This assignment was a very important one for me. It has been difficult to stay focused on my studies during my tenure with Ukraine being ruthlessly invaded, and Palestine being ethnically cleansed. As a student of information science, I began to wonder what will happen to all of these stories coming out of Palestine from reporters, civilians, human rights activists and others. The fate of these stories is quite literally at the whim of the private companies running the platform. From the lens of an archivist, this isn’t great for preservation. I felt as if there was something I could do, and I wanted to explore the idea of trying to preserve these stories.

The description of this assignment was as follows:

You now have a working knowledge of archives at the high level – their history, their functions, their joys, and their problems. The final paper is a chance for you to demonstrate what you have learned and continue building on this foundation through further investigation of a specific archival topic. You will identify and trace a specific topic or idea in scholarly literature from the archival field, or explore literature that will help you build context for a specific research question. Look for connections across time and publications. How has the scholarly discourse evolved? Are there gaps in the literature when it comes to your topic?

I received a 19.75/20 on this paper, and my final score for the course was 101.5%. The 0.25 points subtracted from my paper’s grade was in regards to some errant APA v7 citations, which I’ve left in the document for transparency. Enjoy!