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2023 - November and December - page 18

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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
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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