Abstract
Examining the work of the Archival Education and Research Initiative (AERI) community provides a look into the past, present, and future directions of archival scholarship and education. This paper describes a research project that gathered, surveyed, examined, and created reusable data about the available corpus of abstracts across presentation types delivered at all AERI institutes from 2009 through 2018. In this paper, we describe the methods, process, and challenges that we encountered throughout this project, and discuss the trends, patterns, and topics that emerged during the coding and analysis of the past decade of AERI presentations. Finally, we describe the need for development of sustainable infrastructure and practices that will preserve the record of AERI and its impact on archival scholarship and education.
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Notes
The first IMLS Grant was RE-02-08-0008-08. Additional description of AERI and further information can be found on the first UCLA-managed AERI Web site: https://aeri.gseis.ucla.edu/index.htm (Accessed August 13 2019).
Several examples of funded capacity building and agenda building for archival studies in the USA include: the Advanced Archival Administration institutes (also known as “Camp Pitt”) funded first by CLIR and then NHPRC, held at the University of Pittsburgh from 1989 through 1994 and 1996 through 1997 that trained state archivists and spurred the development of electronic records programs in state government; and the National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR), funded by the IMLS since 2013 to further develop a community of practice and equip the next generation of digital archivists.
The main AERI Web site created in 2009 and administered by UCLA is: https://aeri.gseis.ucla.edu/index.htm (Accessed August 13, 2019). Another AERI Web site with additional information is at https://aeri.website (Accessed August 13, 2019). Examples of AERI Web sites created by host committees include those from AERI 2018 at the University of Alabama and AERI 2016 at Kent State University: https://aeri2018.ua.edu/, https://www.kent.edu/iSchool/archival-education-and-research-institute-aeri-2016 (Accessed August 13, 2019). A full list of AERI institute Web sites and comments about their contents is included with the dataset for this project on GitHub (https://github.com/hsoyka/AERI) and the Harvard Dataverse (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/ZXKDQO).
See Soyka, Heather; Wilczek, Eliot, 2019, “AERI (Archival Education & Research Institute): Programs and Reconciled Data, 2009–2018,” https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/ZXKDQO, Harvard Dataverse, V1 or https://github.com/hsoyka/AERI.
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Acknowledgements
When we contacted participants from the 2011 and 2012 AERI asking for their abstracts, we received many responses which ultimately allowed us to go forward with coding a more complete and robust set of data. We are grateful for the timely and enthusiastic replies of this community. Preliminary findings of this study were presented by one or both of the authors during the 2018 Society of American Archivists Research Forum and the 2018 and 2019 Archival Education and Research Institutes.
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Appendix A
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Soyka, H.A., Wilczek, E. Ten years of Archival Education and Research Institutes: a snapshot of scholarship. Arch Sci 20, 221–244 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-020-09331-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-020-09331-2