Month: July 2023

Call for Abstracts: Special Issue of Comma on “Training and Education in Archives and Records Management”

Comma’s Editorial Board plans an edition devoted to the analysis and discussion of training and education in archives and records management around the world. This follows on from the special edition of Comma on “New Professionals in Archives and Records Management”. The abstracts for this demonstrate the importance that new professionals, and those concerned to support them, attach to training and education and their eagerness to critique and discuss their experiences. Training and education play a vital role in developing competent and confident archivists and records managers. Life-long learning and continuing professional development are crucial in both the maintenance of existing and the acquisition of new expertise, skills and knowledge for all individuals in the archives and records management workforce throughout their careers. 

ICA’s Train the Trainer Resource Pack defines education as “a systematic kind of instruction or intellectual and moral training designed to give participants a broad and/or deep understanding of the topics covered”. ICA’s Section on Archival Education and Training has a long tradition of international cooperation and support of ICA’s capacity building work. It also provides a forum for archival educators to network and start initiatives on international education and research. The Train the Trainer Pack describes training as “the transfer of knowledge and skills that enable participants to carry out their work”. ICA’s Training Programme, established in 2018, is currently undergoing its first significant review. Its primary goal has been to provide training opportunities and resources for those members in parts of the world without access to education and training. These two ICA entities are collaborating to provide guest editorship of the Comma special issue. 

To explore these important topics further, the International Council on Archives’ journal Comma invites abstract submissions for a special issue dedicated to the topic of “Training and Education in Archives and Records Management”. We encourage contributions on:  

  • Training themes and content, training delivery methods and styles 
  • Designing and delivering archives and records management education programmes 
  • Academic curriculum and/or on-the-job training 
  • Comparative surveys of education/training in archives and records management around the world  
  • Artificial intelligence and computational approaches in archival science 
  • Decolonizing archival curricula  
  • Translation and comparison of archives and records management terminology and concepts 
  • Competency frameworks, professional accreditation/certification 
  • Life-long learning and continuing professional development 
  • Developing collaborative international training and education programmes 

Articles comparing training and education traditions and cultures around the world are particularly welcome.  

The Guest editors welcome articles by: 

  • Trainers and training providers 
  • Educators and academics 
  • Apprentices and trainees 
  • Students and recently qualified professionals 
  • Employers, managers, mentors 
  • Professional associations 

The Guest editors especially wish to attract authors from all of ICA’s regions. We also encourage new professionals and first-time authors and are open to expressions of interest and draft abstracts which we are happy to review and discuss via email or virtual meetings prior to a final submission. Note that articles can be peer-reviewed at the request of authors. 

Abstracts for articles should include the author’s name(s), the article title, an abstract (of between 250 and 350 words) which describes what the article will be about, together with the main focus, any relevant research, and conclusions. Abstracts should be sent by 1st September, 2023, to Editor-in-Chief for Comma, Bethany Anderson (comma@ica.org), and special issue editors, Margaret Crockett (crockett@ica.org) and Andrew Flinn (a.flinn@ucl.ac.uk). Authors submitting abstract proposals will be notified during the first week in October. 

If accepted, articles can be up to 6,000 words but may be less if appropriate to the subject matter. The deadline for submitting the full article is 1st February 2024. Comma welcomes submissions in any of the seven languages of the journal: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish. The guidelines for submission of articles can be found here 

New Episode: Archives in Context

In the latest episode of Archives in Context, co-hosts Nicole Milano and Camila Zorrilla Tessler speak with editors Rachel Chatalbash, Susan Hernandez, and Megan Schwenke about their recent book Museum Archives: Practice, Issues, Advocacy (Society of American Archivists, 2022). Chatalbash, Hernandez, and Schwenke discuss museum archives and archivists, the genesis of the publication and its connection to the Museum Archives Section of SAA, and what they hope readers will learn from the volume. Listen today!

Research grants in History of the Book including Maps

Grants up to £4,000 for research into the history of the book, including studies of the production, transmission, circulation, dissemination, and consumption of text and graphics (i.e. maps, music, illustrations, and mass-produced prints).  

