Steering Share: Meet Burkely Hermann

Steering Shares are an opportunity to find out more about the I&A Steering Committee. This post comes courtesy of Steering Committee member, Burkely Hermann, National Security Archive, and current I&A Blog Coordinator. Other members currently on the I&A Steering Committee include Danielle Simpkins, Caitlin Rizzo, Sheridan Sayles, Liz Call, Holly Rose McGee, and Claire Gordon.

1) What was your first experience working with archives?

I first worked in an archives after graduating from college with my B.A. in Political Science and History, as a researcher at the Maryland State Archives for a project trying to track down the stories of Maryland Revolutionary War soldiers, called the “Finding the Maryland 400” project, having a flexible start and end time, often either working with a historian on staff or independently. While that job only lasted six months as the grant money from a non-profit ran out, it began my interest in archives, which was rekindled in later years when I started my MLIS degree and worked at NARA’s College Park location as a work study in my last semester.

While I was drawn toward genealogy when working at the Maryland State Archives, I remember digitizing documents, using a push cart to move heavy books from the stacks to my desk, the in-house system I used to input information, or the many databases I used day in and day out. On the other hand, there were mold remediation efforts during the end of my time there. Worst of all, however, was the public transit nightmare I endured to get to the archives. Every day, I went on a light rail train to the end of the line, then a caught bus down to the archives itself. One wrong transfer or traffic would cause delays either by minutes or by hours. One major lesson I learned from the whole experience was to work somewhere that is accessible through public transportation!

2) What is an archival issue that means a lot to you?

That is a hard question. I would say precarity in the archives profession is very important, as many of my jobs since graduating have been precarious, whether working at a grant-funded position at the Maryland State Archives, an unpaid internship for NARA, or a graduate assistantship at University of Maryland, where I earned my MLIS degree, focusing on Archives and Digital Curation. Connected to this are those trying to unionize archivists, have fair pay, and safe working conditions, among other efforts to help archival issues.

Currently, I work at a non-profit which relies on grant funding, so in that way, it is a bit of a precarious position, I suppose, as a loss of funding could lead, possibly, to cuts in wages and benefits. I am glad that archival precarity has received a lot of attention in recent years and I hope that it continues to be seen as important by those in the profession, including in the SAA. This seems by the case from what I can gather when filling out the A*Census II.

3) What do you hope to gain by being on the I&A Steering Committee?

I hope to connect with like-minded archivists who are concerned with various archival issues, such as reparative processing, redescription, institutional sustainability, institutional racism, and preserving social media posts. I’ll be using my perspective to positively contribute to the Issues & Advocacy Section (I&A) to continue existing advocacy and outreach efforts, including continuing to promote the value and importance of the archival profession.

4) What can we find you doing outside of the archival profession?

Well, read a lot of webcomics and watch a bunch of animated series. And I write reviews of shows and comics I read, some of which have archivists and librarians! Also, for fun, I write fiction and incorporate some archivists into some of my stories. I occasionally do family history research for both sides of my family and have some blogs about that as well. When I’m not doing all of that, and it’s good weather, I go on hikes and read books.

February 7, 2022November 24, 2023 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Interviews, Steering ShareTags: A*CENSUS, archival description, archival processing, archives profession, born-digital records, databases, genealogy, institutional racism, institutional sustainability, internships, Interviews, job security, library degrees, NARA, National Security Archive, outreach, popular culture, precarity, redescription, reparative processing, social media, unionization, web archiving 7 Comments

Steering Share: A Reading List for Practicing Allyship in Archives

Steering Shares are an opportunity to find out more about the I&A Steering Committee. This post comes from I&A Chair Courtney Dean, Head of the Center for Primary Research and Training in UCLA Library Special Collections.

For the final Steering Share of my term as I&A Chair I was planning to provide an update on our section’s temporary labor survey which closed earlier this month. (We had 412 responses!) Instead, when I sat down to write last evening, I quickly found myself going down the wormhole of comments about a recent blog post that was shared via Library Journal’s Twitter account. I won’t go into too much detail (you can look it up yourself) but for those unfamiliar with the situation, a WOC librarian wrote a blog post about the whiteness of library collections, and as so often happens when POC speak truth about racism, the internet trolls came out en masse. (I encourage those of you on Twitter to go in and report them. It’s a quick and somewhat satisfying process.) Appalling enough as it is to have THOUSANDS of strangers leaving vitriolic, hateful, and blatantly racist comments, while also posting photos of the author and details about her workplace, it was especially reprehensible to see other librarians attacking her.

