User:Jf umd/sandbox

Plans for assigned article contributions (February 15, 2018)

Potential Content

Having been assigned the Community archives article for editing, I plan to make the most of the great suggestions already posted to the Talk page, starting with the section marked "Issues," as listed below:

• Digitization as a way to build or link community archives
• Digital divide re: community members accessing their own material
• Archival training
• Community representation in the profession
• Ethics of access
• Capacity challenges (i.e. funding, disaster planning)

This is good. From this, think about developing a list of new subheadings that would be appropriate for developing the article. For example, a History/Background section (one or the other), Methods (some of those are above), perhaps something like "Implications for Archival Practice", and Challenges. In the challenges section, you should also include something on Infrastructure (i.e., there's not a system that supports this, regarding description and preservation in particular). Additional citations include some of the major grants supporting this (for USA: check IMLS database, the NEH Common Heritage funding stream) and also update the articles by Caswell &al to offer a more comprehensive bibliography.

Potential Sources

I will also look more closely at the Woodward article I questioned before and possibly search for a replacement. In terms of relevant, reliable sources, I will start with the following articles.

Jeannette Allis Bastian, “A Question of Custody: The Colonial Archives of the United States Virgin Islands,” American Archivist 64(1) (2001): 96-114.

Don Boadle, “Reinventing the Archive in a Virtual Environment: Australians and the Non-Custodial Management of Electronic Records,” Australian Academic & Research Libraries 35(3) (2004): 242-252.

Alexandra Eveleigh, “Participatory Archives,” In Currents of Archival Thinking, Terry Eastwood and Heather MacNeil, eds. (Libraries Unlimited, 2017): 299-325.

Rebecca Sheffield, “Community Archives,” In Currents of Archival Thinking, Terry Eastwood and Heather MacNeil, eds. (Libraries Unlimited, 2017): 351-376.

You would be justified in removing the Woodward article. It does not offer an expert understanding of community archives, nor does it seem to be representative of the field. (Unless you want to leave it as a reference for the Challenges section.) Morskyjezek (talk) 11:44, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Article evaluation: notes about observations and learnings (February 8, 2018)

Article: Community archives

Relevance

The information in the article is valuable but the writing could be stronger. There are a few grammatical errors and inconsistencies. For instance, "The shared experience of the members of a community often determine or impact the scope of a community archive" should read "The shared experience of the members of a community often determines or impacts the scope of a community archive" and it is not clear whether both "community" and "archive" should be capitalized or not. The writing and sentence structure of the second paragraph are muddled and the use of the word "moniker" seems unnecessarily slangy.

Neutrality and Viewpoints

The article is mostly balanced and the tone is neutral, but I think more could be said about the various kinds of relationships that can exist between community archives and traditional institutions like archives, libraries, and museums. The Wikipedia article cites an Archival Science piece by Andrew Flinn and Mary Shepherd Stevens, "Whose memories, whose archives? Independent community archives, autonomy and the mainstream," (2009) twice, but then never directly states that sometimes community archives make intentional decisions to retain their autonomy from traditional intervention by maintaining control over their collections. Furthermore, a different article cited states that the term has sometimes been considered problematic and that both "community" and "archives" may be inappropriate designations, though both are continuing be more commonly used in both professional and public conversations. That, too, is missing from the Wikipedia article.

Citations, Fact-Checking, Sources

The citation links work and they support the information presented in the Wikipedia article. However, I think "Participatory Archiving: The next generation in archival methodology" by Eddie Woodward is a poor choice for a reference in this case. First, despite its recency (2016), it purports some outdated viewpoints about digital collections, making curious arguments that archivists avoid digital collections due to concerns around space, preservation, working with originals and copies, and copyright/permissions concerns. While this may sometimes be the case, I say curious because in addition to not substantiating these claims, Woodward fails to acknowledge that these concerns lie at the heart of almost all archival work and certainly apply to physical collections as well. Furthermore, this selection appears to be published in a non-fact-based speculative section of that particular journal, a feature entitled, "The Way I See It," and therefore may make a poor choice for an objective Wikipedia citation.

Talk Page

The Talk page has only one comment, but it is a thoughtful and substantial contribution. The user provided a bulleted list of potential ways to expand the topic, including a variety of cultural and geographic viewpoints, discussion of research and policy, and suggested software and platforms. I did add signed feedback with a new header regarding my question about using the Woodward article as a reference here.

Rating/WikiProject Association

The article doesn't appear to be rated or associated with any WikiProjects.

All good suggestions. Consider moving over the main suggestions, particularly the ideas that you have for developing new subheadings and structure, as well as sources, to the article's talk page for peer review feedback. Morskyjezek (talk) 11:46, 1 March 2018 (UTC)