2023 - November and December - page 18
Image details
| Issue number | 395 |
|---|---|
| ISSN | 2632-7171 |
| Publication date | 1st November 2023 |
| Transcription |
magazine Feature Understanding Harmful Language Statements In this article, Lindsay Loebig, documents manager at AerCap in Dublin, looks at current practices in creating Harmful Language Statements. s archivists, our decisions in cataloguing can encourage or dissuade users from accessing collections. While we try to stay neutral in descriptive practice, bias, whether conscious or unconscious, still exists. This can be exhibited in our own word selection, creator language or in controlled vocabularies. From our work, we know language is always changing. Words to describe individuals or communities once deemed acceptable can be offensive in their present form, which can affect user engagement. We try to be mindful of the impact descriptive language has on minority voices, but remediating language in catalogues can be a time-consuming task and is not always possible. To be more inclusive while maintaining searchability, some archives are creating harmful language statements. Harmful language statements acknowledge the presence of offensive content in collections that reflect racist, sexist, ableist, xenophobic, homophobic or other forms of biased views and provide a message of understanding to users. They go a step further than a content warning by explaining why harmful language exists in archives. While these statements are becoming more prevalent, there is limited research about them. I discovered this first-hand when tasked with describing a collection with derogatory language in one of my archiving course modules. This piqued an interest which led to the topic for my master’s thesis, exploring why and how these statements are created. As part of my research, I analysed 27 harmful language statements of U.S. university archives from a collated list comprising American, Australian and Canadian cultural heritage institutions’ statements on a website called Cataloging Lab. I chose to focus on U.S. universities because of my background working in American higher education and the broader number of statements available. Along with a content analysis, I sent a 18 questionnaire to six U.S. university archives to learn more about their motivations and approaches. I discovered in my research there is no explicit mention of harmful language statements in professional standards and codes of practice commonly used by U.S. university archives. While creating a statement is not directly suggested in guidelines like the Society of American Archivists' or the American Library Association’s codes of ethics, these standards encourage archives to be more inclusive and to mitigate harm. Alternative guides for describing minority groups like the Protocols for Native American Archival Material and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services do recommend archives address harmful content, as does our own ARA Code of Ethics (point D.34). From the questionnaire responses, I learned most U.S. university archives are motivated to create a harmful language statement due to social and professional motivators. The primary reason is a heightened awareness of systemic discrimination in archives and a need for social justice. Many of the surveyed archives decided to create their statements after encountering potentially harmful deposits or creator language, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement or observing public scrutiny of racist content in historical university yearbooks. These events encouraged the archivists to explore various resources about reparative description and inclusivity. With the desire to learn and grow, resources play a valuable role in the creation of harmful language statements, presenting opportunities to learn more about social justice trends and to provide guidance to others. A little more than half of the 27 statements I reviewed share more than 60 resources between them. These include links to other harmful language statements, professional standards and codes of practice, academic articles, guides for describing marginalised |