As archivists we’re sometimes inclined to think we don’t have a similar whiteness problem in our field, however one only needs to look at the numbers, or recall the backlash to Dr. Michelle Caswell’s Dismantling White Supremacy session at SAA a few years ago. For all of our talk of diversity, equity, and inclusion, we still struggle to recruit and retain archivists of color, and to acknowledge bias in our collecting practices. To this day I have colleagues who refuse to recognize that archives are not neutral.

Instead of continuing to rely on the on the intellectual and emotional labor of POC colleagues to tirelessly critique and challenge this problematic myth of neutrality, I encourage my fellow white archivists to check out the reading list below and start practicing allyship. We can all be doing better.

Below is a brief reading list in no particular order:

Issues and Advocacy: Archivists On The Issues: Answering The Call For Inclusivity, Summer Espinoza https://issuesandadvocacy.wordpress.com/2018/07/18/archivists-on-the-issues-answering-the-call-for-inclusivity/

Issues and Advocacy: Archivists on the Issues: Reflections on Privilege in the Archives, Summer Espinoza https://issuesandadvocacy.wordpress.com/2018/02/09/archivists-on-the-issues-reflections-on-privilege-in-the-archives/

Issues and Advocacy: #ARCHIVESSOWHITE In The Words Of Jarrett Drake  https://issuesandadvocacy.wordpress.com/2016/04/19/archivessowhite-in-the-words-of-jarrett-drake/

Honma, T. (2005). Trippin’ Over the Color Line: The Invisibility of Race in Library and Information Studies. InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 1(2). Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nj0w1mp

Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, records, and power: The making of modern memory” Archival Science (2002) 2: 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435628.

Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, “Moving Toward a Reparative Archive: A Roadmap for a Holistic Approach to Disrupting Homogenous Histories in Academic Repositories and Creating Inclusive Spaces for Marginalized Voices” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies vol. 5, (2018) https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol5/iss1/6/

Nicole A. Cook Information Services to Diverse Populations: Developing Culturally Competent Library Professionals (California: ABC-CLIO, 2017)

Mario H. Ramirez (2015) Being Assumed Not to Be: A Critique of Whiteness as an Archival Imperative. The American Archivist: Fall/Winter 2015, Vol. 78, No. 2, pp. 339-356. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.78.2.339

Expanding #ArchivesForBlackLives to Traditional Archival Repositories, Jarrett Drake, June 27, 2016. https://medium.com/on-archivy/expanding-archivesforblacklives-to-traditional-archival-repositories-b88641e2daf6

Caswell, Michelle (2017).  Teaching to Dismantle White Supremacy in Archives.Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, 87(3) 223-235. http://www.journals.uchicago.edu.libproxy.csudh.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/692299

Caswell, Michelle & Brilmyer, Gracen (2016).  Identifying & Dismantling White Supremacy in Archives: An Incomplete List of White Privileges in Archives and Action Items for Dismantling Them.  http://www.gracenbrilmyer.com/dismantling_whiteSupremacy_archives3.pdf  

Taylor, Chris (2017). Getting Our House in Order: Moving from Diversity to Inclusion. The American Archivist, 80(1), 19-29. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.80.1.19

April 22, 2019June 23, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Steering ShareTags: anti-racism, archives profession, biases, cultural competence, inclusion, institutional racism, invisibility, memory institutions, racial diversity, racial oppression, SAA, temporary labor, White supremacy, Whiteness Leave a comment

Archivists on the Issues: Answering the call for inclusivity

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. Today’s post comes from regular writer Summer Espinoza, her last for the year. Summer is the digital archivist at California State University, Dominguez Hills where she is working on a California State University Archives project.

This is my third and final blog post for the Archivists on the Issues series. It would be more scholarly of me to share research, but I hope you (reader) can excuse my personal, introspective and non academic discourse here.

One of the most important attributes I carry in this life is that of a brown-skinned human (insert Library of Congress subject headings as you please). My brown skin has guided my experiences in my academic and personal education. My research interests today are guided by the way external and self identifiers have constructed and shaped my life and career. If you are midway through a sigh right now, I empathize. I sometimes catch myself with this same reaction because, in fact, I sometimes cringe at the fact I am so invested in this identity politic.

