Volume 2, Number 1, 2018 Endangered Knowledge Guest-edited by Samantha MacFarlane, Rachel Mattson and Bethany Nowviskie

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This essay introduces a special issue of KULA on the subject of ‘endangered knowledge,’ comprising 22 essays by 34 authors working across a wide array of disciplines and fields. Guest editors Samantha MacFarlane, Rachel Mattson, and Bethany Nowviskie have assembled a collection of scholarly articles, pedagogical reflections, and project reports that take up theoretical and practical considerations of archival salvage and erasure, the persistence of the public record, indigenous knowledge, and the politics of loss. The special issue explores endangerment as a critical category of analysis for records, data, collections, languages, ecosystems, and networks.

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This paper outlines notable features of the Adrian Paton Photo and Oral History Collection at the Saskatchewan History & Folklore Society (SHFS) and discusses aspects of the relationships formed between the local collector, faculty at the University of Saskatchewan, the SHFS, and members of the community-based cultural heritage digitization project during the collection’s creation and curation. We also outline the benefits and challenges for university-led digital projects that seek to partner with a wide range of participants, with a focus on community members, local organizations, and students enrolled in programs at their institution. Additionally, we discuss the transformative potential of such partnerships for academic institutions and what to consider when entering into collaborations of this nature.

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In the world of environmental regulation, records are the foundation on which all further regulatory action takes place. From permits that give industry permission to pollute in the name of economic activity, to annual production reports documenting how much fossil fuel is taken out of the ground, notices of violation issued by regulators, to complaints filed by citizens noticing contaminants in their water supply, recordkeeping is fundamental to regulation. Even as records are critical to understanding and contextualizing environmental problems, accessing and interpreting this information is an exceptionally difficult experience. This article will consider the regulatory recordkeeping context of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, the three most productive states in the Marcellus/Utica shale formation.

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This article addresses the Terezita Romo Papers, one of a handful of archival collections of the Royal Chicano Air Force—a large collective of young, mostly immigrant or first-generation Mexican American artists and activists who produced countless community events and art projects and programs in Sacramento, California during the second half of the twentieth century. While membership of the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) and its activities are hard to calculate, its history has been shaped by a tendency towards iconization of the group’s male founders in archival description. Specifically, where collections are described to highlight the unique contributions of individuals, it is difficult to retain and promote the collective voice of action which made so many of these movements successful. Using the papers of Tere Romo, one member of the RCAF, this paper looks at how the archives of the RCAF have tended towards iconization—overshadowing the contributions of its female members—and explores ways in which archivists can reconsider the language of archives when processing and describing materials documenting collective action in American history.

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Archivists who work on African American collections are increasingly more aware that traditional sites of African American agency and autonomy are becoming more unstable. The need to capture the perspectives and histories of these institutions is urgent. The challenges become more acute when communities recognize the need to preserve their legacies but do not have the resources or support to make it happen. African American material culture and history remains at risk of co-optation from large institutions and individuals seeking to monetize and profit from collecting Black collections. Endemic in that process is the risk of these institutions controlling the narrative and inadvertently or deliberately erasing the narratives of these diverse communities from that community’s perspective. Cultural memory workers focused on African American collections face numerous challenges: the risk of losing the materials or communities themselves; partnering with organizations and administrations with differing, and perhaps conflicting agendas; working on projects with limited or term funding; and the emotional labor of being a person of color in a predominantly white field trying to support communities that can often reflect their own experiences. How can libraries, museums, and archives bring these communities into the world of archives and empower them to protect and share their stories? How can archivists, particularly those of color, find support within their institutions and the archival profession, to accomplish this work of preserving African American cultural heritage? How can archives support genuinely collaborative projects with diverse Black communities without co-opting their stories and collections?

The authors will address these questions in this article, discussing their experiences working with a variety of institutions—predominantly white universities, Black colleges, churches, neighborhoods and families. The authors also include their reflections from their National Conference of African American Librarians panel presentation in August 2017 on these related topics.

