates that summarize, represent, and interpret in-formation content, contexts, behaviors, and requirements.

While similar discussions have also been occurring about the scopeof LIS education and research [5–7], we argue that archival studiesresearch is particularly well-situated within multidisciplinary iSchools—especially iSchools with faculty and students who are drawn from the socialand human sciences and who encourage rich thinking about human, bu-reaucratic, and cultural, as well as technological, aspects of information.In other words, iSchools have been good for archival studies, and thereverse is probably also the case.

Archival research that has emanated largely out of iSchools over thepast decade has moved well beyond the single-authored historical, survey,or case studies that used to predominate, as it seeks to address relevantquestions arising at these nexuses. Today, rapidly growing cohorts of facultyand doctoral students in archival studies are collaborating bidirectionallywith increasing numbers of researchers drawn from other disciplines andare employing, repurposing, and adapting methods from an unusuallydiverse range of fields, including diplomatic science and legal theory (e.g.,contemporary archival diplomatics, critical race theory), business admin-istration and computer science (e.g., business process analysis and meta-data modeling), and anthropology (e.g., record keeping and archival eth-nography) as well as library and information science (e.g., bibliometrics,empirical instantiation) [8]. Issues of archival concern, such as the natureand role of the archive in a postmodern or postcolonial world, and effectiveand appropriate cyberinfrastructure mechanisms for identifying, validat-ing, describing, preserving, declassifying, and curating digital documen-tation are also increasingly being investigated or theorized by scholarsacross many fields in the arts and humanities, science, and the social sci-ences, often working within large-scale collaborations.




The Need to Rethink the Archival Paradigm

Even with this innovation in the scope of the research questions being ex-amined under the rubric of archival studies, professional education in ar-chival science is still constructed around a small set of traditional ideas andpractices (with the possible exception of the growing influence of the Aus-tralian-generated records continuum concept [9]). These ideas and prac-tices are predominantly derived from those of eighteenth-, nineteenth-,and early twentieth-century Europe [10]. Record keeping and archivesduring this period had evolved to provide essential bureaucratic supportand legitimacy for emergent nation states, colonial administrations, mer-cantile and evangelical endeavors, and even war efforts around the world.When archival education began in the 1930s in the United States, it wasto Europe that instructors looked for models.

In the twentieth century, Western ideas and practices became furtherrationalized and institutionalized through the development of national andthen international standards and best practices, especially in the areas ofarchival descriptive and educational guidelines. Professional education andtraining (in some cases, with state-mandated curricula), located variouslyaround the globe within government archives, state-sponsored archivalschools, professional associations, as well as universities, have promulgatedthe resulting professional paradigm of archival science into the twenty-firstcentury without any substantial critique.

If archival studies, and indeed, any other area of information studies, isgoing to be a relevant, useful, and effective area of research and practicein a globalized, digital, postcolonial, and increasingly post-Weberian world,we would argue that the paradigm that supports its assumptions, and fun-damentally its identity as a field, must be subject to continuous criticalreexamination, empirical testing, and consequent reshaping. In the caseof the paradigm underlying traditional archival science, such activities willhelp to ensure that it can be sufficiently robust and expansive not only tograpple with the archival implications of pervasive digitality but also—andthis is the particular focus of this article—to address other social andpolitical changes that are occurring in the world. The paradigm needs tobe critiqued and expanded to ensure that it is both aware of and responsiveto the nature, needs, and perspectives of local and global communitiesthat heretofore have not been centrally addressed and indeed have oftenbeen marginalized by archival ideas, theory, and practices historically de-veloped in support of the administrative requirements of powerful bureau-cracies.

