Society of American Archivists Annual Conference 2021

The annual Society of American Archivists conference was once again held in a digital format this year. Given my feeling of burnout, I attended with the hopes that it would help reignite my interest in archival work. Fortunately, the conference did not disappoint!

It was wonderful to see so many sessions that seemed to be focused on two general themes: reparative description and community archives. These are both topics that I have been interested in and wanting to learn more about, and given the number of sessions that addressed issues around both, I feel as though I walked away with a variety of perspectives. 

Samip Mallick presenting during the session ‘Community Archives Collaborative: Transforming Archival Work with Community-based Archives.’ The quote on his slide underscores the importance of archival records to communities, especially those that aren’t a part of dominant culture.

The sessions that I attended (both synchronously and asynchronously) that looked at the possibilities for inclusive metadata practices included: Instituting Sustainable Reparative Work from Where We Are; Language Matters: NARA and LAC Tackle Reparative Description; Temporal Ties: Addressing Harmful Pasts, Towards Imagining Just Futures; Foundations for Culturally Competent, Racially Conscious Metadata; and Making Product Less Problematic: Considerations of MPLP and Conscientious Description. The panelists in each session represented a range of different institutions - from government agencies to university libraries to small archives. It was helpful to find common threads throughout much of the discussion:

• Understanding your positionality (race, class, gender, nationality, disability status, etc) and how personal identity terms are not neutral are critical aspects to being mindful about this work, and also acknowledging that even with the best intentions it is very possible to perpetuate harm, especially if you belong to dominant identities

• Starting somewhere, even with small or basic steps like remedying collection-level description; progress over perfection

• Knowing that as archivists we often won’t know everything and need to reach out to subject experts, who are almost always members of the communities represented in and/or created by our collections

• Seeking community collaboration - not only around terms but also what priorities should be - can help archivists to be more strategic and create paths forward

• Embracing the reality that this work is iterative and that our workflows and resourcing (staff, time, etc) should take this into account; programs not projects so that the work is sustained rather than one-off

• Accepting that we may use technology to aid in speeding up some of this work - using a script to identify lists of problematic or harmful terms in finding aids, for example - but that redescription requires human intervention and judgment calls

• Accepting that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to redescription and reparative metadata work

• Approaching the work with an ethic of care and cultural humility

• Leaving notes on what was changed or amended for future users and archivists, considering if/when it is appropriate to retain previous harmful or erasing description

Sam Winn presenting during the session ‘Foundations for Culturally Competent, Racially Conscious Metadata.’ The slide provides reflections on the politics of naming.

Betts Coup presenting during the session ‘Making Product Less Problematic: Considerations of MPLP and Conscientious Description.’ The slide suggests that there should be normalization of not knowing and that learning and change should be key components to archival work.

I’m still mulling over all these ideas, and how care is so critical to a seemingly straightforward practice like description. That human-centered focus was a central theme to the sessions on community archives, as well. These sessions included: Temporal Ties: Addressing Harmful Pasts; Considering the Power of Naming Practices in Community-Based Archives; and Community Archives Collaborative: Transforming Archival Work with Community-based Archives. Some of my takeaways from these conversations:

• Many communities have grappled with symbolic annihilation from archives, which is when you and your community is not represented in mainstream collections; as a result these individuals and communities’ relationships with “traditional” repositories may be strained

• Community-based archives can provide an antidote to the traditional archival model in enabling folks to own their stories and history - in all its variation - outside those traditional repositories; self-determination, cultural sovereignty, and agency are key

• Some community-based archives may opt to adopt a post-custodial approach so that the owners/creators of the materials are able to retain the originals and the archive can then provide access to and unify materials digitally 

• Community-based archives serve to help people process generational trauma and heal, and also connect with previous generations and reclaim heritage; these archives can be a way of finding home and a way of continuing to keep the culture going

• Community is complicated! Marginalized communities aren’t a monolith, and it’s always important to take power dynamics into account with interactions; what is our relationship to power and how do we use it?

• Community-based and driven archives aren’t just about a repository collecting materials from a community but rather can and should be about disrupting existing power structures, including but not limited to training community archivists and providing them with free archival materials

• Depending on the nature of the organization, community-based archives may benefit non-hierarchical organizational structure and consensus based decision making

• Aside from simply amassing and providing access to materials, community-based archives can be uniquely positioned to activate their collections through collaborations

Joyce Gabiola and Gabrielle Garcia presenting during the session ‘ Temporal Ties: Addressing Harmful Pasts, Toward Imagining Just Futures.’ The slide reviews their framework for creating an inclusive environment at their organization.