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The Isle of Man in the 1890s saw remarkable activity in the collecting of folklore and folk song, both in English and Manx Gaelic. This was followed by a further wave of collectors in the next decade, enthused by the Celtic Revival. Much of the material collected has now been lost for a variety of reasons detailed in this article. The most significant loss was that of the cylinder recordings made by the Manx Language Society between 1905 and 1913. Several collectors expressed concern in their lifetime about the survival of their papers, but this did little to prevent the loss of the collections they amassed. Such a fragmented record has consequences in researching what does now survive.

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This essay explores symbolic annihilation in the context of state violence, including policing, incarceration, and the death penalty in the US. Using auto-ethnography to reflect on the work of the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) and other community-based documentation and archival projects, I argue that the personal stories and experiences of victims and survivors of state violence are critical counter-narratives to dominant discourses on violence, criminality, and the purported efficacy of retributive law enforcement and criminal justice policies and practices. They also compel us to engage with complex questions about victimhood, disposability, and accountability. Building on the work of activists and archivists engaged in liberatory memory work, I also argue that counter-narratives of state violence confront and challenge the social, cultural, and ideological power of symbolic annihilation. Because these counter-narratives are under constant threat of being suppressed, co-opted, or silenced, they are forms of endangered knowledge that must be protected and preserved. Finally, I reflect on ‘archives of survival,’ repositories of stories and other ephemera of tragedy that contribute to envisioning and achieving transformative justice.

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The essay uses a set of theoretical ideas offered by Susan Leigh Star to argue for a shift in contemporary understandings of, and approaches to, video preservation. Instead of focusing on the granular characteristics of tape and their material stability, I argue, the audiovisual archival community should view preservation as a set of linked systems that function within a web of shifting perspectives and context-driven solutions.

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This paper considers the history and politics of ‘police data.’ Police data, I contend, is a category of endangered data reliant on voluntary and inconsistent reporting by law enforcement agencies; it is also inconsistently described and routinely housed in systems that were not designed with long-term strategies for data preservation, curation or management in mind. Moreover, whereas US law enforcement agencies have, for over a century, produced and published a great deal of data about crime, data about the ways in which police officers spend their time and make decisions about resources—as well as information about patterns of individual officer behavior, use of force, and in-custody deaths—is difficult to find. This presents a paradoxical situation wherein vast stores of extant data are completely inaccessible to the public. This paradoxical state is not new, but the continuation of a long history co-constituted by technologies, epistemologies and context.

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This article contributes to critical archival studies discourse and builds upon the theoretical and practical work accomplished under the postcustodial rubric in order to propose an archival framework that is explicitly oriented in the service of justice. Global north/south postcustodial collaborations highlight the ethical and practical obligation of adopting an archival framework that accounts for expanded notions of stewardship and narrative agency. As an archivist based in US academic libraries who works primarily on transnational archival collaborations in the global south, I want to introduce the concept of contributive justice to these postcustodial transnational collaborations because it reframes the role of the partner organization in the global south and acknowledges the agency of all partners (Gomberg 2007). By drawing upon my experiences facilitating transnational archival partnerships between US academic libraries and institutions in Cuba, El Salvador, and Rwanda, I build upon Michelle Caswell’s (2017) suggested actions for dismantling white supremacy within US archives by offering concrete ways archivists can utilize a contributive justice framework to decolonize archival practices (i.e., appraisal, description, access) within transnational partnerships. By offering these examples, we can begin to both imagine and enact a more just and liberatory archival praxis. As Caswell states, ‘through the lens of liberatory archival imaginaries, our work … does not end with the limits of our collection policies, but rather, it is an ongoing process of conceptualizing what we want the future to look like’ (2014a: 51). The stakes are high in the shaping of our collective histories, and we all have the responsibility of envisioning and enacting liberatory archival futures.

