The affective nature of genealogy collections
In 2014, the Affect and the Archive conference was presented at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and sponsored by the Archival Education and Research Initiative (AERI); and the UCLA Center-sponsored conference for Information as Evidence, UCLA Department of Information Studies, the UCLA Department of English, and the UCLA Library (Cifor and Gilliland, 2016, 2). Affect can “encompass a variety of concepts such as passions, moods, sensations, feelings and emotions” (Paszkiewicx, 2016, 1). The conference was in response to the affective turn in scholarship—a human’s emotions, and how they respond to the world around them. Although this is a very simple definition, archivists recognize the complex and holistic nature of people’s engagement with information, which may explain why the archival world is interested in participating in this type of discourse.
Genealogical collections contain narratives about a person, a family, a place, or an event. Librarians, archivists, and genealogists may come across information serendipitously, which can tell us something more than we expected. In 2016 Renee DesRoberts, special collections librarian, McArthur Public Library and Anastasia Weigle, book artist and part-time faculty for the University of Maine at Augusta, collaborated in a small pilot study to investigate the affective nature of special collections—in this case, personal papers. The study investigated how book artists use these papers as a source of inspiration to create, communicate, and express their works of art while offering archivists a different perspective on the use of genealogy collections used.
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Genealogical collections contain narratives about a person, a family, a place, or an event. Librarians, archivists, and genealogists may come across information serendipitously, which can tell us something more than we expected. In 2016 Renee DesRoberts, special collections librarian, McArthur Public Library and Anastasia Weigle, book artist and part-time faculty for the University of Maine at Augusta, collaborated in a small pilot study to investigate the affective nature of special collections—in this case, personal papers. The study investigated how book artists use these papers as a source of inspiration to create, communicate, and express their works of art while offering archivists a different perspective on the use of genealogy collections used.
For full citations, see Bibliography page