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Responding to the continuing separation of participants and researchers in LIS participatory research, a new methodology is proposed: action partnership research design (APRD). It is asserted that APRD can mitigate or remove the hierarchical structures often inherent in the research process, thus allowing for equal contribution from all.

Building on the bonded design (BD) methodology and informed by a scoping literature review conducted by the same authors, APRD is a human-centered research approach with the goal of empowering and valuing community partnerships. APRD originates from research investigating the use of participatory design methods to foster collaboration between two potentially disparate groups, firstly with adult researchers/designers and elementary school children, and secondly with university faculty and IT professionals.

To achieve this goal, in addition to BD techniques, APRD draws inspiration from elements of indigenous and decolonization research methodologies, particularly those with an emphasis on destabilizing power hierarchies and involving research participants as full partners.

APRD, which emerged from findings from previous participatory design studies, especially those of BD, is based on the premise of partnership, recognizing that each member of a design team, whether researcher or participant/user, has unique expertise to contribute. By considering participants/users as full research partners, APRD aims to flatten the hierarchies exhibited in some LIS participatory research methodologies, where participants are treated more like research subjects than partners.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the legislative drafting processe for the Archives Act in Finland and stakeholder involvement concerning the Archives Act proposal. The study aims to identify key factors that hinder or improve the analysis and visibility of these different stakeholder perspectives through time. It considers this from a recordkeeping perspective.

First, selected law drafting guidelines and statement structures were examined to determine how they affect the analysis of stakeholder statements. Second, 90 stakeholder statements and two law drafter summaries were analyzed. Finally, six topics (public record and archives, archiving and preservation, the life cycle of records, transferring records to the National Archives, analog material and personal data) were used to examine the visibility of stakeholder statements and to compare differences in the views between law drafter summaries and stakeholder statements.

Differing views of stakeholders did not receive sufficient visibility in the law drafter summaries. The key factors hindering the analysis and visibility of stakeholder statements were law drafting guidelines that did not support the analysis of the statements, statement structures that were rarely followed and law drafter summaries highlighting the views of the legislators. The recommendations are the need to embed a recordkeeping perspective into the accounts, the requirement to follow the statement structures, guided analysis methods for stakeholder statements and clearer references to stakeholder statements.

The study compares the differing views of stakeholder statements and law drafter summaries in law drafting relating to records and information management.

The purpose is to investigate the professional identity of public library, archive and museum (LAM) professionals in Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Norway and Sweden.

The data have been gathered through the administration of three questionnaires. A comprehensive analysis is conducted to explore the variations in the professionals’ perceptions of their professional proximities to the other LAM professions and other related professions, considering demographic factors such as age, education, gender and immigrant background of participants.

Through a lens of micro- and macro-professional identities, the findings underscore both clearly perceived role separation between the LAM professions and notable points of convergence, suggesting opportunities for collaborative efforts. The implications of these discoveries are discussed, offering a foundation for future research endeavors.

The study highlights the professions perceived to have the most and least similarity to LAMs based on questionnaire responses, providing valuable insights into the interplay between various professional domains.

This article reports on findings from interviews with ICT-based content creators whose work focuses on documenting and curating queer history and culture. The research specifically examines how as amateur historians, the participant’s embodied knowledge plays a central role in how they engage with discourse about queer historical figures, methods of queer historiography and community accountability.

The research deploys a queer constructivist framework to qualitatively gather and analyzes the semi-structured interviews of 31 North American content creators who curate digital project related to queer history and culture. The interviews were gathered between August 2022 and August 2023.

The research highlights how the subjectivity of queer embodiment aids, rather than hinders, participants' ability to collaborate with LGBTQIA+ communities while also addressing more significant ethical questions around intersectionality and inclusive historiographic work.

The content creators’ own positionality and commitments to community accountability and queer inclusivity fostered richer stories and historical documentation, while also helping make visible queer identity as affirming and valuable within queer culture. Additionally, practical implications include highlighting the value of ICT-based content within the distribution of educational and informational resources related to queer history.

This research offers an underexamined intersection of historiography and queer embodiment. While extensive scholarship on institutional and community-based historiography work exist the content creators interviewed within this study exist within the space of both, often using a combination of embodied knowledge and traditional curatorial work to translate between such spaces, inviting, in turn, new ways of thinking about queer archival knowledge.

This paper aims (1) to create a sense of resonance with Maida Herman Solomon and her ideas, (2) to inspire a reconsideration of current management history (the unquestioned block box of dominant figures, dominant foci and dominant practices), (3) to bring Solomon’s contributions to clinical social work into present discourse in management and organizational studies and (4) to foster recognition for Solomon in her own field of social work, as forerunner in a developing profession. Guiding this study is the question: “What are Solomon’s key contributions and why is she overlooked?”

This paper features a novel methodology, ficto-feminism. The feminism in ficto-feminism is presented as ontology, epistemology, method and mode of writing. Ficto-feminism combines polemical (or prowoman writing) with aspects of collective biography, autoethnography and fictocriticism. As such, the paper contributes to the emerging feminist tradition of writing differently. The approach is an embodied and reflexive approach that engages with history to investigate the absence of women.

Maida Solomon was an educator, researcher, practitioner and advocate. Her contributions to the development and practice of clinical social work spanned over 60 years, and yet, she is little more than a footnote in the history of the field. Her contributions include authoring and implementing graduate programming, which continues to be the taken for granted training; penning some of the most seminal works and advancing theory; introducing academic and scientific approaches, which saw the field professionalize and adopt new standards; and helping to change the way that society thought about mental health and sexual health. A confluence of factors contributes to her marginalization and neglect: gender, ethnicity, the feminized field of social work and the stigmatized focus for her practice.

