COLLECTING OTHERWISE MANUALS

Published by Het Nieuwe Instituut
82 pages
16 x 23 cm
Softcover
English
ISBN 9789083301198

Price: 84 lei

Nieuwe Instituut presents a series of manuals designed to encourage a fresh approach to archives, paying closer attention to restoration, fairness and lesser-known perspectives. Whether you’re just starting out, have been working in the field for a while or want to review your previous experiences, the manuals offer practical support for deeper explorations when researching archives.

The new manuals invite a wide audience to experience these tools and insights for themselves. They are intended to inspire and support those who wish to engage with archives in a careful and conscientious manner.

One of the project’s core principles is ‘neighbourly borrowing’: the exchange of knowledge, methods and tools with other heritage professionals and communities. This is facilitated by the Tool Shed platform, for example, which brings archive and heritage communities together to develop more equitable archival practices. The manuals are a direct result of this.

The Archival Care Rider: This tool helps to prioritise care for the material, the donor, the receiving institution and the archivist during the archive acquisition process. The Archival Care Rider encourages us to reconsider the expectations and forms of interaction within this process. By making joint agreements, space is created for multiple perspectives and meaningful context.

The Asterisk* tool incorporates new knowledge, voices and stories that were previously excluded or omitted from archival documents. This additional information provides the archive with more context and highlights the fact that archiving is an ongoing process of supplementation and revision.

Mapping Collective Memories: This tool offers a new way of looking at colonial architecture archives and encourages community involvement. By visiting places where colonial buildings still stand and mapping memories and current functions alongside them, a richer picture of their significance emerges. This tool is intended for anyone who wants to highlight traces of the colonial past in today’s built environment.
The Trans-Institutional Supra-Archive: This tool helps us to understand stories that are spread across multiple archives. Rather than viewing each archive as a closed entity, the ‘supra-archive’ encourages us to make connections between documents in different locations. This creates a more complete, layered picture of the past, spanning institutional boundaries.