Are you a Ph.D. or MLIS student studying, working, or living in Boston or DC? Are you passionate about archival research and the digital humanities?

Sourcery, an archival document delivery app based out of the University of Connecticut in partnership with Digital Scholar (the same non-profit behind Zotero), is hiring Community Ambassadors!

Visit https://sourceryapp.org/ambassadors to learn more!

Hm, one of my weak spots in my archival research at YIVO is that I'm pretty hopeless with handwritten #Yiddish unless it's very neat and orderly. Which many of the organizational records are not. Based on some of the goodies I've found in English-language (and a few German-language) meeting minutes, I'm surely missing out on some interesting stuff despite having a mountain of materials that I *am* able to read. Lesson learned.

*1775* Poland / Constitution entitled: "Tax on tea traders".
Central Archives of Historical Records

Unit type: Act documentation
Signature: 1/354/0/2.1/3094
Date/Period of creation: 1775
Dates: 1775 - 1775
Upload: Sikorski Arkadiusz htTPS://arQ.PL/
#Document #HistoricalDocument #OldManuscript #Archival #Archive #AncientText #HistoricalRecord #Manuscript #OldPaper #HistoricalArchive #AntiqueDocument #ArchivalResearch #HistoricalManuscript #OldRecord #DocumentaryEvidence #HistoricalText

We love supporting researchers and hearing about the innovative projects they accomplish using our collections. In this guest blog post, Will Hair—recent NYU Cinema Studies alumnus—shares his journey of working with archival materials to analyze the 1970 ABC TV production "Help." The show depicts Afram, a manufacturing company managed and staffed by African Americans in Asheville, North Carolina. Read more here:

https://wcftr.commarts.wisc.edu/index.php/2025/02/21/help-afram-and-black-capitalism/

I'm definitely a week behind in posting interesting tidbits from the YIVO archive of which I've documented many. It's partly because Mastodon doesn't seem to load well on the WiFi there or on the subway where I lose service a lot, but I'll have to sit and post some goodies sometime soon.

my first blog post in quite a while, going over the start of my research at YIVO this week and some of the mutual aid society pamphlets where I've been looking for traces of old New York klezmers.
https://alte.klezmor.im/2025/02/09/the-start-of-my-research-fellowship-at-yivo-in-new-york/

The "Friends of the BC Archives" seek to support an Indigenous individual or organization in accessing the BC Archives Collections; or the RBCM Indigenous Collections and Repatriation Department (ICAR) materials.
https://friendsofbcarchives.wordpress.com/indigenous-research-fund/

Applications for this $2000 fund are open until March 14th, 2025.

Thank you for your help in alerting prospective applicants.

#fluConf2025 will include a track on independent publishing and archival. We want to hear stories of what's being done to create non-corporate spaces on the web and preserve the media big companies so often erase.

Tell us about your motivations and experience moving from big platforms like Substack, Twitter, Instagram, and Wix to self-hosted or communally-operated alternatives.

Share your insights into the world of for-profit journals in academia, and efforts to establish better options not based on extraction.

How do you adapt to challenges like the falling adoption of established syndication protocols like RSS, the costs of AI scraping, and ever-changing search engine algorithms? How do you keep up with legal requirements for content moderation and age verification?

With so many corporate platforms shutting down, changing policies on media retention, or moving to monetize content for AI training: how have you gone about archiving your media? What tools and techniques have you used to ensure it isn't lost? How do we resist corporate capture of independent media and foster conditions for more long-lived infrastructure?

Apply up until midnight of January 19th, 2025 (anywhere on Earth)

https://fluconf.online/apply/

AI Ethics & Archives

This week I have been watching the recording of the UK National Archive’s Annual Digital Lecture, which was titled “Turning over a new leaf: AI ethics in/through the archive” with speakers Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney. It’s a really interesting talk and I definitely encourage everyone to watch it. I would characterize the tone as kind of AI neutral, they’re not negative about AI but they are wanting to ask questions and talk about the ways to be ethical with AI use.

