Archival Enterprise Across Early Modern Europe: A Review Essay

In the early modern era, archives were a conduit for information transfer across Europe. Historians have increasingly centered archives and archivists as actors in scholarship of Early Modern European (c. 1450-1800) historical concerns. In particular, two linked areas of inquiry have been emphasized: the impact of archives on forming European identities, and the influence of European archivists on shaping archives. Studies of archives are rich sources that tease out ideological shifts in early modern times. This essay discusses recent literature and seminal writings contributing to understandings of emergent archives and archival practices across Early Modern Europe. Exploring the concept of “archival enterprise” within these contexts presents exciting opportunities to examine its manifestations through a multitude of lenses and fields of study. The works illuminate the fortitude and resilience of archivists engaged in archival labor during the early modern era. They also recast the archivist’s persona from a neutral information facilitator to an interventionist mediator of the past

Mind the (Training) Gap: A Case Study in Assessing Metadata Competences by Transforming Records for a Multi-System Migration

This chapter discusses a multi-department collaborative project to reprocess digitized university art exhibition catalogs in an academic library at an R1 research university. It examines the challenges to legacy metadata remediation, the implications of a lack of training with migrations, and how to manage the expectations of internal repository stakeholders. Furthermore, it prioritizes the importance of organization-wide training in repository management, and positions a culture of continuous learning as a prerequisite for fulfilling the library’s mission

More Than Recipes: Enriching a Campus Common Read with Historical Cookbooks

In this case study, the authors describe a virtual event designed to enrich a campus common read with historical cookbooks. The program included an overview of the collection and a real-time activity to engage participants in virtually examining rare and unique Chinese cookbooks. A set of guiding questions emphasized primary source literacies including analyses of physical characteristics, contexts, content, and further research that can be conducted by consulting the collection. The virtual modality proved to be both a challenge and an opportunity, but the overall structure of the event - identifying a collection that relates to a larger campus initiative, presenting information about the selected collection, introducing attendees to elements related to primary source literacy, and providing an activity for attendees to interact with selected content from the collection - has potential to be adapted for multiple contexts, audiences, and disciplines. The program also afforded the opportunity for the two librarians to collaborate across library department boundaries