Contextualizing Harmful Language in Collection Guides

Since 2020, the Special Collections Research Center has maintained a Reparative Archival Description group to identify and discuss harmful language in our collection guides and digital collections.  As stated on our Reparative Archival Description page:

"Historical materials may include viewpoints, positions, norms, and values by the original creators that may be harmful to our researchers. Our collection guides, digitized collections, metadata, and original content may include language that is harmful to many communities represented in the collections in a variety of ways."

The Reparative Archival Description Group (or aptly named "RAD" group) has decided when we encounter harmful language created by an archivist, we will update it.  When we find harmful language given by the creator, we will leave it but add historical context notes.  Leaving the original language serves several purposes: it preserves original context and it allows the term to be searchable in case a researcher looks for it. While we were deploying these notes when needed as we came across them on new incoming collections, we had not approached them in a comprehensive manner with our existing collection.  However, this year we embarked on a project to change that. 

For our first deep dive into harmful language in our archive, we targeted terms used to describe the African American community.  To proceed we ran queries on terms to see how many we had and where they typically fell in our collection guides (in the historical description?  in folder titles?).  It turned out most of the terms were in folder titles of collections.  We also filtered out some obvious false positives (for example, the word "colored" in a title for "hand-colored slides.")  Then we were ready to contextualize terms one by one.

As can be imagined, this was long list and a daunting amount of work to do.  Luckily we had a motivated graduate student employee, Katie Bushman, who was eager to get started on some reparative archival description work.  Katie methodically worked through the list, with many requiring case by case consideration.  For many, she added our standardized note only:

[XXXX] is the original folder title. The term used is racist and harmful, but we have retained it to preserve the original context and to support searching with terms common to a specific time period. Read more about our approach to handling harmful language in About Reparative Archival Description.

For some titles, she also added some clarifying historical notes.  This was the case with some of our North Carolina Cooperative Extension materials:

In this folder, the term "negro" is used to describe Cooperative Extension work by Black extension workers during segregation. At this time, agricultural extension programs in the South were segregated with African American work in North Carolina based out of North Carolina Agricultural and Mechanical College (now North Carolina A&T University). This folder contains several programs for Spring Training Conferences as well as a map of North Carolina counties showing Extension districts.

A side benefit was that Katie added more description and keywords of what was in these folders, adding to discoverability.

Katie added context to many occurences of the term "negro" in regard to North Carolina Cooperative Extension, which had been segregated prior to the Civil Rights Act.  As an archive that collects architectural records and drawings, she also encountered examples of the term "colored" in regard to segregated buildings.  She provided those with our standard statement:

By the end of the project, Katie had reviewed over 2000 terms and provided valuable context for many of those.  With the success of her project, we hope to continue with more reparative description projects in the near future.

If you have any questions or are interested in viewing Special Collections materials, please contact us at library_specialcollections@ncsu.edu or submit a request online. The Special Collections Research Center is open by appointment only. Appointments are available Monday–Friday, 9am–6pm and Saturday, 1pm–5pm. Requests for a Saturday appointment must be received no later than Tuesday of the same week.