The most systematic and high-profile calls to rethink and restate archivaltheory and practice, and to delineate how these might interact with the




interests of other information and disciplinary communities, have comein recent years from those who have been investigating the archival im-plications of digital record keeping or designing and operating digitallibraries and archives. Systems designers and software developers, legal andaccountability experts, and archival researchers and archivists are all grap-pling with issues such as how to define the parameters of a digital record,how to identify the processes and guarantees by which users come to trusta digital record, how to fix and set aside a digital record for future pres-ervation and access, and how to manage and exploit record-keeping meta-data [11–15]. Digital library and archive developers are striving to integratedifferent kinds of bibliographic and nonbibliographic materials within asingle or federated digital resource, as well as to implement technical andcuratorial regimes that can support user trust in, ongoing access to, andmanipulation of those resources [10]. In both cases, questions have beenraised about what is the same and what is different between diverse typesof resources; in what ways digital resources and creator and user practicesremain the same or take on different characteristics from analogous non-digital resources and creator and user practices (if any exist); and whichprofessional principles remain applicable and which need to be rethought.

On the other hand, calls to reconsider archival theory and practice andto challenge the inertia that seems to surround so much of the archivalparadigm have also come from archival academics and practitioners influ-enced by postmodern and postcolonial scholarship [16]. Recognizing thatwe live in a world that is far different from the one that existed whenarchival ideas and practices were codified, Sue McKemmish, Anne Gilli-land, and Eric Ketelaar write that

archival literature increasingly points to the need to develop archival systems thatcan represent multiple recordkeeping realities, encompassing or at least accom-modating the differing and temporally-bound world views of all those involved inthe activities the records document, and providing meaningful access paths to allstakeholders. Writers also suggest that there is a need to re-think definitions ofrecords and archives that exclude orality, literature, art, artefacts, the built envi-ronment, landscape, dance, ceremonies and rituals as archival forms. Postmodernideas are opening up the possibility of “refiguring the archive”. For example, insocieties like South Africa, archivists are exploring “the archive outside the archivalinheritance of colonialism, and later, apartheid”—the oral record, literature, land-scape, songs, dance, ritual, art, artefacts and so on. [17]

This is a very different landscape in which to prepare archival practi-tioners than that to which much archival education caters. It is one towhich iSchools, with their interdisciplinary inclinations and multimeth-odological capacities, may be particularly well disposed. As noted above,until the last fifteen years of the twentieth century, professional archival




education in the United States took place primarily within graduate historyprograms. Professional historians, since the rise of modern scientific historyin the nineteenth century, have used archives more or less consciously topromote Eurocentric ideas and shape national narratives. For example, asalluded to earlier, in the United States, the development of the NationalArchives; the foundation of a national professional association, the Societyof American Archivists; and the associated drives to establish a robust bodyof archival theory and practice and professional archival education werevery much tied in with the development of the field of professional aca-demic history. This, in turn, was very bound up with the apparatus of stateand notions of statehood. Ian Tyrrell writes

As part of this legitimizing project, scientific history showed the nation evolvingfrom “planted” European antecedents. Some of these, especially the Spanish andthe French, atrophied or disappeared, leaving more vigorous English versions asthe successful transplants, the germ from which the nation grew organically. . . .In forging this genealogy of the state, historians were mindful of their own changingand insecure position within the state structure. The rapid political and economicreordering of American power post–Civil War did not seem particularly hospitableto professors. Not only did academic freedom cases in the 1890s reveal their vul-nerable position . . . [but also] newly professionalized historians increasingly camefrom lower social classes than either their own predecessors in the universities orthe patrician ranks of the amateurs. These new historians lacked clout in massparties and business, and they imagined that their counterparts in Europe hadmore influence over government, the civil service, and public life than they did.[18, pp. 8–9]

American historians, therefore, wished to play a role in shaping nationalconsciousnesses. Tyrell continues:

What was the key to merging imperial, regional, and local experience into a nationalstream of history? Academic history sought to colonize the state historical societiesand universities with “scientifically” trained people with doctorates from universities.As editor of the American Historical Review and director of the Carnegie-fundedBureau of Historical Research, [J. Franklin] Jameson took the lead in coordinatingthe local groups to link their findings with the national story. Jameson consistentlyadvocated the primacy of the national over the local, doing so partly out of a deepdesire to exhibit history’s wider significance and public usefulness. Not only didJameson assimilate older traditions of local inquiry involving genealogy, oral history,personal reminiscences, and antiquarian documentary collections into a nationalresearch program, privileging printed documents over popular memory in theprocess; he put reverse pressure on local history, insisting that it reflect nationaltrends because “local history” was “American history locally exemplified.” [18]