The most interesting thing I think was Dr Drage’s toolkit she developed for abiding by the EU’s high risk AI tools regulations, which was called HEaT (High Risk EU Ai Toolkit). I couldn’t find it on the web myself, but Dr Drage explained some of the aspects of it, and the very first thing the toolkit asks is “Is AI the right tool for the desired outcome”. And I think that’s really important, especially in higher ed but in lots of other domains too. Higher ed and other sectors have found AI as this shiny new toy and the powers that be have subsequently been throwing it at every problem and non-problem, regardless of whether it’s really the best tool for the job. Things like the Library of Congress’s experiments with using AI to catalog records, which set the cataloging community in a bit of an uproar, are an example. Nobody seems to be asking “is AI really the best tool for this job” and instead they’re all so caught up in the shiny new thing that they’re throwing it at everything, without any real consideration for the consequences and ethics of the situation. And I really think there needs to be more conversation around what ARE the proper uses of AI? Many of them, we’ve already been using them for ages, such as for analyzing data or for natural language processing in search engines. The advent of generative AI on the scene has excited non-tech folks in a way that previous uses of AI haven’t. But that’s no excuse for not considering whether or not a particular use-case is really the best use of resources. And make no mistake, generative AI uses A LOT of resources, from massive amounts of water and electricity unsustainable to the environment to massive amounts of low-paid labor for training the AI (a wrinkle I only just learned about myself).

So anyway, how does this relate to archives? I think it’s an important conversation to have as archives, particularly digital archives, are going to start being pressured to use AI in a host of ways, from cataloguing to interpretation. But is AI really better than a human at these things? I would argue strongly that it is not. And really, it’s just putting a middle-man between researcher/archivist and the data. Because there’s still going to be many humans involved in training the AI to even do these jobs, and there’s still going to be a requirement for humans to quality check the output, especially while AI is so notably full of errors. We can’t even get AI to stop giving us false information based on algorithmic predictive text yet. How can we possibly expect it to do complex higher thought processes such as those needed to accurately and ethically categorize disparate objects or interpret those objects. Humans don’t even agree universally on lots of archival interpretations, adding a machine to the mix isn’t really going to make that better. In the talk, they also discussed how AI throws out the unexpected when looking at archives, while a human would look at the unexpected and derive meaning from it. We cannot wholesale replace archivists and researchers with machine learning, and I very much fear that is the next “great innovation” coming down the pipeline.

Inform the future of the BC Archives! In 2026, the Archives is moving to a new location in Colwood. Your input will inform decisions about the future of the Archives, and planning for the move. Survey open until Aug 14.

Want to respond, but not sure what to say? :) Here's a humble suggestion--request that they maintain a Downtown Victoria Reading Room since Colwood doesn't have meaningful public transit.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/surveyarchives

Re the newly deciphered #MaryQueenOfScots letters my main takes are (1) #cryptography is awesome, and I love how exciting this is for my fellow computer scientists too; (2) it reminds us how much is hidden in #archives, uncatalogued or inadequately catalogued. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-64568222 #ScottishHistory #History #ComputerScience #Cataloguing #HistoricalResearch #ArchivalResearch

Call for applications: Friends of the BC Archives Indigenous Research Fund.

Funded with support from the Royal BC Museum, the Fund provides up to $1000 to support Indigenous peoples’ access to the BC Archives

Individuals and organizations may apply to receive funding for travel (including accommodations/meals), hiring a researcher, and other costs. The deadline to apply is January 31, 2023.

https://friendsofbcarchives.wordpress.com/indigenous-research-fund/

Nov 24, 2022 talk in Victoria, 7:30pm.

Reconciliation Before Its Time: Wilson Duff as Provincial Anthropologist.
Dr. Robin Fisher.

Issues of appropriation and decolonization are not new. Wilson Duff worked from 1950 to 1965 to bring First Nations voices into the Royal BC Museum. Our focus will be on Duff's partnership with Mungo Martin to rebuild Thunderbird Park, and the restoration of north coast totem poles.

https://victoriahistoricalsociety.bc.ca/presentations/

#Reconciliation #BritishColumbia
#ArchivalResearch