My duties as an archivist have guided me towards descriptive cataloging, perhaps by the same token of the fluidity and interpretive nuances of identity politics. Let me relate this conversation to my current work with the California State University System Archives Digitization Project. I have created subject headings for persons of color and I have also made use of the equally dodgy “Caucasians” subject heading. My methodology (if you can call it that) when creating a subject heading for ethnicity (non- “Caucasian”), is to look for published articles, newsletters, or records of events in which a notable person has been commended for work in a community, often by a community with which they identify. I take these cues and with all the best intentions, I apply a Library of Congress or local vocabulary term, and hope for the best. This has not, however, caused me to create particularly accurate or authoritative headings, for example Mexican American, Chicano and/or Latino and Black or African American, Chinese American or Asian American.

The “Caucasians” subject heading has given me extreme pause. I approached the task of descriptive cataloging for photographic prints of European Americans with an apology first: “I’m sorry I am labeling you this way.” Why am I sorry? I am sorry because in the back of my mind is this little kernel of negativity toward the word “Caucasian.” Why am I using this word in the first place?

Up to the point of this project, I had not fully acknowledged the history of this word, and upon further investigation I found the term is rooted in eighteenth century racial classification. How and why am I blindly following the notorious Library of Congress (out)dated subject headings? Not to mention the word as both anachronistic, archaic, and still very much alive in our modern societal vocabularies in human classifications.

Much like my first post, I express these reflective (and yes, negative) experiences to better understand the role of my own history and how it interacts with my professional responsibilities.

In a recent listserv call for panel proposals for a visual arts conference, a cataloger posed some very compelling questions about the ways in which descriptive cataloging of an artist interacts with the cataloging of their artistic works.

This led me to more questions, but primarily this one: why do we as archivists believe that the (best) answers to our initiatives to be inclusive and diverse rest solely in our professional circles? Did we and do we currently believe that we are the best and only source of expertise in the digital environment? Do we not look outward to other disciplines for marketing and development, content expertise, and so forth? Are we the first group of professionals to tackle inclusivity? What do we generally understand about cultural inclusivity on a professional level, and are we trained and educated enough to move beyond initiatives and policies that do not mean much to the everyday archivist?

Let’s not pat ourselves on the back too quickly as we circulate these documents amongst our ranks, let us share our shortcomings for the better.

July 18, 2018June 22, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Archivists on the IssuesTags: archival description, archives profession, institutional racism, Latino people, Library of Congress, racial oppression, redescription 1 Comment

Archivists on the Issues: Access and Inclusion in the Reading Room

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. Today’s post comes from regular writer for I&A’s blog, Lindy Smith, Reference Archivist at Bowling Green State University’s Music Library and Bill Schurk Sound Archives.

For my second in a series on Access and Accessibility in Archives, I will discuss physical access to collections and spaces. I did not want to cover physical accessibility since there was an SAA AMRT/RMRT Joint Working Group on Accessibility in Archives and Records Management that covered this in depth and has created excellent documentation for working with both patrons and professionals with disabilities.

My initial thoughts were unfocused, though I knew I wanted to touch on this idea of who is, and more importantly, feels welcome in our spaces. I have been thinking about this since last spring, when I attended a presentation on art education and museum outreach, and last summer, when I read Cecilia Caballero’s blog post, “Mothering While Brown in White Spaces, Or, When I Took My Son to Octavia Butler’s Exhibit.” My thoughts congealed into a more digestible mass in my brain after I attended a fabulous session at the Midwest Archives Conference annual meeting titled “Beyond Description: Toward Critical Praxis in Public Services,” featuring Anna Trammell, Cinda Nofziger, and Rachael Dreyer as panelists.

These three occurrences gave me a lot to think about regarding the people in our reading rooms and what we can do to increase access and inclusion to a wider range of patrons. I hope we as a profession can come up with solutions to improve access to our physical spaces.

Director Dialogue: In Conversation with Brian Kennedy

Last March I attended a public discussion between three art museum directors about how they approach art education at their respective institutions: Brian Kennedy, director of my local art museum, the Toledo Museum of Art; Gretchen Dietrich from the Utah Museum of Fine Arts; and Lori Fogarty of the Oakland Museum of California. Though I went looking for outreach ideas, I came out with many questions, which I summarized on my own [sadly neglected] personal blog shortly after the event.

The directors discussed how they conduct outreach to make their museums into community spaces, better anticipate user needs, and invite more of the people from their respective neighborhoods into their buildings. Libraries, especially public libraries, have served the role of community centers for decades and museums are now getting on board, but where does this leave archives among our GLAM counterparts?