In other words, archives, like all institutions, are constructs. Until recently,those constructs, with the aid of an uncritiqued set of archival principles




and practices, supported the perspectives, needs, and interests of largebureaucracies such as governments, businesses, and religious organiza-tions, and historical and cultural interests and industries as representedby academic scholarship, publishing, and memory institutions. Today, how-ever, circumstances have changed, with the preparation of professionalarchivists taking place in the United States predominantly within iSchoolsand library and information science (LIS) programs. The changed cir-cumstances raise a number of questions about the goals and effects of sucheducation. For example, to what extent do, or should, those information-based, increasingly multidisciplinary environments challenge the histori-cally and bureaucratically driven intellectual and professional premises ofarchival science? Can we assess what has been or will be the impact on theprofessional field of archival science of the new research in archival studiesoccurring within these programs? And what, if anything, is the influenceof archival studies specializations upon the iSchool or LIS programs inwhich they are situated?

Another important factor that should be considered in archival edu-cation is that communities, groups, and individuals once absent from orsilent in the official record (e.g., immigrant and diasporic communities,Indigenous communities, survivors of traumatic or life-altering events) nowwish to do their own archival construction or production—to capture theirown, often nontextual, record-keeping processes (e.g., through dance,song, or recitation) and generate their own narratives or to take controlof their archival heritage relating to their communities that may now belocated within the holdings of archival and collecting institutions [1]. Todo so, they are bypassing traditional archives and archival practices, whichthey do not see as supportive or relevant, and are employing new tech-niques and technologies, such as video histories, documentary filmmaking,blogging, and social networking. How might more broadly based archivalstudies, as taught within iSchools and LIS programs, better support theseshifting documentary imperatives and community initiatives? Conversely,what might iSchools and LIS programs learn from the experiences andexigencies of archival studies that might help them to promote plurali-zation and critical reflection across the rest of their education and researchactivities?

Research Projects Seeking to Pluralize Archival Education

This section discusses two research projects that challenge the status quowith regard to the scope and nature of contemporary archival educationand, potentially, of all education in LIS programs or iSchools.




Pluralizing the Archival Paradigm through EducationPluralizing the Archival Paradigm through Education, which began in June2005, is an international research collaboration led by researchers at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the United States and theCaulfield School of Information Technology at Monash University in Aus-tralia. Participants have included archival faculty and students, faculty fromancillary fields such as anthropology, museum studies, and ethnic studies,and members of Indigenous and other ethnic and racial communities andmarginalized groups. The project was funded by the University of Cali-fornia’s Pacific Rim Program to identify the scope and extent of archivaleducation in the Pacific Rim and then to encourage research and devel-opment activities that would promote (1) culturally sensitive education ofarchival professionals in and from Pacific Rim communities and (2) theincorporation of the interests, needs, and cultural beliefs of diverse In-digenous, ethnic, and marginalized communities into archival educationand research programs in that region.

The project has employed surveys, focus groups, and research workshopsto explore the state of archival education in Pacific Rim regions of Northand South America, Asia, Australia, and Pacific Island nations and to iden-tify possible ways to develop culturally sensitive curricula and appropriatepedagogies and practices. Data gathered through project surveys suggestthat archival education in the Pacific Rim can be broadly characterized inthe following ways:

• Archival education in the Pacific Rim currently focuses on teachinginternational standards and best practices while targeting nationalsector needs, particularly national strategies for economic develop-ment, both public and private;

• Teaching the management of electronic/digital records appears to bea top priority for most programs, followed by the paradigmatic aspectsof contemporary archival theory and practice as promoted by theInternational Council on Archives and other professional organiza-tions; and,

• While there is recognition that different record-keeping traditions mayexist, for example, within Indigenous communities, these programsdo not identify with or promote such traditions or indeed, any specificlocal or community needs and perspectives beyond those related tolocal government and enterprise [19].