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Indigitization is a British Columbia-based collaborative initiative between Indigenous communities and organizations, the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre (IKBLC), the Museum of Anthropology (MOA), the UBC iSchool at the University of British Columbia (UBC), and the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) Archives and Special Collections, to facilitate capacity building in Indigenous information management. This project is committed to clarifying processes and identifying issues in the conservation, digitization, and management of Indigenous community knowledge. It does so by providing information resources through the Indigitization toolkit and by enabling community-led audio cassette digitization projects through grant funding and training. Indigitization seeks to grow and work with a network of practitioners to develop effective practices for the management of digital heritage that support the goals of individual communities.

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The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is a not-for-profit professional membership organisation that enables its members to deliver resilient long-term access to digital content and services, helping them to derive enduring value from digital assets and raising awareness of the strategic, cultural and technological challenges they face. The Coalition achieve its aims through advocacy, community engagement, workforce development, capacity-building, good practice and good governance.

On 30 November 2017, as part of its ongoing advocacy work and the first International Digital Preservation Day, the DPC published the first ‘BitList.’ This list presented the results of a crowd-sourcing exercise that sought to discover which digital materials the digital preservation community thinks are most at risk, as well as which materials are relatively safe thanks to digital preservation.

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Despite the rich histories of rural communities in northern Wisconsin, accessibility to professional archivists is limited at best. The North Woods Tour project in Wisconsin focused on empowering local residents to preserve historical materials themselves, by teaching them basic archival methods relating to a variety of formats through personal archiving workshops. Led by Amy Sloper, head archivist at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, three Wisconsin archivists created and implemented the project, visiting three rural northern Wisconsin communities and working with 30 local community members. This report examines their planning process and attendee response. Additionally, it argues that, in some cases, materials might be best preserved within the context of their creation.

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Despite the short remaining time to rescue unique cultural and personal materials stored on many twentieth- and early twenty-first-century audiovisual and digital storage media, realistic rescue options are starkly limited. Building a rescue apparatus in house, especially to archival standards, requires significant expertise and expense and is often of limited continuing use. Outsourcing digital capture of these materials overwhelms the resources of even well-funded academic libraries and archives, never mind public libraries, small archives, and local historical societies. To address this problem realistically, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Information School has built and documented an in-house rescue installation called RADD (Recover Analog and Digital Data) as well as two self-contained, portable, and shippable rescue kits: PROUD (Portable Recovery of Unique Data) for digital materials and PRAVDA (Portably Reformat Audio and Video to Digital from Analog) for audio and video. All three units are actively rescuing cultural heritage materials, as well as serving training and outreach functions.

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Collections of independent, non-commercial works often represent voices and speak to topics not seen in mainstream media, and they are still often cared for outside of major collecting institutions. Since 2011, activist audiovisual archivists have organized Community Archiving Workshops (CAWs) in the US and beyond to help caretakers of endangered media and film collections jump-start preservation efforts. In the spirit of ‘each one, teach one,’ experienced archivists share skills with other volunteers to inspect and inventory a collection, thus giving caretakers the data they need to select priority works for preservation. CAW organizers are committed to training more people to carry out CAWs in their own communities; a grant-funded project will pilot this approach in partnership with cultural heritage organizations in three regional hubs (Nashville, TN; Madison, WI; and Oakland, CA) beginning in 2018.

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The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse ( http://clearinghouse.net) solves a significant information deficit related to civil rights litigation by posting information about thousands of ongoing and closed large-scale civil rights cases. Documents are OCR’d and searchable; cases are searchable by metadata tags as well as full-text searching. Each case has a litigation summary by a law student. We live in a civil rights era—a time when people are using the courts, among other strategies, to fight for civil rights. The Clearinghouse posts the records of those fights, the stories of civil rights cases—across topics, across regions, across organizations—and makes them searchable, usable, and available to everybody.

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The advancement of knowledge about life on the planet—its origins, preservation, and loss of species and environments—is dependent on access and reference to library collections. The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a global digital library that serves the biodiversity research community, as well as a widening circle of those interested in learning more about life. Through an international consortium of natural history and botanical libraries and in close collaboration with researchers, bioinformaticians, publishers, and information technology professionals, BHL has democratized access to biodiversity information and revolutionized research worldwide, allowing everyone, everywhere to study and explore life on Earth.