Archival public spaces tend to be limited to utilitarian reading rooms and maybe exhibit space. What would it look like if we tried to build new kinds of spaces where people could interact with our collections in different ways? What if we focused on more than research needs and looked at other information needs we could fill? What if we built spaces that are comfortable and appealing to spend time in? What if people didn’t have to sit at an uncomfortable table in a silent, surveilled room to get access to our collections? I am sure some of you reading this are thinking, “We’re doing something like this!” I want to hear about it! Do you have a good model others can follow? Shout it from the rooftops (or @librarypaste on Twitter)!

Beyond Description: Toward Critical Praxis in Public Services

During the MAC session, Trammel, Nofziger, and Dreyer began by presenting the idea of taking a critical look not only at our collections and our profession, but also the public services our staffs provide, using Michelle Caswell’s instant classic “Teaching to Dismantle White Supremacy” as a basis to examine the barriers that keep some users from accessing archives. Caswell’s article provides a useful diagram to provoke thinking about ways white supremacy shows up in our work; the area on Access/Use is particularly relevant to this discussion, but it only scratches the surface.

The second part of the MAC session was an interactive activity where the room broke into groups and filled out a rubric that had a much longer list of types of barriers along with space to include a description of specific barriers to help guide the group discussions. The categories listed were as follows:

• Technology (i.e. digital literacy)
• Physical (i.e. vision or mobility challenges presented by public spaces)
• Time (i.e. public hours, length of time required to conduct research, request and recall materials)
• Financial (i.e. costs involved with accessing archives)
• Documentation (i.e. registration requirements, identification required)
• Policy (i.e. restrictions)
• Identity (i.e. gender, sexuality, race)
• Institutional/Systemic (i.e. whose interests & history are represented by holdings?)
• Human Factor (i.e. customer service issues, approachability, etc.)

I found these categories to be excellent starting points to brainstorm.  For the sake of (comparative) brevity, I will not go into all of them here, but I want to talk through a few to give examples of how to use them as inspiration for brainstorming. Full disclosure: some of these came up or were inspired by my group’s discussion and did not spring fully formed from my own brain.

First example: Cost is a huge barrier. Obvious costs include memberships to private libraries and historical societies, photocopying or other reproduction services, or private researcher time, but hidden costs like parking, transportation, childcare, time off work, food and accommodations if researchers are coming from out of town are also present. It is great to collect materials from underrepresented communities, but if members of those communities cannot afford to come see and use materials from their own lives and experiences, we are still only serving people with the means to visit. To mitigate this, archives could provide research grants to members of the communities targeted in collection development projects. Institutions could also take their work directly to those communities, rather than continuing on relying on patrons to do all the work of coming to them.

A second barrier: Time. Many repositories have limited hours, often because of limited staffing or other concerns that are seemingly insurmountable, but we should take a closer look at ways to make ourselves more available outside “normal working hours” (or 9-12 and 1-4, or afternoons two days a week, etc.). People who work have to take time from jobs to visit, and if they have limited or no paid time off, this is a costly proposition, especially if their research needs require multiple visits. Archives can at least test extended or flexible hours as their circumstances allow. What if a repository closed on Wednesday afternoons in order to open Saturday afternoons instead? What if academic archives used students to stay open on weekends? My repository is somewhat unusual in that we have a circulating collection in addition to our special collections; so we have longer hours than most special collections – when school is in session, we’re open until 10pm five days a week and Saturdays and Sundays). We only have four full-time and one part-time staff in our department, so our terrific student employees keep things running on evenings and weekends. Sometimes staff members take an evening shift, but we flex that time and take it off during the week.

“Mothering While Brown in White Spaces, Or, When I Took My Son to Octavia Butler’s Exhibit”

I stumbled across Cecilia Cabellero’s post via Twitter last fall and it hit me hard. It is worth a read, because we can see some of these issues in action in a real person’s real life. Rather than try to rephrase her words with my own [white] words, take a minute to read her post and reflect on the issues she raises.

Cabellero mentions a specific library, but let’s be honest: this could be many of our repositories. She identifies it as being in a white space, as many archives and special collections are. Started by a wealthy white man for the use of other wealthy white men. A place where researchers need to have advanced degrees or letters of reference to access collections. Who is served by these policies? What is protected? For those of us with less stringent admission guidelines, what groups are we still keeping out? Do you require photo identification? Do you charge membership or usage fees? Many of our policies have good reasoning behind them and we are not likely to update them anytime soon. Are there better ways to communicate that to our users?

