Harmful content warning: The topic of this webinar is reparative description efforts in archives related to archival description that may contain racist, sexist, colonials, homophobic or offensive terminology. The content of this webinar, including both written slides and verbal presentations, refers to this harmful language in the context of this work.
Resources from the College of Charleston
Webinar Slides: Aaisha Haykal, College of Charleston
Reparative Description LibGuide
Discovering our Past essay about the slave tag discovery site
Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston
Resources from University of Minnesota
Webinar Slides: Lara Friedman-Shedlov and Kate Dietrick, University of Minnesota
Reparative Description in Archives and Special Collections LibGuide
Resources from Penn State
Webinar Slides: Lexy deGraffenreid, Penn State
Resources from Dartmouth College
Dartmouth Library Statement on Potentially Harmful Content
ArchivesSpace Content Warnings Plugin (plugin author, Joshua Shaw)
The next ArchivesSpace webinar will be a 90-minute learning opportunity on June 28, 2022, at 2:00pm ET/11:00am PT highlighting the reparative description work ArchivesSpace community members have begun at their organizations. Ample time for discussion will follow.
Date: June 28, 2022
Time: 2:00pm – 3:30pm ET (11:00am – 12:30pm PT)
Webinar description:
In this webinar, ArchivesSpace community members will describe the ways they have incorporated reparative description work into their overall archival workflow and missions. Each presenter will highlight a different method for approaching this work and all ArchivesSpace and archival experience levels are represented. A discussion will follow the presentations. The presenters and the topics they will discuss are as follows:
Aaisha Haykal is the Manager of Archival Services at the College of Charleston’s Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture. Haykal is responsible for collection development, research services, instruction, and administrative duties. In this presentation, she will be speaking about the College of Charleston’s archival repositories’ efforts with beginning reparative description for archival collections and its connection to the College’s work in understanding its history and legacy of slavery.
Kate Dietrick is the Archivist for the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives at the University of Minnesota, a position she has held since 2013. Prior to this position she lived in New York and worked as a project archivist with the Whitney Museum of American Art and with the Kress Foundation. Lara Friedman-Shedlov is the Digital Records Archivist for the Archives and Special Collections (ASC) Department at the University of Minnesota Libraries, and formerly Description and Access Archivist for the Kautz Family YMCA Archives at the University of Minnesota. In this session, Kate and Lara will discuss efforts in their organization to make small but positive steps to make progress on reparative work in ArchivesSpace. Lacking the resources to attempt a comprehensive project at this time, their approach so far has focused on creating guidance and tools to support and empower staff in making incremental changes.
Lexy deGraffenreid (she/her) is the Head of Collection Services at Penn State’s Eberly Family Special Collections Library (SCL) where she oversees all accessioning, processing, and collections maintenance work. She has been working on reparative description projects since Summer 2019 and has been working collaboratively to build more inclusive arrangement and description workflows in both SCL and as part of a Strategic Plan Action Team. Lexy will discuss conducting a high-level audit of SCL’s over 2,200 finding aids and how the results of that audit informed their reparative description projects. She will further discuss how this audit led to the development of their Inclusive Description Working Group, Inclusive Description Style Guide, and Inclusive Description Resource Guide. She will discuss the challenges they encountered in undertaking reparative description work, including challenges of not imposing identities onto LGBTQIA+ creators, contextualizing racist and violent materials, and adopting bilingual description in ArchivesSpace.
Joshua Shaw is a web and application developer at Dartmouth Library and has been working with ArchivesSpace since 2014. He’s currently part of the ArchivesSpace cross-council testing team and a member of the core committers group. In his session, Joshua will discuss the plugin he developed that adds a new sub record in ArchivesSpace that allows staff to add content warnings and clarifying descriptions to Accessions, Resources, Archival Objects, and Digital Objects. This plugin is currently in “beta” phase and is still in development. Members of the community are encouraged to test the plugin and provide feedback.
This webinar is being held to further the ArchivesSpace anti-racism and inclusion initiatives identified by the community to support and amplify those that document and empower individuals, organizations and communities that work to make the world a more inclusive place. To learn more, visit our wiki at https://archivesspace.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ADC/pages/1737261057/Anti-racism+and+Inclusion+Initiatives.