Identity 1, Confusion 10 - Archives Journals News

Two weeks ago, I emailed Teresa Brinati, SAA publications staff person, and asked her when more issues of The American Archivist were going to be scanned and put online. I guess great minds run on the same track (as my mom always said), because the next day she emailed me and pointed me to an announcement on the SAA website that the journal would be online this Fall. A second announcement said that JSTOR would soon carry all the journal articles from The American Archivist.

Now, I'm a big fan of reading PDF files of articles on my computer. I get the journal in paper format, but I have not opened an issue since the nine most recent volumes went online for perusal by SAA members. In fact, I'm probably going to toss the paper copies very soon.

I also have PDF files of articles from some of the other nine print English language archives journals. I index Provenance, so I get PDFs of those before anyone sees the actual journal. The only one I do not have access to the PDF version is the Journal of Archival Organization, a newer journal that seems to be pretty technical and concentrates, from the looks of the indexes to its volumes, on archival description and technology. But the other journals can be found on EBSCO or Project Muse or History and Life services and their contents downloaded in PDF.

Someone commented yesterday on the A&A list about the fact that JSTOR is going to put The American Archivist in a section called "Library and Information Science" and made the inference that it kind of blows our professional identity discussion by again lumping us in with librarians. I can see this point and I'm sad that this is the case. Why can't The American Archivist be placed in with general history journals? The argument the past few days is that librarians can make just as good archivists as historians.

Why not a separate category for archives journals? I think we might eventually get to that point, but more archives journals need to be indexed and stored by JSTOR before that can happen. JSTOR is a good service, though they have the absolute worst recall vs. precision variance in all of journal indexing, in my opinion. Try to find something with one of their pre-loaded subject terms and you get thousands of hits that don't even fit that subject, let alone the "real" subject you were searching. But JSTOR is a good start.

I thought I'd list for everyone the eleven English-language archives journals I know about. All but one have paper versions. All but one (JAO) seem to have an online PDF version somewhere. Although we are a ways away from where we want to be, one of the planks in any occupation calling itself a profession is having professional literature - we have that.

Here is the list:

Archives & Manuscripts (Australia)
Journal of the Society of Archivists (UK)
Archival Science
Journal of Archival Organization
Archival Issues: The Journal of the Midwest Archives Conference
Provenance: The Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists
The American Archivists
Archivaria (Canada)
African Journal of Library, Archives and Information Science
RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage
Archives & social Studies (Spain) (online only)