Invitational focus groups were organized in Melbourne and Los Angelesin 2007, and additional open discussion forums were held at the Inter-national Council on Archives Conference in Kuala Lumpur and the Societyof American Archivists Conference in San Francisco in 2008 in order to




engage in multiparty critical dialogue on issues relating to how archivaleducation in the Pacific Rim has sustained and should further supportpluralization in archival practice and scholarship.

Several key questions and themes emerged from these dialogues thatparticipants wished to see addressed in archival education, and, by exten-sion, in research and practice:

• Who is best qualified to work with diverse and marginalized com-munities to address their record-keeping and archival needs? Whatkind of skill set and outlook would be most relevant? How can studentsacquire the skills and knowledge to work in the community in cul-turally sensitive ways? How can professionals and researchers be pre-pared to cope, and help community members cope, with the traumathat may be associated with records?

• What should be the role of archives in reclaiming and recoveringcommunity identity, memory, and history? For example, should ar-chivists be trained to be activists? Should they learn how to developmetadata and design social computing environments that might sup-port the presentation of alternate interpretations of archival hold-ings? Should they advocate for communities with nontextual recordsor intervene in situations where groups are being disadvantaged byrecord-keeping or archival practices?

• How can the archival paradigm be extended to include other ways ofkeeping records, for example, through oral traditions, and additional,often non-Western constructions of key concepts such as records, evi-dence, ownership, time space, authenticity, and preservation?

• How can archival curricula and pedagogy be made more culturallysensitive and responsive to diverse community needs? [1]

This dialogue also led to the development of an action agenda, whichamong other points called for (a) the development of a statement ofprinciples for inclusive, transformative record keeping and archival edu-cation that could be adopted by professional associations and used toinform course recognition/accreditation; (b) reconfiguring educationalprograms to be more inclusive, culturally sensitive, and diverse; (c) estab-lishing a databank of resources to support inclusive, culturally sensitiveeducation and research programs; and (d) developing the research agendarelating to record keeping and archival education, training, and scholar-ship that addresses the needs of marginalized communities [1].

Race and Remembering in a “Color-Blind” Society: A Case Study of RacialParadigms and Archival Education in MexicoIn 2008, White conducted a study that sought (1) to provide insight onhow communities of African heritage became absent from Mexico’s official




record, (2) to describe Mexico’s archival education infrastructure and iden-tify the role that education of archival professionals might play in addressingor contributing to these absences, (3) using the case of Mexicans of Africandescent in the Costa Chica (home of the largest Mexican community ofAfrican descent) to delineate ways of remembering in non-Indigenous ethniccommunities, and (4) to generate recommendations for how under-documentation and the resulting absences of these kinds of communitiesfrom the archival record might be partly remediated by changing how ar-chivists are educated.

The significance of this study lies in part with contemporary ideas ofrace in Mexico, which are dominated by the concept of mestizaje (racialand cultural mixture). As the dominant paradigm, mestizaje has allowedfor a somewhat unified idea of what it means to be “Mexican.” AlthoughMexican anthropologist Gonzalo Beltran estimated that enslaved Africans(or remnants thereof) were one of the largest population groups of Mex-ican society by the mid-eighteenth century, little or no reference is includedin the country’s grand narrative [20]. After gaining independence fromSpain, Mexico engineered a new national identity—one that considereditself to be mestizo (racially and culturally mixed). Mestizaje ideology per-mitted a sympathetic investigation of and linkage to the new nation’s In-digenous past. In doing so, other minority groups, such as Mexicans ofAfrican descent, were silenced and “erased” from the official historical andcontemporary narratives of Mexican nationhood and national identity. De-spite strong historical evidence that indicates a large African populationin colonial Mexico, the archetypical “Mexican” is even today representedto be mestizo—the product of an unproblematic cultural and racial “mix-ture” of Spanish and Indigenous people with no acknowledgment of thenation’s African heritage. This situation is reinforced by official recordkeeping, which provides no way for Mexicans of African descent to identifythemselves as such, even though their communities continue to experienceracial discrimination and marginalization. White hypothesized that archi-vists—if they were professionally educated within a more reflexive andculturally sensitive archival paradigm, might be better prepared to under-stand how professional frameworks for appraisal, arrangement and de-scription, preservation, access, and exhibition—have the ability to com-pound or redress some of the underempowerment caused by mestizaje [21].