Cabellero was visiting an exhibit about Octavia Butler, a woman of color who wrote science fiction at a time when neither women nor people of color were particularly welcome in that genre (I am sure many would argue they still are not, but things have improved). Regardless of the library’s intentions, they created an environment in which a female writer of color did not feel comfortable or welcome or allowed to visit an exhibit with personal resonance.

One of Cabellero’s main points, as evidenced by the title, is her experience parenting in our spaces. This deserves some examination for archivists. Do you allow children in the reading room? If not, do parents who want to use your collections have other options? Childcare is expensive and may not always be available at convenient times. This disproportionately affects mothers, who often take on more childcare labor, especially during weekdays when archives tend to be open.

How often do we exclude as Caballero was excluded, or on similar but smaller scales? How often do our minor interactions with patrons leave them feeling unwelcome? I am sure I have unintentionally done this in my work. What kind of image do we project and how does that keep people away? How do we make archival spaces that are really for everyone?

It Take a Long Pull to Get There

I do not have nearly as many answers as questions, but let us have these discussions and attempt solutions that better serve all potential users. It won’t be quick or easy, but it will be worthwhile.

I’ll leave you with one final illustration. I studied musicology in graduate school and I often think back to a point that one of my professors, Dr. Gayle Sherwood Magee, made about the importance of representation and access, as illustrated by the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. A little background if you’re unfamiliar: it is very controversial because a group of privileged white men wrote about poor black characters so the script play into a lot of negative stereotypes: characters are beggars, drug dealers, abusive partners, etc. It gave African-American singers the opportunity to perform on Broadway, something that was still remarkable when Hamilton premiered with a diverse cast 80 years later, but none of the characters portrayed in the opera had access to be in the audience and watch their stories playing out on stage. Are we doing the same thing in archives by focusing our diversity efforts on our staffs and collections, and not the people coming into our reading rooms?

 

References

• Caballero, C. (2017 August 23). “Mother While Brown in White Spaces, Or, When I Took My Son to Octavia Butler’s Exhibit.” Retrieved from https://www.chicanamotherwork.com/single-post/2017/08/23/Mothering-While-Brown-in-White-Spaces-Or-When-I-Took-My-Son-to-Octavia-Butler%E2%80%99s-Exhibit
• Caswell, M. (2017). “Teaching to Dismantle White Supremacy in Archives.” The Library Quarterly, 87(3), 222-235. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/692299  
• Trammell, A., Nofziger, C., & Dreyer, R. (2018 March). “Beyond Description: Toward Critical Praxis in Public Services.” Panel presented at the Midwest Archives Conference Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL.

 

May 4, 2018June 24, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Archivists on the IssuesTags: archival description, archives profession, BIPOC, Black history, collection development, gender identity, grants, inclusion, institutional racism, library school, outreach, patrons, physical access, record restrictions, redescription, reproduction, technology, underrepresented communities, White supremacy, Whiteness 2 Comments

Research Post: Gaps in the Collections

The I&A News Monitoring Research Team stays abreast of news related to archives and archivists, and helps us stay updated. This post, part of our Research Post series, was written by News Monitoring Team member Rachel Cohen. 

 

History is told by the victors. For too long, the evidence of that history has been missing minority voices. On the heels of the #MeToo movement and the Charlottesville protest, society has been looking inwards towards racist and sexist gaps. Archivists are recognizing that our collections are frequently reflecting the identity of their stewards, a group largely composed of white individuals.

The collective idea of history as an elevated, almost posh concept for the elite is waning. The past is becoming more accessible to the everyday person in ordinary places outside of the occasionally intimidating archive or expensive museum.

In Chicago, black women well known by textbooks and never recognized, now have a guidebook documenting their legacies through geographic locations. An article in the Chicago Tribune interviews authors Mariame Kaba and Essence McDowell on their documentation of the South Side of Chicago’s African American women. Forty women during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from pilot Bessie Coleman to the abolitionist Fannie Hagen Emanuel, are highlighted on maps throughout the city for their accomplishments. The authors were not paid for their work and published the book on top of their full time jobs. “People haven’t taken the time to really know black women, in our fullness as three-dimensional human beings,” Kaba explained. “I want people to think about what these women did, the stories they told, the music they made, the institutions they built and how it’s connected to black women’s lives today.”

