A new book co-edited by Associate Professor Bonnie Mak investigates how archives, archival practices, and the notion of the archive are being explored across the disciplines. Showcasing the work of established and emergent scholars, as well as information professionals, Engaging with Records and Archives: Histories and theories bridges theory and practice to offer fresh perspectives on recordkeeping and archives that will be of interest to those in the information sciences, digital humanities, art history, social history, data curation, media studies, and communication.
Among the wide range of topics included in the collection are the history of data modeling; information management in Malawi; metaphors of archival order; and the experience of artists in the archive.
Publisher's Description: The contributions in the volume span diverse regions, communities, disciplinary perspectives and time periods. From the origins of contemporary grassroots archival activism in Poland to the role of women archivists in early 20th century England, from the management of records in the Dutch East Indies in the 19th century to the relationship between Western and Indigenous cultures in North America and other modern archival conundrums, this collection reveals the richness of archival thinking through compelling examples from past and present that will captivate the reader.
"Given the current fascination with big data, it is vital for us to recall the long-standing traditions of information management from across the globe that have not only informed new developments in data science and data curation, but also made them possible," says Mak. "I was deeply honored to have been invited by my colleagues, Fiorella Foscarini and Heather MacNeil of the University of Toronto, and Gillian Oliver of Monash University in Australia, to co-edit this volume."
Mak is jointly appointed in the iSchool and the Program in Medieval Studies at Illinois. Her first book, How the Page Matters (2011), examines the interface of the page as it is developed across time, geographies, and technologies. A second book-length project, Confessions of a 21st-Century Memsahib, examines the digital texts and images that are increasingly being used as resources for humanistic scholarship. She was inaugural Senior Fellow at the Center for Humanities and Information at the Pennsylvania State University for the 2015-2016 academic year and currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.