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Contexts built and found: a pilot study on the process of archival meaning-making

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Abstract

Over the last 20 years, humanities and archival scholars have theorized the ways in which archives imbue records with meaning. However, archival scholars have not sufficiently examined how users understand the meaning of the records they find. Building on the premise that how users come to make meaning from records is greatly in need of examination, this paper reports on a pilot study of four book history students and their processes of archival meaning-making. We focus in particular on behaviors of an interpretive rather than forensic nature. This article includes a discussion of the theoretical concepts and scholarly literature that shaped our goals for this paper. It then discusses the methodology and our interpretations of the research findings, before turning to a discussion of the findings’ implications and directions for future work.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Heather MacNeil, Costis Dallas, Peter Gorman, Rebecca Niles, and the audience at the 2010 Association of Canadian Archivists Conference. Any errors are our own. The research described here was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, 140 St George St., Toronto, ON, M5S 3G6, Canada

    Wendy M. Duff & Alan Galey

  2. Military History Research Centre, Canadian War Museum, 1 Vimy Place, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0M8, Canada

    Emily Monks-Leeson

Authors
  1. Wendy M. Duff
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  2. Emily Monks-Leeson
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  3. Alan Galey
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The Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Team

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Correspondence to Wendy M. Duff.

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A complete list of The Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Team members are available at inke.ca.

Appendix

Appendix

Assignment: archives report excluding works cited and notes

This assignment requires you to visit a rare book library or archives and become familiar with the contents of a collection of authors’ papers or publishers’ records. You will then submit a short report in the form of a research diary on the contents of these collections and their potential interest to book history researchers.

The purpose of this assignment is to introduce students to archival research as an important stage within the larger research process. While your goal is to locate potentially significant or interesting material amidst the larger collections and to then consider its potential as research material, you should bear in mind that the focus is on the processes of research as distinct from the products.

You should begin by using finding aids, including online catalogues, to identify a collection of records that interests you. Your criterion for selection should be the material’s potential interest for book history research—imagine this assignment as the first stage in a larger research process, potentially leading to a longer study. The scholarly literature that’s been written about a given collection (if there is any) can help suggest leads, but make sure you cite these sources if you use any. For the purposes of the assignment, you’ll likely need to select a subset of the materials. It’s up to you how to define that subset—temporally, thematically, by publication, etc.—but your report should begin with a clear description of the scope of your material and provide some rationale for its relevance to book history research. Although we have been focusing mostly on authorship and authors’ papers in the course so far, publishers’ records would be equally suitable for this assignment.

The report should not be an exhaustive catalogue of the whole of a given collection. Rather, it should take the form of chronological diary entries describing the process by which you selected, discovered, and worked with the materials. Questions your diary entries should answer include (but are not limited to):

  • How did you decide what to look at?

  • Did you encounter any gaps in the materials or problems with the finding aids?

  • What other sources of information did you turn to in order to solve these problems? (Record any and all steps you took.)

  • In addition to the official finding aids, did you end up using any informal or unexpected methods for locating material? How did parts of the archival materials lead to other parts?

  • How did your understanding of the records you were working with change from the start to the end of your research?

Toronto is a city of archives. In addition to the archives at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, here are some of the others (and feel free to post others to the discussion board):

City of Toronto Archives: http://www.toronto.ca/archives/

Province of Ontario Archives: http://www.archives.gov.on.ca/

Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives in Toronto: http://www.clga.ca/index.shtml

Toronto Public Library special collections: http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/books-video-music/specialized-collections/

Royal Ontario Museum Library and Archives: http://www.rom.on.ca/collections/library.

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Duff, W.M., Monks-Leeson, E., Galey, A. et al. Contexts built and found: a pilot study on the process of archival meaning-making. Arch Sci 12, 69–92 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-011-9145-2

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