Using Metadata as Data for Reparative Archival Description

(also known as the project title that was never accurate)

Institutional projects that seek to address problematic metadata in archival materials have become increasingly common over the past year. However, these projects are often not publicly documented, with legacy metadata changes occuring quietly without any explicit discussion or interrogation of intent, actions taken, or anticipated effect. Without transparency, these projects risk reinforcing systemic issues both old and new within archives and archival practice. Public accountability is critical to mitigate the history and present legacy of a white supremacist and classist society.

In line with the principles outlined in Michell Caswell’s Dusting for Fingerprints: Introducing Feminist Standpoint Appraisal, this site site will, I hope, be my way of dusting and revealing the fingerprints that I will leave on the metadata describing digital and physical collections of my institution. I seek to document the scholarship that has influenced my thinking, the actions I take and did not take on metadata, and the larger trends and implications that reparative work has on reconsidering problematic archival practices and reparative work in archives as a whole.

Why This Site’s Name Needed A Parenthetical

Date: 5/30/2021

The impetus for this project was, as it is for all too many projects in archives, a grant. I initially applied to one of my institution’s summer research grants because of a dichotomy I have seen all too often in the archives field—those who are practitioners in archives and those who develop, write, reflect upon, and create archival theory in scholarship are rarely the same. To further emphasize this divide, despite librarians being classed as faculty at my institution and serving on faculty committees, I was the first librarian to even apply for this research grant.

As an archivist who is primarily a practitioner at a small, under resourced institution, systematically documenting, reflecting upon, contextualizing, and sharing the work I do or would like to do through scholarly channels too often falls low on the priority list. The misleading name of this site is the initial title of the grant I submitted, which I have chosen to include for transparency purposes. You can read the grant application here. While the title reflects the need for a long-overdue equity audit of metadata at my institution, the title and grant I submitted also reflects a white person diving into the field of increasing equity in memory work having done little public work previously on the subject. Similarly, it reflects an overly simplified understanding of collections as data that did not fully integrate a reflection of the biases held by my institution over its fifty years of existence.

This project is meant to be a way for me to document the ways in which I bridge the researcher and practitioner gap in my own work and reflect upon my personal privilege. I want to use the “Blog” section of the site to interrogate my internal biases and privilege and actively reflect on established archival practices that reinforce systemic professional and societal inequalities throughout this work. Sharing the work I am doing at my institution and contextualizing that work within the field also allows me to be accountable to myself and the many others, particularly people of color, who are doing this important work. I aim to espouse the following values from Milena Radzikowska, Jennifer Roberts-Smith, Xinyue Zhou, and Stan Ruecker’s article, A Speculative Feminist Approach to Design Project Management while conducting this project:

  1. Challenge existing methods, beliefs, systems, and processes;
  2. Focus on an actionable ideal future;
  3. Look for what has been made invisible or under represented;
  4. Consider the micro, meso, and macro;
  5. Privilege transparency and accountability; and
  6. Expect and welcome being subjected to rigorous critique.

As such, I’d like to credit the scholarship of the following individuals (in no particular order) at the outset. I extend my deepest thanks to all of them for creating scholarship (broadly defined as tweets, blog posts, published articles, etc) of all kinds that have influenced me both personally and professionally. This list is inherently incomplete, but credit and citation is critical.

Jarrett Martin Drake’s Blood at the Root.

Michell Caswell’s Dusting for Fingerprints: Introducing Feminist Standpoint Appraisal.

Dorothy Berry’s Twitter is a gem, as well as her many presentations over the past year.

Alison Clemens, Wendy Hagenmaier, Jessica Meyerson, and Rachel Appel’s Participatory Archival Research and Development: The Born-Digital Access Initiative.

The individuals and collectives behind Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia, Collections as Data, and Documenting the Now.

This is just an introduction—I’ll talk more (a lot more, maybe even too much more) about how my understanding of this work has shifted between when I submitted this grant in November 2020 and starting the work in May 2021 and how the values I outlined above factor into the execution of this work.