The Archival Education and Research Initiative (AERI) is a collaborative global effort among academic institutions to support the growth of a new generation of academics in archival and recordkeeping education and research who are versed in contemporary issues and knowledgeable of the work being conducted by colleagues. Begun in 2009, the initiative seeks to promote state-of-the-art in scholarship in Archival Studies, broadly conceived, as well as to encourage curricular and pedagogical innovation in archival education locally and worldwide. AERI is engaged in a number research and infrastructure building initiatives as well as annual week-long summer Archival Education and Research Institutes (AERIs) that are hosted by partner institutions. These working Institutes are designed to strengthen education and research and support academic cohort-building and mentoring. The Institutes are open to all academic faculty and doctoral students working in Archival Studies as well as to others engaged in archival education and scholarship, both nationally and internationally. We provide scholarship support to certain categories of attendees, particularly students and junior academics, to the extent that funds are available. A second component of this effort is the encouragement of a larger and more diverse cohort of doctoral students in Archival Studies through The Emerging Archival Scholars Program (2011- ). colleagues. The initiative seeks to promote state-of-the-art in scholarship in Archival Studies, broadly conceived, as well as to encourage curricular and pedagogical innovation in archival education locally and worldwide.
PI: Anne J. Gilliland, Department of Information Studies, UCLA; Co-PI James Lowry, Liverpool University Center for Archive Studies (LUCAS).
The Rights in Records for Refugees Project first aims to identify and make visible the many ways in which official records (including bio-records), bureaucratic practices and other more "irregular" forms and uses of records play crucial roles in the lives of displaced people as they travel across state boundaries, interact with governments and aid agencies in camps, asylum hearings, immigration vetting, claims for social services and so forth, and eventually resettle into new countries and interface with their bureaucratic systems or return/are returned to their places of origin. Secondly, it seeks to identify and understand from the perspectives of refugees, governments and aid agencies, the roles and implications of ICTs such as cloud services, social media and cellphones for the creation, movement, preservation and accessing of records. With this knowledge in hand, it then aims to identify ways in which professionals and agencies involved in archives and record-keeping in affected countries might contribute and collaborate through digital systems design to identifying and locating, protecting, validating, securing and certifying such records; and also to identify potential policy recommendations supporting specific refugee rights in records.
PI: Anne J. Gilliland
This research has several aims:
Using ethnographic methods it probes personal, professional and literary attitudes towards, and experiences with recordkeeping. It applies the insights thus gained to enhance how recordkeeping systems, processes, metadata, interfaces and end user services might better protect individuals who continue to be vulnerable because of how records or metadata have been created, kept, destroyed, manipulated or shared; to facilitate how individuals locally and in diaspora need to locate and use [particular] records in support of their daily lives and well-being; to help individuals to identify other sources of evidence and build cases when records have been destroyed or damaged, or are not trustworthy; and to acknowledge and mitigate damaging affective aspects of records and recordkeeping.