Similar to the research findings of the Pluralizing the Archival Paradigmproject, the finding of this study indicated that archival educators andprofessionals in Mexico are not being educated to address memory keep-ing, which is traditional in ethnic or Indigenous communities. Instead,archival education curricula focuses on teaching to meet internationalstandards and best practices predominantly based on European record-keeping practices and juridical traditions. The curricula also privilege na-




tional sector needs, particularly those relating to enterprise (i.e., nationalstrategies for economic development, both public and private). Based onthe results of survey data of archival educators and practitioners, semi-structured interviews of cultural gatekeepers in the Afro-Mexican com-munity, and ethnographic data of the ways of remembering in Afro-Mex-ican communities (which included ritual dance, corridos or ballads, andeven food ways), a framework was developed consisting of six elementsthat would support systematically incorporating the interests, needs, andcultural beliefs of diverse communities into Mexico’s archival educationcurriculum:

1. Conceptual expansion (e.g., incorporating different conceptualizationsof the record by different communities, particularly those with non-Western epistemologies);

2. Embeddedness (e.g., locating field and service learning experienceswithin communities to gain a richer understanding of communityneeds);

3. Collaboration (e.g., partnering with community-based organizations inefforts to cultivate equitable, mutually beneficial, long-term teaching,learning and research partnerships);

4. Leadership, activism, and ethics (e.g., expanding the archival role inpromoting the visibility of underdocumented communities);

5. Sustainability (e.g., planning and program developments that aresensitive to the community’s resources and relevant to its culturalprotocols);

6. Reflexivity (e.g., critical examination of the body of knowledge com-prising archival theory and practice but also of the role and standpointof the archival instructor, scholar, or professional). [21, 22]

Advancing Reflexivity and Inclusivity through Archival Education

So, practically speaking, what can be done within archival education pro-grams to nudge them out of their traditional scope and make them moreresponsive to the kinds of concerns and needs being expressed by under-represented or marginalized communities, as well as more closely alignedwith the intellectual territory now occupied by archival studies research?To support a critical sensibility and more reflexive and inclusive archivalresearch and practice, archival education should seek to juxtapose anddiscuss both traditional and counterconstructions of the archive as it existsin and across time. Basing curriculum around the records continuum, withits multidimensional and space-time framework, will assist students in un-




derstanding the individual, institutional, and societal aspects of archives,records, and evidence. Archival education should also incorporate thor-ough discussion of the intellectual lineage of archival concepts and prac-tices and discuss, in both theoretical terms and using real life cases, thepower implications of these concepts and practices. Postcolonial ideas andexamples of the colonial archival endeavor should be introduced. JeanetteBastian, for example, in noting that “post-colonial scholars find that co-lonial records offer the voices of the master narrative but do not reflectthe voices of the oppressed and voiceless,” suggests remedying this byframing records within their social provenance and a “community of re-cords” [23].

Again, with real-life examples and taking its lead from definitional workdone with digital records, archival education should approach concernsregarding the nature and role of the archive and the record functionallyand procedurally, rather than ideologically. In other words, students shouldbe taught to understand the purpose of record keeping and archives insocieties and then how to identify those procedures, “texts,” and collectingactivities (regardless of form or media) within those societies that servethose purposes.

