Publisher's Synopsis
This book is the result of recent research by postgraduate students in archivistics at University College, Dublin. Their work addresses many of the issues faced by archival, records management, and information specialists, and many of the expectations of the societies that rely on their services. The areas addressed include legal and ethical challenges, medical and community archives, advocacy and user perspectives, governance, and accountability. Researched with a post-modern framework, the book's essays challenge and interrogate established views and provide exciting professional perspectives from a new generation of Irish archivists. Contents include: the role and place of personal finds in the archival tradition * archives, power dynamics, and socio-cultural sites of contestation * the significance of history in modern and post-modern appraisal * Web 2.0 and the postmodern challenge * reckoning and dictatorship: the STASI records * the retention of personal data for historic and research purposes * archiving the records of psychiatric hospitals * community archives * the Bureau of Military History and the Military Services Pensions collections * a survey and analysis of archives coverage in two newspapers * archival interaction with higher education * an exploration of the relationship between archivists and family historians * teachers' perspectives on the use of archives * family historians and archives * archives online * a response to the compromise of government records in Ireland's National Archives and Records Administration.
