INTRODUCTION The three articles covered in this paper discuss how an archivist (and indeed the archives field in general) should deal with the challenges surrounding records of human rights violations and social justice issues.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Wood et al.'s article, “Mobilizing records: re-framing archival description to support human rights”, focuses on how archives can (and should) modify their item descriptions in order to best serve human rights efforts and those who have been involved in human rights abuses. The article's primary argument is that the traditional archival principles of respect des fonds and provenance are harmful to both investigating human rights abuses and to the survivors of the same. Also, the article underlines
…show more content…
Participation calls for the active involvement of survivors in the archival process, including employment of survivors and participation on advisory boards. She also points out the usefulness of flexible and extensible description systems, as they allow for broader tagging of records so that all perspectives on an issue/item may be represented. Caswell argues that shared stewardship necessitates that, when documenting human rights abuses, archives make survivors their primary service responsibility instead of academics or politicians. When discussing multiplicity, Caswell goes beyond recommending the inclusion of multiple formats and actually calls for archivists to go out into the community and create new records of abuse using audio, video, and photographic documentation. Finally, Caswell argues that archivists who deal with human rights violations on a regular basis need to avail themselves of counseling so that the grim nature of their work does not make them secondary victims of the crimes they are documenting. Many of Caswell’s ideas are good and definitely practicable, but the notion of sending archivists out into the community to collect data is silly and not at all within the professional scope of an archivist’s work.
Anne Gilliland's article, "Neutrality, social justice and the obligations of archival education and educators in the twenty-first century", questions the role education has in preparing students of archival science for working in situations that deal with social justice issues. Gilliland states that:
"Archival institutions have not undergone the same degree of public scrutiny about their roles and practices as have museums, even though many have played central roles in promoting particular historical narratives and sustaining dominant power structures." (Gilliland, p