The Willison Foundation Charitable Trust promotes the advancement of the History of the Book by awarding funding to researchers working within that global field of study. It is interested in studies of the production, transmission, circulation, dissemination, and consumption of text and graphics (i.e. maps, music, illustrations, and mass-produced prints). It therefore expects to serve the needs of those working in the history of authorship, publishing, reading, and archiving, including maps, music, and prints; the history of libraries including deposit of computer memory; textual studies in the widest sense; codicology, palaeography, textual biography and editorial practice, textual communication, reception studies within oral as well as inscripted cultures.

To learn more see https://willisoncharitabletrust.org/applications/guidance-for-applicants/

Sarah Tyacke on behalf of the Trustees

New Issue: Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals

Volume 19 Issue 2, June 2023
subscription

Articles

Focus Issue: Safety and Cultural Heritage Summit: A Review of Hazard Identification and Risk Mitigation 2016–2021
Catharine Hawks, Tara D. Kennedy, Kathryn Makos, Anne Marigza, Melissa Miller, Samantha Snell

Navigating Change and Safety with Mercury in an Installation
Rebecca Horn, Emily Hamilton, Jeff Sotek, Steve Poletski

Not a Known Carcinogen: Health and Safety Considerations of New and Innovative Treatments
Kerith Koss Schrager, Anne Kingery-Schwartz, Julie Sobelman

Can’t Touch That: Safety, Preservation, and Collection Management Assessments of an Education Collection
Kelsey Falquero, Catharine Hawks, Deborah Hull-Walski, Kathryn Makos, Lisa Palmer

Managing Mental Health in Cultural Heritage Emergency Response: Occupational Safety and Operational Resilience
Rebecca Kennedy, Nora Lockshin

Toxic Tomes: Understanding the Use and Risks of Heavy Metals in Nineteenth-Century Bookcloth
Melissa Tedone, Rosie Grayburn

A Safer Work Environment for Stabilization of Moldy Collections
Amber L. Tarnowski

Protocols to Prevent Transmission of the Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome: Three Case Studies
Jo Anne Martinez-Kilgore

Powder Struggle: How a Contaminated Rare Book Collection Led to a New Paradigm of Collaboration at Harvard
John Avedian, Brenda Bernier

Case Study

Comprehensive Occupational and Environmental Risk Assessment of Elemental Mercury at the Edison National Historic Site in West Orange, NJ
Bernard L. Fontaine, Jr.

CFP for a special issue of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History on ‘Personal documents and ephemera as sources for interdisciplinary Holocaust scholarship’

Personal documents and ephemera as sources for interdisciplinary Holocaust scholarship

Edited by Hannah Holtschneider (University of Edinburgh) and Amy Simon (Michigan State University)

Since the 1970s, and proliferating in the 1980s, works of life-writing and of academic scholarship have sought to reconstruct the experience of individuals during persecution, and as refugees in different parts of the world. In the past decade micro-historical research has drawn increasingly on personal documents from the Holocaust. Branching out from works on Holocaust testimony and memoirs, literary scholars have engaged with diaries, letters and other ego-documents, and sociologists, linguists and ethnographers have shown interest in personal archives of families affected by the Holocaust. At the same time, the past two decades have seen a rise in publications of memoirs and other forms of life writing that engages specifically with such sources. Typically, such works proceed from one disciplinary perspective and rarely engage with scholarship working on similar sources but with a different scholarly method. Yet, a conversation of scholars in different disciplines working on the same documentary evidence is still lacking. Volumes such as The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life models a different approach by bringing together literary and cultural scholars with historians in the exploration of diary writing.

The proposed special issue seeks to facilitate a similar conversation and bring together scholarship on personal documents from the Holocaust. The aim is to develop and test multi- and interdisciplinary work regarding the value of different ways of approaching and interrogating these sources. We expect historians, literary scholars, linguists and translation scholars, historical anthropologists and sociologists among others to contribute to this special issue. We also encourage those working on documents from hitherto unexplored archival collections of Jewish refugees to majority-world locations, to propose contributions.

To this end we are inviting proposals for research articles of 7,000-12,000 words (incl. references and bibliography), annotated translations and research notes. We expect to host two gatherings during the writing process to engage in productive conversation about the  links between topics and cross-disciplinary approaches. The finished articles should act both as stand-alone research papers and model a methodological conversation across the entire special issue suggesting new directions for research in this field.  