The New York Times tried to correct the historical record by writing obituaries for overlooked women throughout the paper’s history. They solicited nominations and received submissions from readers that included famous women and their own deceased relatives. Accessible at “Overlooked,” the reporters are collating obituaries dating back to 1851.

Since 1888, National Geographic has been informing its readership about foreign lands, exotic animals, and racist coverage of minorities. As reported in “‘National Geographic’ Reckons With Its Past,” the magazine scoured its archive in anticipation of an edition solely devoted to race. The textual references, photographs, and choice of subjects in the magazine’s coverage upheld a tradition of racism that influenced generations of readers. Glossing over the ugly parts of history that don’t show people in the best light is wrong. The photographs in the magazine up until the 1970’s fetishized the “otherness” of certain groups in order to make them seem subhuman in comparison to Western, white culture. Women were often shown topless and images were framed in stereotypical manners without giving voice to the subjects. The so-called exotic practices of the people were emphasized in order to not report on the negative parts of their lives, like war or hunger. The magazine is increasing its list of diverse voices in response to their report.

Contemporary interpretations of history have had the tendency to try erase the struggles of people, to the point of war and death, for a better world. Confederate statues, largely put up in the twentieth century, ignited a nation-wide debate this year with how the present day culture deals with the notion of slavery and racism generations later. The last slaves have died, as have their children. How should we place the rampant practice of slavery in the present day interpretations of history?

A new historical marker in Memphis shows how history can include recognizing the negative aspects of the past. This prime example comes from the Jefferson Davies Highway, which still has remnants you can drive on throughout the Southern states. Memphis and the National Park Services expanded a 1955 sign honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest to include his participation in the antebellum slave trade. Prior to the additional words on the marker, the fifty-five words on Forrest only said that “business enterprises made him wealthy.” It is now the only sign in Memphis that connects the city to slave trading. Forrest was only one of several slave traders on Adams Street, where the sign is located, who bought and sold kidnapped African slaves despite the 1808 congressional ban on slave importation.

Revealing these hidden histories will take time and introspection by those in power, but the articles of this past month have shown some steps towards a more inclusive reading of the past. As archivists, we are in a unique position to fill in gaps in our collections that marginalize groups.

April 16, 2018June 22, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Research PostTags: anti-racism, historical interpretation, institutional racism, maps, news media, racial oppression, Whiteness Leave a comment

ICYMI: Simmons College DERAIL Forum Highlights Student Research and Advocacy in Archives and LIS

Our ICYMI series provide summaries of presentations, publications, webinars, and other educational opportunities that are of interest to I&A members. We keep a running list of upcoming events. If you’re interested in writing a post for ICYMI, please refer to our sign up sheet. In this post, Des Alaniz, Joyce Gabiola and Caroline Gardner recap the DERAIL Forum, held at Simmons College.

The first-annual Diversity, Equity, Race, Accessibility and Identity in LIS (DERAIL) Forum held on March 26^th at Simmons College in Boston, marked the culmination of several months of student-coordinated efforts to address social justice and inclusion within the Simmons College School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) and beyond. In April 2015, DERAIL logistics coordinator and SLIS archives student Joyce Gabiola virtually attended University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign’s (UIUC) LIS Education Symposium and was inspired by the coordinators’ leadership and efforts to empower students to critically examine LIS education. In their first semester of graduate school, Joyce wrote their first research paper about implementing “diversity” in core LIS curriculum because they realized “it was unlikely that we were going to explicitly address how race, ethnicity, white privilege, white supremacy, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and intersectionality play a structural role in information, technology, workplaces, and in our relationships with colleagues.” After the Symposium, Joyce felt a similar event could be one way to fill this void at Simmons.

While DERAIL was originally intended to create a safe space for SLIS students to engage in meaningful conversations on topics not explicitly addressed in our classrooms, we also implemented a virtual component to allow Simmons faculty/staff, LIS educators and students at other institutions, and practitioners to participate. Although in-person attendance was intentionally limited to current students and recent alumni (within one year of graduation), DERAIL found tremendous support and interest from virtual attendees (and non-attendees) – both LIS professionals and students in other MSLIS programs – who were able to watch DERAIL via live-stream and participate in discussions through moderated Twitter chats and GoToWebinar. In addition, we were honored that a graduate student from Queens College in New York attended in-person, as well as one of the coordinators of UIUC’s LIS Education Symposium.

