I would like to introduce myself as the new General Editor of Archives and Manuscripts. I have just started a new job at Cambridge University Library, where I am the Curator of Scientific Collections, and was previously University Archivist at the University of Melbourne. My interests are broadly using archives for research and teaching, archives and histories of science, personal digital archiving, university and collecting archives, and thinking historically about recordkeeping. Joining the new editorial team are the Assistant Editor, Hannah Hibbert, who is the Archivist at the Australian Turf Club in Sydney, and the Reviews Editor, Annelie de Villiers, who works at the eScholarship Research Centre at the University of Melbourne and is commencing her PhD on reciprocal research methods at Monash University in 2017. On behalf of the new editorial team, I would like to express my thanks to the outgoing editors, who will continue on the Editorial Board, Dr Sebastian Gurciullo, General Editor for eight years, Adrian Cunningham, Reviews Editor for 21 years, and Dr Richard Lehane, Assistant Editor for three years.
Our main goal in the next two years is to increase the content and value of the journal to members and readers through attracting more high-quality submissions in Australia and internationally. The Archives and Manuscripts sub-committee of the Australian Society of Archivists, chaired by Kylie Percival, will develop the future direction of the journal. Green open access is currently available to all authors for Archives and Manuscripts, who are able to publish accepted manuscripts on their personal websites, professional network or archiving repository with no embargo period. There are some exciting issues coming up. The November special issue on Radical Recordkeeping, guest-edited by Katherine Jarvie, Greg Rolan, Heather Soyka and Narissa Timbery, is attracting a great deal of interest from potential authors. We also have the Australian Society of Archivists conference in Melbourne in September and speakers are invited to indicate their interest in writing for the journal.
This issue of Archives and Manuscripts presents three different perspectives on recordkeeping, from an information science researcher examining South Africa’s digital preservation capacity for records and archives, a digital archivist working in a provincial government archive in Canada, and a library science researcher studying Native American museum archives.
Mpho Ngoepe, of the Department of Information Science at the University of South Africa, Pretoria, considers in his article ‘Archival Orthodoxy of Post-Custodial Realities for Digital Records in South Africa’ the adoption of digital records and information management systems by government agencies since the 1990s. Although some agencies have been through several system migrations, Ngoepe’s study points to the absence of a digital preservation perspective and the possible loss of records that may have occurred. The National Archives and Records Service of South Africa (NARSSA) is unable to accept electronic records transfers. Ngoepe also highlights training and archival education of digital archivists and digital preservation specialists as a skills gap in South African higher and professional education. He argues that South Africa should adopt a post-custodial model to allow distributed records creators to establish interim solutions to digital preservation, following national standards and guidelines to be developed and monitored by NARSSA. He reflects on the post-custodial policies of the National Archives of Australia (NAA) and the National Archives of Canada in the early 1990s and how the NAA reversed this decision in 2000 owing to growing maturity in the management and preservation of digital records. Ngoepe also considers the challenges and benefits of cloud storage hosted solutions for digital repositories in the South African legal and administrative context. It would be interesting to hear from readers in Canada and Australia reflecting on the experience, ostensibly short-lived in the Australian case, of a post-custodial solution to digital archiving. Is it a useful way to mature the digital recordkeeping environment? Also, from a South African perspective, what is at stake in terms of both government accountability and historical memory in failing to develop solutions for digital recordkeeping, preservation and archiving?
While many government archives in Australia may well have adopted or returned to custodial solutions for archiving digital records, it seems likely that post-custodial solutions persist in some sectors of government recordkeeping. The post-custodial paradigm remains pertinent to initiatives in community archiving, argues Michael Jones of the University of Melbourne in his review of Ephemeral Material: Queering the Archive (2014) by Alana Kumbier. Jones points out that this connection between community archiving practice and archival theory is not explored by Kumbier, who approaches the subject from an activist archivist perspective.
A case of digital archiving practice especially of email formats at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick is discussed by William P Vinh-Doyle in his article ‘Appraising Email (Using Digital Forensics): Techniques and Challenges’. The program is operational and receiving transfers from government departments. Forensic disk imaging techniques, in particular using Forensic Toolkit hardware with EnCase software, the latter choice adopted owing to a community of users in other sectors in the New Brunswick government administration, are used for powerful searching, tagging and indexing. These functions assist examination and appraisal including flagging sensitive material, reference and access for researchers, and arrangement and description. The volume of emails received by government officers demands more automated techniques to aid the still necessary manual examination of private or sensitive material. Vinh-Doyle discusses the ethical issues of dealing with email communication, drawing the conclusion that some users of government email had tended to treat it as a ‘private’ rather than official form of communication, at least in the period covered by archival transfers. After some debate, New Brunswick archivists concluded that this use and misuse of email was itself a part of the historical record that should be preserved, appropriately managed and accessed.
One of the highlights of this issue is Jane Zhang’s article ‘Lakota Winter Counts, Pictographic Records, and Record Making and Remaking Histories’ about pictorial records created by the American Plains Indians. This form of recordkeeping drew on earlier Native Indian pictographic traditions, for example on stone, but used different media including skins and paper to record pictures representing key events from each calendar year. The purposes of the records were twofold: to mark the passing of years and to record key events as mnemonics to historical memory preserved in the oral tradition. The transportable forms of the Lakota winter counts coincided with the movement of white settlers into the West following the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804–06), and Zhang argues for a connection between the colonial encounter and the nature of the records produced by the Plains Indians. Lakota winter counts, which persisted until the adoption of writing and narrative forms in the twentieth century, were apparently traded and collected by settlers, thereby making their way into national collections the National Anthropological Archives and the National Museum of the American Indian.
General Editor, Archives and Manuscripts