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Edited by Tom Nesmith, Greg Bak, and

Joan M. Schwartz

Take a peek inside!

“Archives touch our souls.”

–TERRY COOK

“A well ’a bless a my soul . . . I’m all shook up.”

–ELVIS PRESLEY

Like his favorite rock star Elvis Presley, the eminent Canadian scholar-archivist Terry Cook (1947–2014) had a knack for shaking things up. There’s an abiding lyricism in Cook’s contributions to the broad landscape of archival theory and practice. He was deeply passionate about archives and the people who cared for them, and his legacy resides in his holistic way of thinking about archives, memory, history, and society.

“All Shook Up” explores this legacy. For the first time, thirteen of Cook’s groundbreaking articles are brought together in a single volume. They’re paired with commentaries by leading archival thinkers from several countries who reflect on his influence as a scholar, colleague, educator, and mentor. The articles span his career, starting with an initial foray into archival literature in 1979 and ending in 2013, a year before his death. The range is prodigious: the history/archives debate, archival appraisal, the post-custodial era, digital records, Indigenous peoples and justice with archives, the records continuum, postmodernism, and power, memory, and identity.

In addition, three essays reveal ideas Cook honed as a graduate student that shaped his later archival thought, the eclectic reading he drew from his personal library, and his reflections during the final year of his life. The book also includes a comprehensive bibliography of his publications.

"All Shook Up is relevant to archivists, records managers, librarians, curators, historians, and students in these disciplines—in short, anyone who has taken “the archival turn” and seeks to understand archiving as a complex human activity that shapes how we think and what we know and do. Cook’s essays are designed to “shake you up,” to inspire you to embrace the full human experience of archives, and to open that experience to others.

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