Research in the Archival Multiverse ed. by Anne J. Gilliland, Sue Mckemmish, and Andrew J. Lau (review)

Research in the Archival Multiverse is the first collection of critical and reflective essays produced as part of an ongoing collaborative research initiative funded through grants from the US Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Centred at the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) and led by a consortium of academic institutions, the Archival Education and Research Initiative was established in 2008 to encourage curricular and pedagogical innovation within archival studies and to support doctoral research within the archival field. One of the major undertakings of the initiative was to develop the annual week-long summer Archival Education and Research Institute (AERI), which brings together emerging scholars and academic faculty as well as others working in archival education and scholarship. Throughout its first two cycles of IMLS funding, the initiative helped support student attendance at AERIs and committed to nurturing a larger and more diverse cohort of doctoral researchers in the field. Additional IMLS grants have also funded the Emerging Archival Scholars Program (EASP), a recruitment and outreach program that targets undergraduate and graduate students from backgrounds that are under-represented in the field and who are considering doctoral work in archival studies. The EASP provides bursaries and scholarships to assist students to attend AERIs and to support their scholarship throughout the rest of the year. The inaugural AERI was hosted at UCLA in 2009 and has been held in subsequent years at the University of Michigan (2010), Simmons College (2011), UCLA (2012), University of Texas at Austin (2013), University of Pittsburgh (2014), University of Maryland (2015), and Kent State University (2016). In 2017, the University of Toronto became the first institution outside of the United States to host an AERI.

As editors Anne J. Gilliland, Sue McKemmish, and Andrew J. Lau note in the preface of their book, potential contributors to Research in the Archival Multiverse were identified during the summer AERIs of 2009 to 2012. As a result, the collection includes a cross-section of writing by academic faculty and student researchers covering a broad range of topics, from traditional archival functions to case studies of archival projects to trans-disciplinary theoretical and methodological discussions. Gilliland is Professor and Director of the Archival Studies Specialization in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA and Director of the Archival Education and Research Initiative. Her work focuses on recordkeeping and archival systems in support of human rights, the role of community memory in promoting reconciliation, and digital recordkeeping and archival informatics. Sue McKemmish is Associate Dean Graduate Research for the Faculty of Information Technology, Chair of Archival Systems, and Director of the Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. McKemmish has published extensively on metadata in records and archival systems, Australian Indigenous archives, information resource discovery, and the records continuum. Andrew J. Lau, a former AERI student, is now Program Director for Instructional Content Development, UCLA Extension, and a lecturer at the University of Maryland College of Information Studies. He is also a founder of the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies. In total, the volume includes 39 contributors, of which nearly half were student participants.

Research in the Archival Multiverse is an ambitious collection that endeavours to represent the diversity of scholarship that has emerged from within the archival field over the past decade or more. The challenge in putting together a book with this breadth and scope is that it can easily become cumbersome, attempting to pull too many ideas together without coherency. At more than 1,000 pages, it does feel unwieldy, and although the editors have deftly organized the chapters into three categories – theoretical frameworks, applied methods, and case studies – the result is a hefty single volume that might have better served readers as a series of three. Thankfully, the editors offer some discussion in the preface that does well to frame the book...