A persistent problem in archival practice is that very little practice-basedresearch is undertaken. Few tested benchmarks exist to aid in evaluatingarchival activities, and many archives operate on the basis of unchallengedassumptions and inherited wisdom. This poses special challenges in thedigital environment, where it is unclear whether traditional assumptionsand practices continue to be effective and where one of the most difficultissues is defining conceptually, procedurally, and technologically, the pa-rameters of digital records. All students should have training in researchmethods so that they may be better able approach their work empiricallyas well as critically. The question, however, is what sort of methods trainingis likely to be most effective for the kinds of issues they are likely to faceas professionals or as researchers. While students should obviously be en-couraged to take methods courses in areas that are most relevant to theircareer goals, there is no doubt that availability of courses in ethnographyand in video and oral history would be valuable to those seeking to workin community-based archives or in culturally sensitive settings.

Management and policy curricula also need to challenge the notion ofthe big archival institution to which all records and collections will flow.Curricula need to address how nontraditional archives such as, for ex-ample, personal, community-based, or Internet-based archives should beorganized and managed. This might involve discussions of new organiza-tional and economic models for digital or special media preservation co-operatives. The curriculum should also address relevant policy in different




national and cultural contexts (e.g., ownership and other forms of propertyand moral rights, personal privacy and national security, transnationalmovement of artifacts, and Indigenous sovereignty concerns) [24].

Beyond the curricula, there are also questions about how to teach (e.g.,employing more case-based and service learning), where to teach (e.g.,within communities such as Indigenous communities where there is emo-tional support and intellectual context, rather than requiring communitymembers to come to the academic institutions), and who should teach.The latter question raises a number of difficult issues for the field ofarchival science and for iSchools. The Pluralizing the Archival Paradigmproject, as well as the recent Society of American Archivists A*Census, bothindicate that almost all faculty in all the countries involved are drawn fromsimilar social, ethnic, and racial backgrounds. Within the iSchools, at least,there is progress being made in terms of the disciplinary diversity of theacademic backgrounds of faculty teaching in archival studies (althoughthe diminishing numbers of faculty with professional archival experienceis causing some concern within the archival profession). Because facultyhave very similar backgrounds and were themselves trained within thedominant archival paradigm, how well equipped are they to advance thereflexivity and cultural sensitivity of their programs? We are not suggestingthat ethnic and/or experiential diversity alone will make things better but,rather, that those types of diversity along with a more diverse range oftheoretical and cultural frameworks and perspectives will result in a richereducational environment. Adjunct faculty have always augmented ladderfaculty and helped to integrate real-life perspectives into professional ed-ucation. Bringing in teachers from a more diverse range of community aswell as institutional backgrounds would also help pluralize the educationalenvironment. Moreover, educational programs could go much further to-ward recognizing and entering into partnerships with traditional teacherswithin communities, such as elders in Indigenous communities, who havea standing and knowledge that is likely to be quite different from that ofmost academics.

Examples of Implementations

This article concludes by citing examples of three different efforts that areunderway to address some of the issues raised in the prior discussion.

Implementation AThe UCLA Department of Information Studies has implemented severalstrategies to support a more culturally sensitive and responsive curriculum




for all its master’s of library and information science (MLIS) students,including those in its archival studies specialization. The MLIS programincludes six required core courses, each of which must include componentsaddressing aspects of the three MLIS specializations areas—library studies,archival studies, and informatics. Students are also required to select onefrom a minimum of three different research methods courses offered eachyear. Both the core course, “Information and Society,” and the introductorycourse in American archives and manuscripts provide students with a re-view of the intellectual lineage of the information and, specifically in thiscase, the archival science fields, as well as media theory (an area that canbe further explored in electives provided through the MA program inmoving image archive studies). Five years ago, the program first imple-mented a required core course entitled “Diversity, Ethics, and Change,”which includes elements drawn from cultural and critical race theory, aswell as a significant service-learning component whereby students areplaced in nontraditional information settings, often within different ethnicor racial communities, to carry out information organization or consultingactivities. Building upon that experience within the archival studies spe-cialization, two new electives have been developed—one with an academicspecial collections perspective, “Collecting Community Materials,” and onethat approaches the issue of community documentation from the oppositeperspective, “Community-Based Archiving.” The latter course, which alsohas a significant service-learning component, partners students with com-munity groups who are working to document their own activities or retaintheir own archival materials, either physically or digitally. The course ad-dresses issues of cultural and language barriers—including obtaining en-tree and building trust, notions of how an archive might be alternatelyconceived within that community and designed to support those notions,how to develop a support base for the archival endeavor, and economicand collaborative mechanisms for sustaining the archive and ensuring itspreservation over time.