The paper combines assertive autobiographical and literary strategies to foreground an overlooked female leader in the field of clinical social work, namely, Maida Solomon. Drawing on biographical material, literature, media and archival material, this paper features a fictional but truthful conversation between the present-day author/writer/historian and the posthumous, historical protagonist (Maida Solomon). In so doing, the engagement with history is both one that deconstructs while reconstructing a historical account with both aesthetic and political implications.

COVID-19 has forced audit firms to change the way they operate. One change has been to rely more on information technology (IT) and IT human capital to overcome COVID-19-related challenges. We refer to audit firms’ use of these two resources as audit firm informatization (AFI). It is important to understand whether AFI helps audit firms address challenges created by the pandemic. Thus, this study examines the impact of AFI on audit quality during the COVID-19 pandemic in China with a focus on IT human capital.

We use a mixed-methods approach. First, we perform multivariate regression analyses on archival data. Specifically, we investigate the relationship between IT human capital and audit quality and the two mechanisms (i.e. improved efficiency and reduced audit risk) underlying the relationship. We also investigate how this relationship is moderated by features of clients, audit firms and individual auditors. Then we use interviews to corroborate the results of our regression analyses.

Our analyses of archival data show that IT human capital positively affects audit quality through improved efficiency and reduced audit risk and that this positive impact is more pronounced for clients in non-manufacturing industries, those with a more opaque information environment, audit firms with greater industry coverage and individual auditors with less experience. Our interview data indicate that audit firms with more advanced AFI and a higher level of IT human capital in particular are less disrupted by the pandemic and are better able to use IT to address challenges associated with COVID-19. Furthermore, the results confirm that improved efficiency and reduced audit risk are the mechanisms through which AFI enhances audit quality. Finally, we identify issues associated with the use of IT.

This study is the first to investigate how IT human capital (and by extension AFI) influences audit quality in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings should be of interest to practitioners and setters of auditing standards.

This paper focuses on image-to-text manuscript processing through Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), a Machine Learning (ML) approach enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI). With HTR now achieving high levels of accuracy, we consider its potential impact on our near-future information environment and knowledge of the past.

In undertaking a more constructivist analysis, we identified gaps in the current literature through a Grounded Theory Method (GTM). This guided an iterative process of concept mapping through writing sprints in workshop settings. We identified, explored and confirmed themes through group discussion and a further interrogation of relevant literature, until reaching saturation.

Catalogued as part of our GTM, 120 published texts underpin this paper. We found that HTR facilitates accurate transcription and dataset cleaning, while facilitating access to a variety of historical material. HTR contributes to a virtuous cycle of dataset production and can inform the development of online cataloguing. However, current limitations include dependency on digitisation pipelines, potential archival history omission and entrenchment of bias. We also cite near-future HTR considerations. These include encouraging open access, integrating advanced AI processes and metadata extraction; legal and moral issues surrounding copyright and data ethics; crediting individuals’ transcription contributions and HTR’s environmental costs.

Our research produces a set of best practice recommendations for researchers, data providers and memory institutions, surrounding HTR use. This forms an initial, though not comprehensive, blueprint for directing future HTR research. In pursuing this, the narrative that HTR’s speed and efficiency will simply transform scholarship in archives is deconstructed.

The study aims to enhance our understanding of shared community oral history stewardship by exploring its practices and challenges from the perspectives of the stakeholders involved.

This study employed in-depth semi-structured interviews with community oral history stewards. Each interview focused on their experiences and perspectives regarding community-based oral history projects. The interview data were transcribed and analyzed using a grounded theory approach.

Community oral history stewards found oral history stewardship entails substantial effort, long-term commitment, and challenges. They concurred on the importance of partnerships between communities and archives in preserving community stories, with institutional archives providing valuable support, resources, and engagement beyond mere preservation platforms. Establishing trust between communities and archives emerged as a fundamental requirement for fruitful collaboration.

Community oral history has stood out as the prevailing form within the theory and practice of oral history, but its shared stewardship practices have not been thoroughly explored from the stakeholders' viewpoints.

This chapter explores how the development of football fandom for the Chinese national team and local football clubs is strongly associated with societal changes. Although the performances of Chinese football teams, especially the national team, have failed to impress the world, football remains the most popular because of millions of supporters with loyalty and passion. Most studies related to fans mainly focus on the economic and political implications of spectatorship along with the rise of China. Nevertheless, few articles are available to answer the fundamental questions, such as ‘When did these supporters come out?’ and ‘What were the factors of the development of fandom?’. By going through archival records and published documents over the last decades, this chapter offers a comprehensive and historical analysis of the development of football fandom in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and deals with these unanswered questions. As such, this chapter does not intend to be the most authoritative one but is one of the rare sources to lay down the foundation for research on Chinese football fandom. Furthermore, this chapter also proves that studies on football fandom can be a useful window for observing Chinese society.

Organizations remain a vital sociological topic, but organizational sociology, as a subfield, has evolved significantly since its inception. In this paper, I argue that organization sociology is becoming increasingly disconnected from organizational theory, as currently conceived. The focus of sociological research on organizations has become more empirically grounded in the study of social problems and how organizations contribute to them. Sociologists continue to see organizations as important actors in society that play a role in shaping social order and as contexts in which social processes play out. I propose two main sociological approaches for organizational research, which I describe as “organizations within society” and “society within organizations.” The first approach examines the role of organizations as building blocks of social structure and as social actors in their own right. The second approach treats organizations as platforms and locations of social interactions and the building of community. These approaches are somewhat disconnected from the sort of grand theorizing that characterizes much of organizational theory. I argue that the problem-oriented sociology of these two approaches offers a vital way for organizational scholars to expand and theoretically revitalize the field.