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This article reviews the origins and goals of the Digital Library of the Middle East and discusses how the DLME and other digital library projects implement international cultural heritage preservation policy.

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This report describes some of the practical solutions to the challenges of long-term digital preservation being developed by the project Endings: Concluding, Archiving, and Preserving Digital Projects for Long-Term Usability at the University of Victoria.

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The cultural movement centred on the Dark Mountain journal has generated considerable debate over the past ten years. In this report, one of Dark Mountain’s co-founders discusses the reception of the project, the relationship to the emergence of the ‘Anthropocene’ concept over the same period, and the relevance of Dark Mountain thinking and practice to the theme of ‘Endangered Knowledge.’

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Scholars, activists, researchers, and artists of a certain age and inclination are burdened with a soon-to-be-obsolete but always-beloved, carefully tended but perhaps recently quieted collection that most likely sits on an office shelf gaining dust: their VHS Archive. Not a personal collection, but a professional one of continuing or even growing value if not usability, this archive has been lovingly built and used, probably over decades, for teaching and research and in support of the movements and issues that have mattered most to the collector. With the help of an Open Education Resources grant from CUNY we built an online teaching resource for a graduate course that would focus on just twelve of these tapes. We hope that the course and its lasting website asks, and will offer some answers about, best practices for reactivating knowledge that might be endangered due to medium obsolescence, and other broader cultural factors of forgetting.

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In 2017, I taught an Introduction to Digital Humanities course for undergraduate students at the University of Toronto. The course’s unifying theme was banned books. What moved me to focus the course in this way was the illegal typewriter that lived under my childhood bed: I grew up in formerly communist Eastern Europe, where typewriters were tightly controlled by the government. Yet my family owned an illegal, unregistered typewriter, hidden under my bed behind the off-season clothes, because they saw the ability to write and disseminate one’s thoughts as a technology of survival.

In the Intro to DH course, students explored the intellectual landscape of the digital humanities by thinking about banned books throughout history. They examined early printed books of astronomy; early printed books of the lives of saints; illicitly typewritten and photographed Soviet samizdat; endangered climate change research data rescued by the Internet Archive; and American Library Association data about banned and challenged books for children and young adults. This article reflects on using the lens of banned books and endangered knowledge to focus an Introduction to DH course and encourage students to interrogate critically how a variety of technologies—from codex to printing press to typewriter to the internet—create, transmit, preserve, and repress knowledge and cultural memory.

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Endangered Data Week emerged in the early months of 2017 as an effort to encourage conversations about government-produced, open data and the many factors that can limit its access. The event offers an internationally-coordinated series of events that includes publicizing the availability of datasets, increasing critical engagement with them, encouraging open data policies at all levels of government, and the fostering of data skills through workshops on curation, documentation and discovery, improved access, and preservation. The reflection provides an outline of the curriculum development happening through Endangered Data Week and encourages others to contribute.

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The silences and erasures surrounding the histories of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in many instances are caused by limited technology, lack of financial resources, and, most importantly, institutional priorities. Many aspects of HBCUs’ histories, particularly in the state of Texas, have been relegated to historical voids or are becoming endangered knowledge. These are the issues that jeopardize the long and rich history of Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU), Texas’s first public supported historically black university, which dates back to the post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras of American history. Emancipated blacks in Texas sought all avenues available to them to obtain an education, including establishing churches and schools. Freed people’s efforts culminated in the creation of Alta Vista School for Colored Youth, which subsequently became PVAMU following several name changes. During the Jim Crow era, PVAMU served as the administrative home base for black education in the state of Texas, offered agricultural extension services to black farmers, and served as the central facility for black grade school athletics and extracurricular activities. Due to lack of personnel and resources, all of the archival collections that document this history are unprocessed and unavailable to the public. This article considers the collaborative efforts of the history faculty and the Special Collections and Archives (SCAD) staff at PVAMU to bring light to this important history through preservation projects, public programming and student engagement activities. Additionally, the article uses endangered archival materials from PVAMU’s Special Collections to explore the history of this important institution of higher education.