Looking for Speakers: Open Archives & Special Collections Symposium – 26 October 2023

York University’s W.P. Scott Chair in Librarianship, Hilary Barlow, is seeking presenters for an upcoming symposium exploring digital collections and Open Educational Resources (OER). Potential presenters do not have to be familiar with OER, as the symposium is also seeking presentations related to digital projects in archives and special collections.  

The event will be hosted via Zoom on Thursday, October 26 at 1 pm Eastern time, with presentations lasting 20 minutes plus a question period. There will be a concluding presentation by the Scott Chair on her current research. Presenters from Canada, the United States, and abroad are welcome. The symposium is being offered as part of International Open Access Week.

Interested presenters can email Hilary Barlow via hbarlow@yorku.ca with questions and potential topics.

New Issue: Oral History Review

Oral History Review, Fall/Winter 2023
(subscription)

Special Issue: Disrupting Best Practices

Editorial
Editors’ Introduction
Abby Perkiss, Janneken Smucker, and David Caruso

Research Articles
Money Talks: Narrator Compensation in Oral History
By Fanny Julissa García and Nara Milanich

Oral History Indexing
By Douglas Lambert

The Evolution of Best Practice at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Oral History Program “(Special Focus on Best Practices)”
By Leslie McCartney

Learning about Sharing Authority With the Gathered Voices of Malmö
By Robert Nilsson Mohammadi and Sima Nurali Wolgast

Getting it Right: Safeguarding a Respected Space for Indigenous Oral Histories and Truth Telling
By Rhonda Povey, Susan Page, and Michelle Trudgett

Book Reviews
The Language of Russian Peasants in the Twentieth Century: A Linguistic Analysis and Oral History
Reviewed by Orel Beilinson

Once Upon a Time in Iraq: History of a Modern Tragedy
Reviewed by Mia Martin Hobbs

Remembering Theodore Roosevelt: Reminiscences of His Contemporaries
Reviewed by Rachel B. Lane

Children’s Voices from the Past: New Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives Reviewed by Kimberly Redding

Fly Until You Die: An Oral History of Hmong Pilots in the Vietnam War
Reviewed by Troy Reeves

Survival Schools: The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin Cities.
Reviewed by Cameron Vanderscoff

CFP: Studies in Oral History

Studies in Oral History, Issue No. 46, 2024

Joint Editors: Skye Krichauff and Carla Pascoe Leahy

Working Lives & Workplaces

Peer-reviewed articles

Contributions are invited from Australia and overseas for the peer-reviewed articles section of the 2024 issue of Studies in Oral History, the journal of Oral History Australia (OHA).

This special issue will explore oral histories of working lives, workplaces and work, all broadly defined to incorporate histories of volunteering, military service and other types of service. Papers that employ or interrogate oral history methodologies and illuminate aspects of working life, workplaces, and workplace culture are invited.

Contributions are invited across the following themes (though are not limited to these):

  • How the experience of work is mediated by gender, ethnicity, class, and generation
  • How technological innovation changed the nature of work
  • How workers have sought to protect their employment rights and conditions
  • Migrants’ experience of the workplace
  • Occupational health and safety
  • Multi-generations of families working at the same workplace
  • Unfree work
  • Work and the environment
  • Workplace closures, redundancies and lay-offs.

As all articles are subject to anonymous peer review, pleasure ensure your submission contains no identifying material. Articles submitted to the Oral History Australia Editorial Board for peer review will first be assessed for suitability by the Editorial Board. Please consult the Guidelines for Contributors and Journal Style Guide for further information.

Word limits and deadlines

To be considered for peer review, articles should be no more than 8000 words, including references. Publication of the issue is anticipated in late 2024.

Deadline for submissions: Friday 1 December 2023.

Submission

Send submissions to: Dr Alexandra Dellios, Chair, Oral History Australia Editorial Board, email editorialboard.journal@oralhistoryaustralia.org.au.

