Category: GLAM

bookmark_borderArchives and Indigenous Trauma

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Today I listened to a talk by Kirsten Thorpe titled “Critical Librarianship – Indigenous Librarianship”. She brought up a very good point about Indigenous trauma in collections and archives. She said it should be recognised that archives are places of Sorry Business (an Aboriginal term meaning grieving, death, loss, and traumatic events). As such, should also be a trauma-based approach to helping Aboriginal people when navigating this, and workplaces should have special means of support for Aboriginal people. The support that Indigenous people need is different to the standard applied for non-Indigenous people and institutions have to recognise this and educate themselves.

She provided the following resource about supporting Aboriginal people who have been affected by the Stolen Generations:
https://healingfoundation.org.au/

There is also a course by the Australian Society of Archivists called “A Trauma-Informed Approach to Managing Archives”:
https://www.archivists.org.au/events/event/a-trauma-informed-approach-to-managing-archives

bookmark_borderPortrait in Paradox: Commitment and Ambivalence in American Librarianship, 1876-1976

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Today I read a journal article from Libri, a journal which has been around since 1950. In Portrait in Paradox: Commitment and Ambivalence in American Librarianship, 1876-1976, Michael H. Harris casts a critical eye on how the government has pressured libraries in a series of moral panics and how librarians have reacted. His goal is to counter the often rosy picture that people have when thinking of libraries in the past. My main takeaway from reading this was that his comments still apply today, as does his rallying cry for librarians. History repeats itself and the way that librarians react to government intervention has alternated between playing it safe and standing their ground. Their ethics and choices have been criticised and held against them, and at times it’s been impossible to win, but the author calls for librarians to stand firm. While the article is about America specifically, other countries can surely relate.

Continue reading “Portrait in Paradox: Commitment and Ambivalence in American Librarianship, 1876-1976”

bookmark_borderOn Archives Having the Power to Boost Marginalized Voices

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This post is about TED talk by archivist Dominique Luster and her work to uplift African American voices in historical records that are held by archives. She makes the important point that history is not just a linear recounting of events, it can have bias and re-write peoples’ pasts from a particular person or group’s point of view, essentially erasing marginalised voices.

“The inclusion or exclusion of documents from history making is an expression of power.” – Dominique Luster

She is constructing an archive of works by Pittsburgh journalist Teenie Harris, who, via his articles and photography, documented everyday African American lives from the 1930s-1970s. The archive is being built and described as the community would describe it, using their standards and vocabularies. It’s a short talk, but she has some very important points to make in terms of inclusiveness and bias and it’s well worth a watch.

Continue reading “On Archives Having the Power to Boost Marginalized Voices”

bookmark_borderOn Preserving Australian First Nations Digital Cultural Heritage

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This post is just to share an amazing talk by C. Toby Edgar and Rebecca Barnott-Clement on a project they did which helped a First Nations community digitise their heritage collections. The talk is titled Collaborative models of care: preserving Australian First Nations digital cultural heritage and was the winner of the International Council on Archives Award for Collaboration and Cooperation. The talk was part of the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Digital Preservation Masterclass series.

The project involved going to the Ramingining community in the Northern Territory to work with the Bula’Bula Arts Centre. This talk taught me so much about what it means to truly collaborate with First Nations peoples, and the immense amount of things that we can learn from engaging consistently with their communities. Giving First Nations communities sovereignty over their cultural artifacts is integral to having ethical collections and archives and this talk has some great examples of how to do that.

The talk is only 15 minutes long and I can HIGHLY recommend giving it a listen even if you don’t work in the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) field.