Fiorella Foscarini

Associate Professor , Director of Master of Information Program

Phone 416-978-8295

Email: fiorella.foscarini@utoronto.ca

Office: 638

Fiorella Foscarini holds a PhD in archival studies from the University of British Columbia. Before joining the Faculty of Information in January 2010, she worked as Senior Archivist for the European Central Bank in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) for a decade. Previously, she was Head of the Records Management Office and Intermediate Archives (Ufficio Protocollo e Archivio Generale) with the Province of Bologna (Italy). From 2014 to 2016, she taught archival studies in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands).

Research

Professor Foscarini is interested in the relationship between recordkeeping and information culture. She uses rhetorical genre studies to explore the interactions taking place when records are created and used in organizational contexts. She participates in an ICA-funded project entitled “Learning to Walk the Talk,” whose goal is to develop an information culture toolkit that organizations can use to diagnose their own information culture and to promote recordkeeping in their workplace. She is co-investigator in a SSHRC partnership grant project, InterPARES Trust, aiming at establishing a framework for trusting records in online environments.
Publications

Foscarini, F, MacNeil, H., Mak, B., and Oliver, G. eds. Engaging with Records and Archives: Histories and Theories. London: Facet, 2016 [Forthcoming].

—. “Appraisal in Four Paradigms.” In Currents of Archival Thinking, 2nd edition, MacNeil, H. and Eastwood, T. (eds). Santa Barbara, Calif.: Libraries Unlimited, 2016, 107-133 [Forthcoming].

“Organizational Records as Genres. An Analysis of the ‘Documentary Reality’ of Organizations from the Perspectives of Diplomatics, Records Management and Rhetorical Genre Studies.” In Genre Theory in Information Studies, Andersen, J. (ed.) . London: Emerald, 2015, 115-132.

—. “Function.” In Encyclopedia of Archival Science. Duranti, L. and Franks, P. eds. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2015, 215-218.

Oliver, G. and Foscarini, F. Records Management and Information Culture: Tackling the People Problem. London: Facet, 2014.

Selected Articles:

Douglas, J., Foscarini, F., Furness, A., and MacNeil, H. “To Understand Ourselves: Introduction to the 40th Anniversary Issue of Archivaria.” Archivaria 80 (2015): 1-4.

Oliver, G. and Foscarini, F. “Effective Records Management: Working Collaboratively within Organizations.” Comma: International Journal on Archives 13.2 (2015): 35-42.

Oliver, G. and Foscarini, F. “The Value of International Standards for Records Management: Perspectives from Education and Training.” Archives and Manuscripts 43:3 (2015): 181-193.

Foscarini, F. “A Genre-Based Investigation of Workplace Communities.” Archivaria 78 (2014): 1-24.

—. “Record as Social Action: Understanding Organizational Records Through the Lens of Genre Theory.” Information Research 18:3 –C08 (2013). Accessed November 1, 2016. http://InformationR.net/ir/18-3/colis/paperC08.html

—. “Diplomatics and Genre Theory as Complementary Approaches.” Archival Science 12.4 (December 2012): 389-409.

—. “Understanding Functions: An Organizational Culture Perspective.” Records Management Journal 22.1 (2012): 20-36.

—. “Understanding the Context of Records Creation and Use. ‘Hard’ versus ‘Soft’ Approaches to Records Management.” Archival Science 10.4 (December 2010): 389-407.
Student Supervisions

PhD

Nathan Moles, In Progress. “Inside Open Government Data Curation: The Impact of User and User Conceptions on Curation Processes at the City of Toronto.”
Course Titles

INF 2184H Appraisal for Records Retention and Archives Acquisition

INF 2175H Managing Organizational Records I

Fiorella Foscarini

Fiorella Foscarini

Research

Publications

Student Supervisions

Course Titles