Reports

Submissions are also invited for the reports section of the 2024 issue of Studies in Oral History. Reports may describe oral history projects conducted by academic researchers, museum curators, heritage professionals, consulting historians, community historians and more. Projects may have resulted in public outcomes such as websites, exhibitions, podcasts, theses, articles or books. Please note the reports section is not peer-reviewed; notes from the field, updates on exciting new work, or reflections on the process and/or outcomes of oral history projects are encouraged. Reports which relate to the issue theme of ‘Working Lives and Workplaces’ are welcome but not mandatory.

Word limit: 1,500 words.

Deadline for report submissions: Monday 30 April 2023.

Please send reports to Alexandra Mountain, Reports Editor of Studies in Oral History, reports.journal@oralhistoryaustralia.org.au

Please note that while the reports are not peer-reviewed, we cannot accept all reports for publication and accepted reports will need to be edited for length, clarity and adherence to the Style Guide. Reports will be selected on the basis of quality of writing, the diversity of oral history perspectives showcased across the reports section and relevance to the special issue theme. Please consult the Guidelines for Contributors and Style Guide for further information.

Call for Nominations: American Library Association’s “Best Historical Materials” List

The Historical Materials Committee of the American Library Association/Reference and User Services Association’s History Section is soliciting nominations for the committee’s annual Best Historical Materials list.

The list consists of the best print and online historical bibliographies, indexes, reference products, and published primary sources created, published, or significantly updated within the past two calendar years and primarily in English. The 2023 list will consider titles published or significantly updated in 2022 and 2023.

The committee encourages nominations from librarians, scholars, and students.

Nominations can be submitted for the committee’s consideration at https://forms.gle/ntm9UH8Y5M8pF5LbA .  The deadline for nominations is September 30.

For past winners, please see rusaupdate.org/awards/best-historical-materials/. For questions, please email one of the co-chairs of the Historical Materials Committee, Steve Knowlton (steven.knowlton@princeton.edu) or Jennifer Bartlett (jen.bartlett@uky.edu).

Contact Information
Steve Knowlton

Contact Email
sak2@princeton.edu

URL: https://forms.gle/ntm9UH8Y5M8pF5LbA

New/Recent Publications

Articles

Neville Vakharia, Alex H. Poole, “Knowledge management in museums: enhancing organizational performance and public value,” Journal of Documentation 75 no. 1, 2023

Cheryl Klimaszewski, “Towards a vernacular aesthetics of liking for information studies,” Journal of Documentation 75 no. 1, 2023

Jonathan Furner, Birger Hjørland, “The coverage of information science and knowledge organization in the Library of Congress Subject Headings,” Journal of Documentation 75 no. 1, 2023

Amber L. Cushing, “PIM as a caring: Using ethics of care to explore personal information management as a caring process,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 1–11

Garg, K., Jayanetti, H.R., Alam, S. et al. “Challenges in replaying archived Twitter pages.” Int J Digit Libr (2023).

Brady Lund and Amrollah Shamsi, “Women authorship in library and information science journals from 1981 to 2020: Is equitable representation being attained?” Journal of Information Science, 49(5), 1335–1343

Ya-Ning Chen, “An investigation of linked data catalogue features in libraries, archives, and museums: a checklist approach,” The Electronic Library 41 no. 5

Books

Allemagne et généalogie : retrouver ses ancêtres allemands (Germany and Genealogy)
Sandrine Heiser

The Anticolonial Museum: Reclaiming Our Colonial Heritage
Bruno Brulon Soares
Routledge, 2023

The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Destruction
Edited by José Antonio González Zarandona, Emma Cunliffe, Melathi Saldin
Routledge, 2023

Tied and Bound: A Comparative View on Manuscript Binding
Edited by: Alessandro Bausi and Michael Friedrich
Volume 33 in the series Studies in Manuscript Cultures

Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide
Elyse Semerdjian
Stanford University Press, 2023

Archive of Tongues: An Intimate History of Brownness
Moon Charania
Duke University Press, 2023

The Power of Oral History Narratives: Lived Experiences of International Global Scholars and Artists in their Native Country and After Immigrating to the United States
Edited by: Toni Fuss Kirkwood-Tucker, Frans H. Doppen
Information Age Publishing, 2023