Possible themes engaging personal documents and ephemera from the Holocaust could include, but are by no means limited to:

  • Multiple approaches to the same sources to explore gains of multidisciplinary research and opportunities for interdisciplinary work
  • The role of emotions for writing about personal archives
  • The relevance of materiality
  • Space and place in personal documents
  • Gender as an analytical category
  • Connecting micro- with macro-history
  • Language, translation and genre 
  • The value of engaging one collection of documents or a single diary
  • The value of working across a number of collections or different sources
  • Ethical considerations of writing about the lives of ‘private’ individuals 
  • Sociological, anthropological, historical, literary theory arising from engagement with personal documents

​​​​Timeline:

  • 300 word proposal with 100 word bio by 31 August 2023. Please send this to h.holtschneider@ed.ac.uk and simonamy@msu.edu.
  • Notification to submit full article by 30 September 2023.
  • Publication is envisaged by the end of 2025.

Contact Info: 

Dr Hannah Holtschneider, University of Edinburgh, UK

Contact Email: h.holtschneider@ed.ac.uk

URL: https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/hannah-holtschneider

CFP: The Image on the Page: A Study Day Around Illustrated Print Culture 

Concordia University Library, Montréal (Québec), Canada, 13 October 2023 (in-person) 

This study day aims to gather researchers around the subject of the printed image since the 1880s. A significant milestone of this era was the widespread implementation of halftone printing, a photomechanical process that eventually enabled the reproduction of subtle hues and gradients in publications with large-scale print runs. 

With particular attention to material bibliography and production techniques, we seek to better understand how illustrations contribute to the formation of meaning and discourses within different contexts from illustrated newspapers to etiquette manuals, from scientific journals to children’s books. As literacy levels continued to rise throughout the twentieth century, this vast array of publications was directed at increasingly diverse communities of readers whose expectations and needs influenced the development of visual culture in print. In turn, the intimate relationships that played out between image and text significantly shaped people’s impressions of the world around them by collating all manner of leisurely, professional, and political information within the space of the page. 

Straddling the disciplines of literary studies, art history, bibliography, and library sciences, the field of illustrated print culture is a privileged inroad to social history. We are inspired by the foundational work of Richard Benson’s The Printed Picture (MoMA, 2008) as well as recent scholarly interest in vernacular media, such as Sarah Mirseyedi and Gerry Beegan’s important contributions on the development of photomechanical reproduction and the Thierry Gervais-edited volume The “Public” Life of Photographs (The MIT Press, 2016). Heeding the call of rare books specialist Roger Gaskell, who has identified the need to develop a “bibliography of images,” we invite contributions in French and English that address any aspect of mass-produced visual materials as well as the diverse industrial or manual processes that enabled their production. 

Proposals may consider topics such as: 

  • The development, usage, or impact of various print processes. 
  • The importance of the graphic arts, including layout and typography, in the study of visual culture. 
  • The historical significance of a given book, magazine, or other kind of illustrated publication. 
  • Mass-produced works that rely on printed pictorial sequences such as photobooks, comic strips, or photo-novels. 
  • Posters, flyers, postcards and other kinds of ephemera. 
  • The invisible intermediaries: designers, prepress specialists, printers, typographers, etc. 
  • The evolving roles and statuses of author and illustrator/artist. 
  • Readership and reception. 
  • Distribution and publishing networks. 
  • The study of variants in the context of printed pictorial material: seriality, different editions, and the (ir)relevance of the original image. 
  • Approaches to the rapport between text and image in print and their resultant meaning. 
  • The creation and mass-circulation of stereotypes or other visual tropes. 
  • Theoretical or methodological approaches to multimedia artefacts: how to categorize, characterize and interpret hybrid print objects. 
  • The institutional challenges faced by scholars, libraries, and archives alike in collecting, cataloguing, preserving, and making illustrated print culture accessible. 

Proposals for 20 minute papers can be sent to stephanie.hornstein@concordia.ca before 15 July 2023. They should include a title followed by an abstract (200 words max.) and a short biography (100 words max.). 

Contact Info: 

Organizing committee 

Stéphanie Hornstein, PhD candidate, Department of Art History, Concordia University and Concordia Library’s Researcher-in-Residence 2022-2023. 

Michel Hardy-Vallée, PhD (art history), Visiting scholar, Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University. 

Contact Email: stephanie.hornstein@concordia.ca

URL: https://library.concordia.ca/about/news/#guid=https://library.concordia.ca/about/news/#i28_Apr_2023_11:44:00_EDT