The Pamela J. Stewart &
Andrew J. Strathern Archive
Records are important in themselves, but their value for the future is greatly enhanced if they are accompanied by descriptive materials, or metadata as these are called. The vision behind our archival project is to provide materials in digitized form that will be usable by scholars and others, representing a selection from a large and unique corpus of holdings of our own long-term research results from a number of field areas around the world: in particular, the Pacific (with special reference to Papua New Guinea), Asia (with particular reference to Taiwan, including its indigenous peoples), and Europe (with highlighted reference to Scotland and Ireland).
We have published extensively on these areas, but original field materials always outrun what can be published, and this archive is designed to give an in-depth idea of such materials, textual, audio, and visual, stretching back in the case of Papua New Guinea to early 1964, when life was very different, at least in surface details, from what it has subsequently become. Having worked together for many years to publish books and articles using both the earlier and the more recent fieldwork, our aim is to use the new venues of the digitized world to further deepen the record of our work and to provide images, audio, and texts that can be meaningful also to people from the field areas themselves.
The production of these online materials is very demanding of time and effort, as much as for publications that appear in book or article form. The collection of materials that are presented here is intended as integral with the overall long term publication projects in which we have engaged. The Pamela J. Stewart & Andrew J. Strathern Archive as a whole is being produced with the generous assistance of staff in the Hillman Library, University Library System (ULS) at the University of Pittsburgh and initial funding of our archiving laboratory in the Department of Anthropology by the Office of the Dean, Faculty and School of Arts and Sciences, also at the University of Pittsburgh.