Queer Exhibition Histories
Edited by: Bas Hendrikx
Valiz, 2023

Sound Writing: Voices, Authors, and Readers of Oral History
Shelley Trower
Oxford University Press, 2023

Dimensions of Curation: Considering Competing Values for Intentional Exhibition Practices
Edited by Ann Rowson Love and Pat Villeneuve
Rowman & Littlefield, 2023

Podcast

Treasures Revealed Episode 12 – Pregnancy Photos

Talking Archives Episode 8 – Archivist Melissa J. Nelson

Reports

Towards a Glossary for Web Archive Research: Version 1.0
https://cc.au.dk/fileadmin/dac/Projekter/WARCnet/Healy_et_al_Towards_a_Glossary.pdf

Scholarly Use of Web Archives Across Ireland: The Past, Present & Future(s)
https://cc.au.dk/fileadmin/dac/Projekter/WARCnet/Healy_Byrne_Scholarly_Use_01.pdf

Understanding the history of national domain crawls: mapping and archiving the national web domain in Denmark and France
https://cc.au.dk/fileadmin/dac/Projekter/WARCnet/Teszelszky_Understanding_the_history.pdf

Using a National Web Archive for the Study of Web Defacements? A Case-study Approach
http://cc.au.dk/fileadmin/dac/Projekter/WARCnet/Kurzmeier_Using_a_national.pdf

Arts and Humanities Research Council and Research Libraries UK – Protecting Dispersed Collections: a Framework for Managing the At-Risk Heritage Assets of Catholic Religious Institutes
https://castrial.files.wordpress.com/2023/08/ahrc-rluk-fellowship-report-1-1.pdf

New Issue: Restaurator. International Journal for the Preservation of Library and Archival Material

Restaurator. International Journal for the Preservation of Library and Archival Material, vol. 44 issue 3
subscription

Some Practical Aspects of Nanocellulose Film: Characterization, Expansion and Shrinking Tests, and Techniques to Create Remoistenable Nanocellulose
Robin Canham, Alison Murray, Rosaleen Hill

Hidden Players: Small Paper Nails—Manufacture and Application of Paper Nails in Chinese Double-Leaved Books
Rong Yu, Zhewei Shen, Peng Liu

Barriers to Preservation for Digital Information Resources in University Libraries of Pakistan
Rafiq Ahmad, Muhammad Rafiq, Muhammad Arif

Intelligent Repair Method for Archival Videos Based on the Super-SloMo Technology
Hui Li

Announcing the “Archival Futures: Ethics and Carework in the Archive” Reading Group

From Archive/Counterarchive

If the archive is a remnant, it is one that keeps whispering to me, insisting on its place in my everyday life.

Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You (Punctum, 2018)

How have attitudes about ethics and care in archival research – and other work concerning archives and special collections – changed in recent years? How has this shifted the social, cultural, economic, and political significance of archives in scholarly and creative forms of humanistic inquiry? In the Archival Futures reading group, we will make our way through a curated list of key readings that illustrate the ways that archival scholarship in a variety of disciplines and research areas and features a range of important voices in the field. Selected readings focus on contemporary, evolving critical and generative conversations taking place between scholars and the archive, attending to themes of ethics and carework and the ways relationships between collections and different forms of scholarship are framed and reimagined in recent texts. 

Our first reading will be a selection from Michelle Caswell’s Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (Routledge, 2021), a call to action for archivists and others to reimagine and renegotiate the relations between archives, affected communities, and the present.

This reading group is intended for academics, artists, and memory workers from any background interested and/or involved in scholarly and creative research about archives and invites participants to read, discuss, and share perspectives. Some knowledge and experience working and reading in archives and/or archival studies is useful but not necessary.

