ABSTRACT Archives commonly hold full, unedited, and unpublished recordings of live musical performances, particularly those archives that focus their collecting on local communities. Much of this content resides on deteriorating magnetic tape with highly restrictive intellectual property constraints that threaten its digital future. This article explores a possible resolution of this dilemma of preservation and access by giving preference to the perspectives and prerogatives of the musical artists represented on live folk music recordings. The article characterizes The Ark in Ann Arbor and the at-risk recordings made at this nationally recognized coffeehouse between 1969 and 1980 in the context of the late-era folk revival scene in the United States and the challenges that copyright restrictions pose for making digitized copies available to contemporary audiences. The authors present and discuss the findings of innovative memory triggering interviews with folk music performers that point toward a way to extend into the realm of digital surrogates a philosophy of the gift exchange cycle. The article argues that archives could embrace asynchronous digital streaming as an extension of the well-established folk process that is so central to the intimacy of the coffeehouse and sidestep if not completely mitigate the barriers imposed by today's intellectual property framework.

Seventy-five years of archival education activities across four complementary domains are reviewed and the most promising developments are noted. Topics addressed include an exploration of the state of graduate-level education, a critical look at several regional initiatives designed to widen the reach of archival training, a discussion of the importance of grassroots education, and an examination of Rare Book School as an intellectual and practical meeting ground for archivists, librarians, and other allied professionals.

The American Archivist Editorial Board administered a Web-based survey to 6,000 Society of American Archivists members and affiliates. The survey was open for response for 45 days during April and May 2010. Respondents expressed overall satisfaction with the American Archivist . Print remains the publishing vehicle of choice. Reading the American Archivist varies in priority. Three major issues emerge from the data analysis. First is the apparent contradiction between generally high overall satisfaction with the American Archivist and significant variation in the perception of the value of its individual components. Second is whether the journal should focus primarily on matters of practice or on scholarly or theoretical explorations of archival principles. The third issue is the relationship of the print and online versions of the journal.

In the process of transforming the American Archivist (AA) into a digital journal, the Society of American Archivists (SAA) confronted the political, economic, and intellectual tensions inherent in the complex environment of open-access publishing. This article establishes the framework within which SAA made the transition from print only to a combination of print and electronic publication and contextualizes this transformation within the intellectual evolution of the longest-running archival journal in the world. It uses this transformation to a print-digital hybrid as a jumping-off point for consideration of future possibilities for the Society's digital publishing endeavors and concludes by considering a set of unresolved issues for the American Archivist posed by the open-access publishing movement, which itself is coming to terms with broad-based economic and preservation challenges.

Digitization practice in archives and libraries is now generating digital content and associated tools and practices that are transforming the relationships among archivists, users, and archival collections. The transformative nature of digitization derives in part from the power of the complex technologies to represent images and facilitate their use. This article explores how experienced, but for the most part nonacademic, users see the visual, material, and archival properties of digitized photographic archives while undertaking innovative and insightful projects that push the boundaries of visual interpretation. The study is a qualitative investigation involving independent case studies of seven people who have extensive experience using the photographic archives preserved by the Library of Congress. This article contextualizes the research in a range of literatures, summarizes the research methodology, and presents findings from in-depth interviews that focus on how visually experienced users choose digitized photographs for inclusion in a given project. By understanding these "modes of seeing" the contemporary digitized visual archives, archivists are in a better position to understand the representational implications of their digitization processes.

The preservation of historical materials, in a variety of forms and formats, is both a cultural necessity and a central responsibility for professional archivists. Archivists need to define for themselves just what archival preservation entails and assess the capacity of the thousands of archives, large and small, scattered and isolated from each other, to develop and administer sophisticated preservation programs. The author presents the results of the first nationwide study of archival preservation practices in the United States. He describes a model of archival preservation that partially shaped the research project, summarizes the research process involved, reports the major findings, and discusses the implications of the research for archivists and the archival profession.

A healthy system of professional education has three complementary components: professional associations, practitioners in the field, and faculty in academic settings. The lack of a sufficient number of full-time faculty is the weakest aspect of the current system of education for archivists. Drawing on the extensive literature on education for professions, especially librarianship, the author speculates on the advantages for the archival profession of a larger number of faculty, sketches an appropriate role for such a faculty, and encourages further development of a more complete system of archival education.

This article is a report on the first comprehensive survey of the resources, responsibilities, and activities of archival repositories in the United States. After placing the study in the context of past surveys of archivists and institutions, and describing its design, the article characterizes the findings on five basic resources common to all archives—money, staff, holdings, facilities, and users. Summary tables permit comparisons of the responses to key survey questions across eight types of archives—federal, state, local, academic, religious, business, special subject, and museum. The author concludes with recommendations for improving future studies.

The continuing reluctance of the archival profession to develop a better understanding of users seems less a problem of will than a problem of method. The framework presented here is a first attempt to structure a comprehensive program of user studies. Built on definitions of users, information needs, and use, the framework combines the basic elements of information that should be recorded, analyzed, and shared among archivists with a scheme to gather this information. The author illustrates how parts of the framework can be implemented as an ongoing program through the use of a reference log and suggests applications of the framework at the personal, repository, and professional levels.