While archival user studies have largely focused on humanities (and adjacent) scholars, this paper focuses on anthropologists engaged in scientific research. Based on qualitative results from an open-ended survey, we investigate how science-based anthropologists perceive and use archives in their work. We ask: How are science-based anthropologists and archaeologists reusing archival data in their research? What difficulties or barriers do they encounter in reusing archival data in scientific contexts? What attitudes or understandings about archival research are held by science-based anthropologists and archaeologists? Our findings primarily add to the body of literature about user experience in archives and more broadly to the emerging literature on archival data reuse. Major findings include (1) barriers and gatekeeping legacies that impact archival research and the ability of researchers to reuse data and (2) mixed perceptions about archives among researchers. We also discuss suggestions made by these communities of practice, and the ways that barriers to archival data reuse may stem from a lack of knowledge about core archival and information infrastructures among researcher communities. Together, this research showcases possible (re)uses of important primary source data in archives among scientific communities but highlights that barriers to access and misperceptions create a gap in exploiting that potential. We argue for a “re-imagining” of anthropological archives as relevant to contemporary communities and scientific pursuits toward a richer scientific research environment.

Homeless services systems provide unhoused individuals access to emergency shelter, subsidized housing, and other life-sustaining resources. In this paper, we present a qualitative study that draws on the experiences of fifteen social service workers to examine how recordkeeping practices sustain homeless services systems and unite a tangled web of institutions and actors, including public housing systems, nonprofit agencies, and local governments. We address the following research questions: How is the infrastructure of homeless services sustained by recordkeeping? How are social service workers affected by increasing recordkeeping demands? In what ways do social service workers work against or ‘find the play’ in this system? To address these questions, we collected interviews and conducted artifact walkthroughs with our study participants. We analyzed the data using an infrastructural lens and found that current recordkeeping practices within homeless services systems comprise an "infrastructure of last resort" that functions logistically, prioritizing efficiency and speed. We also found that social service workers “speak back” to logistification by making the homeless services infrastructure more legible to their unhoused clients through mediation and acts of translation that help to produce better resource outcomes. Our findings show how structuring recordkeeping in ways that privilege efficiency and speed disrupts social service work and interferes with social service workers’ ability to provide care for vulnerable individuals facing life-altering and life-threatening hardships.

The UK Government Web Archive (UKGWA) has been archiving government websites since 1996 and now holds regular snapshots of over 5000 sites. Currently, this material can be accessed through browsing or a simple keyword search interface on their website and has also been catalogued in The National Archives’ online catalogue, Discovery. However, the scale of the UKGWA exposes the limits of the current search interface, and there is no facility to understand the archive in aggregate. This article seeks to go beyond the simple keyword search by exploring the data sources available, from APIs to web crawling, for computational analysis of the UKGWA. The article is accompanied by two Python Notebooks which present examples of analysis using each data source. Notebooks lower the technical barriers for the reader to explore and interpret the UKGWA as data, while surfacing the challenges around making web material computationally accessible.

In the last twenty years, anthropologists, archivists, and historians have dedicated increased attention to the study of archives as objects of research themselves. In so doing, scholars have predominantly examined the emergence and transformations of archives during the early modern age, focusing mostly on political and diplomatic depositories. They have tended to neglect financial archives, which is unfortunate, as—alongside judicial archives—they were probably the largest documentary repositories of the pre-modern world and those that first faced the problem of managing huge masses of documentation. This article discusses the formation and development of the Kingdom of Sicily’s financial archives in the later Middle Ages, arguing that this repository evolved into a collecting archive by the early fifteenth-century, when it preserved not only the records and accounts produced by the central financial administration, but also those from a number of territorial officers and magistracies. This archival turn, I suggest, originated from the fact that the Crown of Aragon’s rulers constantly needed increased incomes to fund bureaucracies and warfare and exercise patronage, and thus needed financial information organized, at hand, and under their control. After briefly discussing the emergence of the financial archive in the thirteenth-century, this essay traces the Crown’s attempts to create a stable repository for storing financial records and accounts and its continuous struggles to prevent documentation from being scattered and dispersed. Finally, it examines the successful strategy that King Alfonso V of Aragon (1416–58), called the Magnanimous, pursued to organize financial documentation and concentrate records and accounts produced by financial administration into a stable building. The essay pays particular attention to the material aspects of preserving records, e.g., the restoration of buildings, construction of chests, and preparation of secure locks that were integral to the emergence of collecting archives for financial documents in the later Middle Ages.

This paper reports on a study aimed at providing a structure for the various types of “archives” in China. As the concept of “archives” in China has Chinese characteristics (hence the quotation marks), so is the practice in China that is relevant to the Chinese “archives.” Developing a typology of Chinese “archives,” therefore, did not strive to tease out the logics between and among these types, but rather focused on outlining their existence in their originating environment. The typology was developed using the perspective of historical development, i.e., presenting the various types of archives along with the particular times and/or spaces in which they existed and functioned. Representative features were summarized based on the practices associated with these archives, i.e., the time requirement for internal archival transfer, the broad coverage of archives and the flexible criteria for archives categorization. These features differ from those in other countries and are related to the requirements of Chinese archival management. It is hoped that this presentation of the typology of Chinese “archives” will provide readers outside of China an informative introduction and a general understanding of archival practices in China, and will provide a foundation for comparative studies between China and other countries.

China is one of the world’s earliest civilisations with a written history extending back nearly five thousand years and an accompanying history of over three thousand six hundred years of archival work. The Three-Character Classic of Archival Work, a poem written in a traditional Chinese style, outlines this long history of the development of archival work in China. Through the presentation and analysis of an English translation of the newly revised version of this poem, the authors examine the archival history and practice of China from ancient times to the present day. In explanatory notes and a reflection examining the historical overview the poem provides, the authors consider the formation, change, transition, and development of Chinese archival traditions to demonstrate the multi-faceted impact on archival work today. The article establishes how, over time, some of these traditions have been incorporated into current practice, whereas others have been updated or rejected. Alongside this, the development of Chinese archival education over the past century is also detailed, to illustrate how this has been key to the professionalisation of archival work. The article concludes by arguing that, in the context of rapidly changing society and technology, the experience and tradition of the past will continue to provide a valuable reference point for the future development of archival work in China.

In the opening keynote speech at the Eighth International Conference on the History of Records and Archives (I-CHORA 8) in Melbourne, Australia, the author provided an overview of archival displacement as an historical phenomenon, before concentrating on postcolonial cases and arguing for a fuller global history of the displacement of archives during decolonisation. The talk concluded with some thoughts on future directions for research on displaced archives. Understanding the term “displaced archives” to refer to any records that have been removed from the context of their creation and whose ownership is disputed, this short article elaborates further upon a potential research agenda for displaced archives, which remains an under-researched area in archival studies.

The communist party had a developed organisational structure which consisted of numerous elements forming a system of mutual dependencies and a very unique office personnel who was in charge of managing the said system. The aim of the article is to describe the system of recording and the flow of information in local structures of communist party in Poland between 1975 and 1989 which were formed from provincial party organisation, meaning provincial party committees and all their subordinate committees and lower-level organisations. It was an enormous bureaucratic system which, in bigger provinces, could be made up from even a few thousand of activists, some involved more, some less in shaping the life of the society, distributing information and producing documentation about the party functioning.