Dominique Luster presenting during the session ‘Foundations for Culturally Competent, Racially Conscious Metadata.’ The slide asserts that archives are not neutral and that cultural competency is key in archival work.

I feel like so much of the work discussed during the sessions I attended critically looked at dismantling dehumanizing power structures in archives. The field has a long way to go in acknowledging and repairing the harm that has been done, often under the guise of neutrality and professionalism. It is heartening to see more folks working in the field centering human-centered archival work. 

Chicago Area Archivists: XML, EAD, ArchivesSpace

Northwestern University Library (NUL) hosted an event organized by the Chicago Area Archivists this fall. Two information professionals working in the archives and library presented on three topics: XML, EAD, and ArchivesSpace. I decided to attend the event given my increasing involvement in the sphere of metadata at work, and my interest in how other organizations adopt standards and tools.

First, the metadata specialist gave some basic foundational information about XML - extensible markup language - a plain text markup language. She provided a brief history of the language, context including related schemas (HTML, SGML), and examples of ways the data can be transformed via cascading style sheets (CSS) or extensible stylesheet language transformations (XSLT) (Miller, 2019). Next, she provided some basic structure and syntax rules, including “root” and “child” elements and limitations on characters (Miller, 2019). NUL uses XML given how flexible and powerful it can be as a way of organizing and transforming data. XML works well with a variety of structure schemas and controlled vocabularies that the institution relies on in order to publish the data on various platforms, and a well-formed XML document can be highly extensible. Oxygen is one software tool metadata librarians use at NUL to review and edit XML metadata, and the presenter provided a number of screengrab examples of this interface to show what XML looks like during her talk.

The metadata specialist then dove into EAD or encoded archival description. Once again, she provided some background information about the standard, especially as it related to the shift in making traditional paper finding aids machine-readable in order to make them more accessible (Miller, 2019). EAD is maintained by the Library of Congress and Society of American Archivists, and it is rooted in published standards for syntax and elements (Miller, 2019). The presenter discussed the core components of EAD next: the header, which describes the finding aid itself; front matter, which describes the finding aid publication information; and the archival description, which describes the collection (Miller, 2019). 

The archival description contains the core content of the finding aid, so the presenter spent the most time here. She outlined the type of information one might find here, including: the title, abstract, physical description, subject headings, biographical or historical note, collection description, scope and arrangement notes, provenance, custodial history, and access and use restrictions (Miller, 2019). The collection contents also fall under this section, and this allows for a hierarchical description of the collection - often mirroring the physical organization, broken down by box and folder level-information (Miller, 2019). Helpfully, EAD provides some structure for this way of outlining the content of a collection, allowing up to 12 layers of such “component elements” - numbered c01, c02, etc (Miller, 2019). EAD allows for an archivist or librarian to choose the degree of detail and levels of hierarchy for a finding aid, as it is not prescriptive. Finally, she discussed the use of attributes within EAD to make the components of a finding aid machine-readable. She touched on the ways in which attributes can be described through tags to provide greater specificity about the element - “label” is a label meant to be used in the display of the data, “normal” to indicate the established form of a heading like an ISO-formatted date, and “source” to indicate the source of a controlled vocabulary term (Miller, 2019).

One of the library’s archivists then provided a walk-through of NUL’s instance of ArchivesSpace, which is where the organization hosts its EAD finding aids. He discussed their workflow in ingesting documents into the system, the ways in which data can be further edited once it is in ArchivesSpace, and how it displays for the general public. The library has only been using it for a few years, but it sounds as though it is working well to make accessible finding aids for their archival collections. We had the opportunity to sit down in one of the library’s computer labs to try the system out in its test environment. This gave me a much better feel for the interface, and all of the ways in which you can manipulate and edit data. 

The day also included a tour of some of the library’s on-campus but off-site storage for archival collections. The archivist told us about the changes the library is undergoing in terms of staffing organization, and how this is impacting how special collections are conceived. Part of this will include some reorganization of the physical storage of collections, and it sounds like a daunting project they have ahead of them. I am always thankful for the chance to peer behind the scenes and see what these spaces look like at other organizations, especially since I never had the chance to visit this space when I worked at NUL years ago.

This was a wonderful opportunity to see how these elements that are often discussed in the abstract - XML, EAD - actually work in practice, and how they interface with tools like Oxygen and ArchivesSpace. I now feel like I have a much better grasp of these standards, especially in seeing examples of real finding aids. 

References:

Miller, K. (2019). Introduction to EAD and XML. [Workshop handout].