The wide range of topics presented at DERAIL represent the existing research, interests, and concerns of current students and recent alumni. Some of the presentations examined librarians and LIS professionals as workers (Professionally Underpaid: Systemic Issues in the LIS Field), the meaning of accessible libraries in policy and practice (Accessible Libraries: Essential and Often Forgotten), and the deployment of ‘diversity’ language in LIS outreach efforts (Words of Welcome: The Language and Structure of Diversity Policies and Initiatives in LIS Outreach). Archival student perspectives were also represented, in oral history projects (Inknography: Challenging the Model Minority Stereotype with Tattoos and Oral Histories) discussions about the role of archives in providing resources for anti-racism work on college campuses (Race, Archives, and Campus Communities), and a panel specifically centering on reconsidering the relationships between archives and archival users (Coming In Like a Wrecking Ball: Deconstructing Archival Authority).  All the presentations were critically engaging and highlighted the biases and systemic inequities in the standards and culture of the professions as well as in the curricula of graduate programs. At DERAIL, our views were challenged and the knowledge we’ve gained in our classes and work environments was shared with members of our student and practitioner communities. These critical conversations continue to affect how we approach our work as students, new graduates, and emerging professionals.

DERAIL provided the rare opportunity for LIS students to discuss their research on “uncomfortable topics” that impact our experiences as patrons, practitioners, educators, and students of information environments. For organizers, presenters, and attendees, DERAIL not only shaped our relationships to our fellow students and participants, but also brought wider recognition of the value of student contributions to the development and reconsideration of “professional” domains. All presentation slides and handouts are currently available online at the DERAIL Forum Program. Follow the Forum on Twitter (@derailforum) to receive info on DERAIL 2017!

Joyce Gabiola recently earned a MSLIS in Archives Management at Simmons College, where they were instrumental in the School of Library and Information Science’s creation of the Dean’s Fellow for Diversity and Inclusion as well as the Task Force for Diversity and Inclusion. They are an ARL/SAA Mosaic Fellow, ARL IRDW Scholar, and ALA Spectrum Scholar. Joyce is excited to begin the doctoral program in Information Studies (Archives) at UCLA this Fall.

Desiree Alaniz is a dual degree master’s student in Archives/History at Simmons College and served as Communications Coordinator for DERAIL 2016. She also blogs at Hack Library School and tweets @litlegoldenage.

May 24, 2016June 24, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: ICYMITags: accessibility, anti-racism, archives profession, biases, class oppression, gender oppression, Google Workspace, inclusion, institutional racism, library school, oral history, outreach, patrons, professionalism, racial diversity, racial oppression, social justice, White privilege, White supremacy, Whiteness Leave a comment

#ArchivesSoWhite Intro & Bibliography

I&A Research Teams are groups of dedicated volunteers who monitor breaking news and delve into ongoing topics affecting archives and the archival profession. Under the leadership of the I&A Steering Committee, the Research Teams compile their findings into Research Posts for the I&A blog. Each Research Post offers a summary and coverage of an issue. This Research Post comes from On-Call Research Team #1, which is mobilized to investigate issues as they arise.

Please be aware that the sources cited have not been vetted and do not indicate an official stance of SAA or the Issues and Advocacy Roundtable.

Due to the amount of information Research Team #1 gathered, this will be a 4-part series, with the Intro & Bibliography and then interviews with Jarrett Drake, Samantha Winn, and Ariel Schudson.

In January 2016 protesters sparked a conversation about the ongoing exclusion of people of color from nomination for Academy Awards with the Twitter hashtag #OscarsSoWhite. Although specifically focused on a single awards ceremony, the message it represented has far broader implications for how society grapples with institutional and structural racism. For archivists, the issues of cultural hegemony and representation #OscarsSoWhite addressed are ongoing concerns as we deal with our own legacy of a white, patriarchal system.

In response, archivist Jarrett Drake expanded the dialog through his own adaptation of the hashtag, #ArchivesSoWhite. Drake calls the archival profession to task for continuing to prioritize narratives of white supremacy and restricting opportunities for people of color in the profession. The ensuing Twitter conversation brought several other voices into the discussion, but also emphasized that these issues need to be addressed at a far deeper level as we strive for critical self-examination and real change.

Members of the Issues & Advocacy Roundtable On-Call Research #1 team reached out to Jarrett, as well as several other archivists involved in the dialog to gain additional perspective on their use of the hashtag #ArchivesSoWhite and potential next steps for the profession. Jarrett Drake, Sam Winn, and Ariel Schudson all graciously agreed to be interviewed for this blog.