Implementation BAt the University of Oklahoma School of Library and Information Studies,which is in the process of developing a new archival studies specializationthat draws in particular on the state’s Native American heritage, the corecourse is designed to introduce students to historical/theoretical foun-dations and key practices/terms/concepts of the archival professions. Thisis covered in roughly the first half of the course. During the second halfof the course, students are introduced to the ideas of postmodernism,postcolonialism, constructionism (especially in the context of how historiesare constructed), cultural theory, and pluralism. Those concepts are fur-




ther explored in an archival context and are then used to critique tradi-tional archival theory by using Indigenous, Afro-Mexican, and Asian-Pacificcommunities as cases.

Implementation CIn July 2008, a collaboration of programs preparing doctoral students inarchival studies at UCLA; the University of Michigan; the University ofPittsburgh; the University of Maryland; the University of North Carolina,Chapel Hill; the University of Texas; and Simmons College was funded bythe Institute of Library and Information Services to provide two sets offour-year doctoral fellowships in successive years. The fellowships are de-signed to encourage the development of new, diverse cohorts of educatorsin archival studies who are versed in contemporary issues and researchmethodologies and to implement annual week-long summer Archival Ed-ucation and Research Institutes (AERI) for doctoral students and facultyfrom the United States and worldwide. The goals of the institutes are to

1. Create a network and community of faculty and students to helpmentor doctoral students and junior faculty.

2. Advance curriculum and pedagogical development in archival studies.3. Further current research development through presentations, post-

ers, and workshop activities.4. Foster interest in future collaborations both nationally and internation-

ally.

The first institute took place at UCLA with 75 faculty and doctoral at-tendees and drew upon local institutional and research expertise and ex-periences, especially those relating to moving image, sound, and othermedia; ethnic, Indigenous, diasporic, and other community-based initia-tives; conservation and preservation practices; and digital record keepingand curatorship. The second institute will be held in June 2010 at theUniversity of Michigan.

Conclusion

Concomitant with the rapid expansion of archival studies as an interdis-ciplinary and multimethodological area of iSchool and LIS education andresearch, we have argued for the need to rethink, transform, and expandthe traditional underlying archival paradigm so that it is more reflectiveof the shifting cultural, social, technological, and political demands andchanges that are occurring in the twenty-first century. Arguably, and at therisk of gross overgeneralization, such expansion would never have occurred




if archival education had remained predominantly located within historyprograms because it would not have had the same exposure to disciplines,technologies, and methods, as well as empirical research infrastructure,training, and funding incentives. Moreover, it would likely have remainedfocused on the historical and artifactual aspects of records and archives,rather than on the human, bureaucratic, and cultural systems within whichrecords and archives reside and perform.

Without such a rethinking and transformation, there is little doubt thatthe field would continue to expand, but it would likely result in archivalstudies being a less relevant, useful, and effective area of research, practice,and, indeed, activism than it could be in an increasingly postcolonial,digital, globalized world. Reflexivity and inclusivity in archival education,practice, and research will help to create opportunities for educators, stu-dents, and practitioners to gain a richer understanding of diverse usercommunities and their interaction with all forms of records and archives,in and across space and time. Archival studies may also thereby provideencouragement for other iSchool and LIS educators and researchers toexamine more critically and with more cultural sensitivity the lineage andimpact of the paradigms that they are applying.

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