Unruly Records: Personal Archives, Sociotechnical Infrastructure, and Archival Practice
Title Page Unruly Records: Personal Archives, Sociotechnical Infrastructure, and Archival Practice by Chelsea Gunn BA, Carlow University, 2008 MLIS, Simmons University, 2012 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the School of Computing and Information in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2020 Committee Page UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH SCHOOL OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION This dissertation was presented by Chelsea Gunn It was defended on July 27, 2020 and approved by Dr. Lara Putnam, Professor, Department of History Dr. Tonia Sutherland, Assistant Professor, Department of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Hawai’i at Manoa Dr. Stacy Wood, Assistant Professor, School of Computing and Information Dissertation Director: Dr. Alison Langmead, Clinical Associate Professor and Director, Visual Media Workshop, History of Art and Architecture; Associate Professor, School of Computing and Information ii Copyright © by Chelsea Gunn 2020 iii Abstract Unruly Records: Personal Archives, Sociotechnical Infrastructure, and Archival Practice Chelsea Gunn University of Pittsburgh, 2020 Personal records have long occupied a complicated space within archival theory and practice. The archival profession, as it is practiced in the United States today, developed with organizational records, such as those created by governments and businesses, in mind. Personal records were considered to fall beyond the bounds of archival work and were primarily cared for by libraries and other cultural heritage institutions. Since the mid-20th century, this divide has become less pronounced, and it has become common to find personal records within archival institutions. As a result of these conditions in the development of the profession, the archivists who work with personal records have had to reconcile the specific characteristics of personal materials with theoretical and practical approaches that were designed not only to accommodate organizational records but to explicitly exclude personal records.
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