The full text of those interviews will follow, but there are several key takeaways reiterated by each archivist worth noting here. The problems of a lack of diversity and the shaping of history based upon the records of the wealthy and powerful have been discussed among archivists for years. We can build upon the momentum of #ArchivesSoWhite to move beyond talk to action. From the collections our repositories acquire to the outreach we conduct, exhibits we mount, and classes we teach, a fundamental shift in how archivists conceptualize their mandate is coming. In addition, we need to reevaluate how we train, hire, support, and retain diverse staff who truly represent the materials for which they care.

Above all, this is not a solitary effort. Both Jarrett and Sam emphasize the twin goals of education and collaboration. We have compiled a brief bibliography with articles and books that provide context and background, allowing us to approach these problems as informed practitioners. Scholars, activists, researchers, and the public all have a stake in this conversation. We will use mechanisms that allow us to seek out and listen to the concerns of our colleagues across disciplines.

Acknowledgement of the lack of diversity in the profession, the realization that personal biases affect our work, and widespread recognition of the gaps in the historical record are not new developments. The question now is how we can take advantage of this particular moment of reflection and cultural consciousness.

Bibliography

Referenced in the #ArchivesSoWhite Dialogue

Zimrig, Carl. Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States. New York: NYU Press, 2016.

Recommended by Interviewees

Berrey, Ellen. “Diversity is for what people: The big lie behind a well-intended word,” Salon, October 26, 2015.

Ettarh, Fobazi. “Black or Queer? Life at the Intersection” Hack Library School, November 19, 2013.

Haris, Verene. “The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory, and Archives in South Africa,” Archival Science 2 (2002): 63.

Harling, Adrienne, “What to Do about Privilege,” Archival Outlook (November/December 2012): 13.

Hathcock, April. Diversity and Inclusion writings on At the Intersection: Blog about the intersection of libraries, law, feminism, and diversity.

Hathcock, April. “White Librarianship in Blackface: Diversity Initiatives in LIS”, In the Library With the Lead Pipe, October 7, 2015.

McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Independent School (Winter 1990).

Ramierz, Mario. “Being Assumed Not to Be: A Critique of Whiteness as an Archival Imperative,” American Archivist 78 no. 2 (2015): 339.

Swanson, Juleah, Ione Damasco, Isabel Gonzalez-Smith, Dracine Hodges, Todd Honma, and Azusa Tanaka. “Why Diversity Matters: A Roundtable Discussion on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Librarianship,” In the Library With the Lead Pipe, July 29, 2015.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph  Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History Boston: Beacon Press, 1997.

Vinopal, Jennifer. “The Quest for Diversity in Library Staffing: From Awareness to Action”, In the Library With the Lead Pipe, January 13, 2016.

Additional Sources

Dewey, Barbara I., and Loretta Parham. Achieving diversity : a how-to-do-it manual for librarians. New York : Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2006.

Hastings, Samantha Kelly. “If Diversity Is a Natural State, Why Don’t Our Libraries Mirror the Populations They Serve?.” Library Quarterly 85, no. 2 (April 2015): 133.

Maxey-Harris, Charlene, and Toni Anaya. Diversity plans and programs. Washington, DC : Association of Research Libraries, 2010.

Neely, Teresa Y., and Kuang-Hwei Lee-Smeltzer. Diversity now : people, collections, and services in academic libraries : selected papers from the Big 12 Plus Libraries Consortium Diversity Conference. New York : Haworth Information Press, 2002.

Ryan, Marianne, and Sarah Leadley. “Reflections on Diversity and Organizational Development.” Reference & User Services Quarterly 54, no. 4 (Summer 2015): 6-10.

Wheeler, Ronald. “We All Do It: Unconscious Behavior, Bias, and Diversity.” Law Library Journal 107, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 325-331.

The I&A Steering Committee would like to thank Heather Oswald for writing this post, and Stephanie Bennett and Christine Anne George for coordinating interviews.

I&A On-Call Research Team #1 is:

Christine Anne George, Leader
Stephanie Bennett
Maureen Harlow
Heather Oswald
Linda Reynolds
Kristen Weischedel

If you are aware of an issue that might benefit from a Research Post, please get in touch with us: archivesissues@gmail.com.

April 18, 2016June 24, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Research PostTags: #ArchivesSoWhite, archives profession, biases, BIPOC, cultural competence, Googlization, institutional racism, LGBTQ+, librarianship, libraries, outreach, racial diversity, Research Teams, White privilege, White supremacy, Whiteness 5 Comments