The 8th Archival Education and Research Institute (AERI) Conference(July 8-12, 2016) was held at the Kent State University, Ohio, USA. The five-days meeting was mainly composed of the keynote speech, sub-group report, group discussion and some other activitives.

   The Archival Education and Research Initiative (AERI) is a collaborative effort amongst academic institutions to support the growth of a new generation of academics in archival and recordkeeping education and research who are versed in contemporary issues and knowledgeable of the work being conducted by colleagues. The initiative seeks to promote state-of-the-art in scholarship in Archival Studies, broadly conceived, as well as to encourage curricular and pedagogical innovation in archival education locally and worldwide.

   Three SIRM doctoral students Xiaoshuang JIA, Zihan DING, Xiangnv WANG were invited to make speeches at AERI 2016. Xiaoshuang JIA gave the speech titled "Livelihood Archives in China" which introduced the status quo, problems and future development of livelihood archives construction in China; Zihan DING’s speech was "Visible technology: archives, power, governance and homeless people" which took the homeless crowd as case to discuss the elements of the imagination of the archives, and to explore the concept of archives management; Xiangnv WANG’s speech was "Archives career development and archives education: the thinking on Chinese archives science" which took a critical thinking on Chinese archives education and archives career development.