A Content Analysis of Archival Journal Literature

This paper is a content analysis of archival journal literature from five of the leading journals in the field. Although there have been many similar studies in LIS, few have examined archival literature in particular. The aim of the study was to investigate how research in archival studies was distributed over various topics and which approaches and methods were most popular in the field over the past thirty years. To implement this study, the research articles published in each journal were analyzed for four representative years. Key hypotheses were that little change over time will be seen in the methods and approaches used by archival researchers but that coverage of standards, functional archival practices and technology would increase over time. The data was gathered and then analyzed to test the predictions and to identify any other trends or notable features of archival discourse