Heather MacNeil

Professor MacNeil’s research revolves around archival histories and theories, archival representational practices, and cross-disciplinary perspectives on record trustworthiness. Her recent research and publications focus on histories and theories of knowledge organization in archives and museums.

MacNeil, Heather and Terry Eastwood, eds. Currents of Archival Thinking. 2nd ed. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited, 2017.

MacNeil, Heather. Trusting Records: Legal, Historical, and Diplomatic Perspectives. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000.

MacNeil, Heather. “Deciphering and Interpreting an Archival Fonds and its Parts: A Comparative Analysis of Textual Criticism and the Theory of Archival Arrangement.” In Research in the Archival Multiverse. Eds. Anne J. Gilliland, Sue McKemmish and Andrew Lau. Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2016.

MacNeil, Heather. “The Role of Calendars in Constructing a Community of Historical Workers in the Public Records Office of Great Britain ca. 1850-1950.” In Genre Theory in Information Studies. Ed. Jack Andersen. Bingley, UK: Emerald, 2015

“MacNeil, Heather, Jessica Lapp and Nadine Finlay. “The Evolution of the Ethnographic Object Catalogue of the Canadian Museum of History (2): Systematizing, Communicating, and Reconciling Anthropological Knowledge in the Museum, ca. 1960-2018”. Information and Culture: A Journal of History 55:3 (Fall 2020): 226-251.

MacNeil, Heather, Jessica Lapp and Nadine Finlay. “The Evolution of the Ethnographic Object Catalogue of the Canadian Museum of History (1): Collecting, Ordering and Transforming Anthropological Knowledge in the Museum, ca. 1879-1960”. Information & Culture: A Journal of History 55:2 (Spring 2020): 169-191.

MacNeil, Heather. “Understanding the Archival Fonds as Autobiographical Text through Three Discourses.” Italian Journal of Library and Information Science (JLIS.it) 20:3 (Sept. 2019): 47-58.

MacNeil, Heather, Wendy Duff, Alicia Dotiwalla, Karolina Zuchniak. “‘If there are no records, there is no narrative’: the social justice impact of records of Scottish Care-leavers.” Archival Science 18:1 (March 2018): 1-28. Lead article.

MacNeil, Heather. “Catalogues and the Collecting and Ordering of Knowledge (II): Debates about Catalogues and Cataloguing Practices in the British Museum and the Forebears of the Public Record Office of Great Britain, ca. 1750-1850,” Archivaria 84 (Fall 2017): 1-35. Lead article.

MacNeil, Heather. “Catalogues and the Collecting and Ordering of Knowledge (1): ca. 1550-1750.” Archivaria 82 (Fall 2016): 27-53.

Doctoral

Jennifer Douglas, 2013. “Archiving Authors: The Analysis And Representation Of Writers’ Records.” Winner of the iSchool 2014 Best Dissertation Award.

Jessica Lapp, 2020. “The Provenance of Protest: Conceptualizing Records Creation in Archives of Feminist Materials.”

INF 2195H Libraries, Archives, Museums: Intersections and Tensions

INF 2146H Trusting Records: Concepts, Methods, Perspectives

INF 2174H Histories of Records and Archives

BKS 2000H Advanced Seminar in Book History and Print Culture: The Archive as Text