SCHEDULE AND REGISTRATION

The group will be led by Dr. Julia Polyck-O’Neill (University of Guelph). The first session will take place via Zoom on Thursday Oct 5 at 4:30pm EST. Please register using the Google Form below. Subsequent meetings will also be held throughout the Fall and Winter semesters, with specific dates to be announced shortly. 

https://forms.gle/3WpLKCcv79HG9uDb7

New Issue: Code4Lib

Code4Lib, Issue 57, 2023-08-29
open access

There are several articles of interest to archivists:

Evaluating HTJ2K as a Drop-In Replacement for JPEG2000 with IIIF
Glen Robson, Stefano Cossu, Ruven Pillay, Michael D. Smith

From DSpace to Islandora: Why and How
Vlastimil Krejčíř, Alžbeta Strakošová, and Jan Adler

Creating a Full Multitenant Back End User Experience in Omeka S with the Teams Module
Alexander Dryden and Daniel G. Tracy

The Forgotten Disc: Synthesis and Recommendations for Viable VCD Preservation
Andrew Weaver and Ashley Blewer

Breathing Life into Archon: A Case Study in Working with an Unsupported System
Krista L. Gray

Seeking Managing Editor and Book Review Editor for the Oral History Review

OHA is pleased to announce the first two members of the 2024-26 editorial team for its journal, Oral History Review: Holly Werner-Thomas as editor, and Robert LaRose as copy editor. Holly and Robert bring impressive experience and expertise to lead the next era of this leading oral history research journal published for OHA by Routledge/Taylor and Francis.

The OHA is searching for two additional team members to join Holly & Robert on the new editorial team in the roles of Managing Editor and Book Review Editor. Learn more and apply by September 15th here: https://oha.memberclicks.net/ohr-editor-app

This call is open to oral history practitioners – including oral historians, librarians, archivists, freelance/independent historians, instructors, trainers – located worldwide.

Contact Information

Oral History Association

Contact Email

oha@oralhistory.org

URL

2024-26 OHR Editorial Team Updates

Call for Proposals: AI in OH Online Symposium

AI in OH: How New and Evolving Technologies Will Impact the Profession

Since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in the fall of 2022, artificial intelligence, or AI for short, has pervaded our shared discourse and lexicon. Myriad organizations and sectors are at once hurriedly embracing and cautiously considering the impacts large language models and complex algorithms might have on their industries. Oral history is not immune to AI’s influence, and in certain cases the profession might already hold extant examples of its effects on practice.

For this online symposium, OHA invites oral history practitioners and scholars from all disciplines who utilize oral history in their work to submit paper or roundtable proposals detailing any number of intersections between artificial intelligence and oral history. Topics could include, but are not limited to:

  • Augmenting/Improving oral history workflows with AI tools
  • Impacts of utilizing oral histories for large language model training
  • Influences of AI in representations of racial/ethnic identity or racial power structures
  • Creative/Productive uses of oral history material via AI tools
  • Ethical considerations regarding AI behaviors or products
  • Ruminations on the future of the field in an AI-driven world

The symposium is tentatively set for the work week of July 15, 2024, with its ultimate timing/length determined by the strength of the submission field. Proposals may either be submitted as stand-alone papers/presentations, a panel of topically coherent papers/presentations, a roundtable centered around a central theme, or a two-hour workshop. Your proposal should include:

  • The title of each paper, presentation, and/or proposed panel/roundtable/workshop
  • An abstract of no more than 500 words for each individual paper/presentation/workshop, or a single abstract for a proposed roundtable
  • Name, affiliation, and email address for each prospective participant
  • A short bio of no more than 250 words for each prospective participant

For those looking to find fellow presenters for their panel, roundtable, or workshop idea, feel free to use OHA’s collaborative Google Doc for the symposium found HERE.

Submit your proposals within the OHA Symposium Portal by January 1st, 2024. If you have any questions about the submission process, please reach out to AI in OH program co-chairs Steven Sielaff (steven_sielaff@baylor.edu) & Sarah Milligan (sarah.milligan@okstate.edu).

Proposals will be reviewed by a program committee in early 2024, with applicants being informed of their acceptance or declination by March 1st, 2024. The full program will be released and registration for the symposium will open shortly thereafter. For future news and updates, please visit the official symposium website: https://oralhistory.org/ai

Contact Information

Steven Sielaff – Associate Director, Oral History Association

Contact Email

Steven_Sielaff@baylor.edu

URL

AI in OH Virtual Symposium (July 2024)