Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
70 lines (43 loc) · 6.62 KB

Principles for Ethical Description in Special Collections Technical Services.md

File metadata and controls

70 lines (43 loc) · 6.62 KB

Updated June 2020

Principles for Ethical Description in Special Collections Technical Services

We recognize the significance of the language we use and the ways we frame narratives in archival description, and we approach our descriptive work with compassion and care for the people documented in our collections and for the people who use our collections and our descriptive resources.

  • We identify people documented in the archival collections by name, wherever possible.
  • We revise and expand legacy subject access points, especially in visual materials description, to acknowledge the people who are documented.
  • We strive for consistent use of conscious and humane language. We do not use language that perpetuates stereotypes, is offensive, racist, and dehumanizing.
  • We revise legacy description that does not meet these standards, whether it was creator-generated or applied by an archivist.

We strive to improve discoverability of enslaved, formerly enslaved people, and immediate descendants of enslaved people with more expansive and reframed description around the sources in our collections that document their existence.*

  • We re-center people who have been marginalized, dehumanized, and erased in the historic record by revising our legacy description that does not hold enslaving families accountable.
  • We describe and make discoverable all eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collection materials that document the lives of enslaved people.
  • We identify enslaved people by name whenever possible.
  • We remediate biographical information in abstracts and elsewhere to clearly connect family and plantation names with slavery.
  • We create NACO and SNAC records for plantation and enslaving family names.

We seek to dismantle the white supremacist viewpoint that permeates legacy archival description and to refute Lost Cause mythology with historical accuracy.

  • We revise description that neutralizes hate groups as "civic" or "heritage" organizations or belies lynching and other violent acts documented in collection materials.
  • We seek creative digital solutions, such as alt-tagging, closed-captioning, and transcription, to surface content about underrepresented groups that has been hidden by legacy description practices.

We seek to serve the communities represented in the collections and in the description by improving the accessibility of the description we write.

  • We compose and edit description to privilege inclusivity and accessibility, especially for people outside the academy.
  • We seek feedback on our descriptive work from the communities, with respect and appreciation of their perspective, time, interest, and engagement.
  • We develop opportunities for communities who seek to participate in creating description of their history and collection materials.

We approach our descriptive work with a commitment to humility, consistency, and transparency.

  • We bring questions to the ethical description channel or meetings so everyone can understand the issues and engage with them.
  • We use processing notes to document the updates that we make to legacy finding aids so staff and researchers can understand the evolution of description.
  • We make legacy description easily available to staff and researchers.
  • We plan our remediation work so that it is systematic and open to participation of everyone in the department.
  • We create documentation that guides this work.

We connect our work in TS Archival to the work of UNC Libraries.

  • We participate in CE steering committee's focus groups and case studies.
  • We learn about the work of the CE steering committee and how our work connects to it.

We engage with the efforts of other archivists and those in allied professions who are speaking and writing about these issues. We have based our approach on writings and presentations by Jarrett Drake, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Gloria Gonzalez, Jasmine Jones, Michelle Caswell, Annie Tang, Dorothy Berry, Kelly Bolding, Rachel Winston, Nathan Sentence, and the Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia’s Anti-Racist Description Working Group, among others.^1 We recognize and acknowledge the influence that they have on our work.

  • We share readings on ethical description.
  • We report out on webinars, conference sessions, and other professional development and learning opportunities.

We share our work with the profession so we can receive feedback and develop collaborations.

Bibliography

Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia’s Anti-Racist Description Working Group, "Anti-Racist Description Resources", October 2019. Accessed November 2019. https://archivesforblacklives.wordpress.com/

Bergis Jules, “Confronting Our Failure of Care Around the Legacies of Marginalized People in the Archives,” Keynote address presented at National Digital Stewardship Alliance, Pittsburg, PA October 2017. Accessed December 5, 2019. https://medium.com/on-archivy/confronting-our-failure-ofcare-around-the-legacies-of-marginalized-people-in-the-archives-dc4180397280.

Kelly Bolding, “Reparative Processing: A Case Study in Auditing Legacy Archival Description for 55 Racism” Presentation at Midwestern Archives Conference, Chicago, IL, March 2018. goo.gl/uwjQpg.

Michelle Caswell, "Teaching to Dismantle White Supremacy in Archives." The Library Quarterly 87, no. 3 (July 2017): 222-235. https://doi.org/10.1086/692299.

Jarrett Drake, “RadTech Meets RadArch: Towards A New Principle for Archives and Archival Description,” Paper presented at Radcliffe Workshop on Technology & Archival Processing, Cambridge, MA, April 2016. Accessed December 5, 2019. https://medium.com/on-archivy/radtech-meetsradarch-towards-a-new-principle-for-archives-andarchival-description-568f133e4325.

P. Gabrielle Foreman, et al. “Writing about Slavery/Teaching About Slavery: This Might Help” community-sourced document, Accessed 18 June 2020. https://naacpculpeper.org/resources/writing-about-slavery-this-might-help/.

Gloria Gonzalez and Jasmine Jones, "Access and Diversity: How to Create Practical and Ethical Minimal Archival Description," Presented at Intersections: Technology and Public Services in Special Collections Symposium, State College, PA, August 2017.

Nathan Sentence, “Maker unknown and the decentring First Nations People.” Archival Decolonist (blog). 2017. Accessed December 5, 2019. https://archivaldecolonist.com/2017/07/21/maker-unknown-and-the-decentring-first-nations-people/amp/?__twitter_impression=true.

Annie Tang, Dorothy Berry, Kelly Bolding, and Rachel Winston, “Towards Culturally Competent Archival (Re)description of Marginalized Histories.” Presented at Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., August 2018.