In today’s joint meeting today of Harvard Library’s Trauma-Informed Librarianship Discussion Group and Photo Discussion Group, Lillianne Keaney and I facilitated a discussion about caring and responsible practices for making digital collections with harmful content available to researchers.
Recommended readings included:
- Reading: Odumosu, Temi. “The Crying Child: On Colonial Archives, Digitization, and Ethics of Care in the Cultural Commons.” Current Anthropology 61, no. S22 (October 2020): S289–302.
- 1-hour video: Sutherland, Tonia. “Redescription as Restorative Justice.” Talk (01:02:56) presented at the Louisiana Digital Library as Data Online Speaker Series, November 19, 2020.
- Slides: Sutherland, Tonia, Dawn Schmitz, Alison Clemens, Whitney Russell, Maggie Dickson, Sari Mauro, Adrienne Pruitt, and Faith Charlton. “Reducing Harm with (Digital) Content Mediation.” Panel presented at ARCHIVES*RECORDS, July 27, 2023.
To open, Lilli and I shared the experiences that sparked our interest in this topic. For Lilli, it was processing a specific collection. For myself, it was discussing with colleagues whether or not to invest in Reveal Digital’s open access digital collection of historical Ku Klux Klan newspapers.
Then I provided some brief definitions and context:
- 6 principles of trauma-informed practice
- concept of harm reduction
- ethics of care — In Circles of Care, Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto define care as “everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we may live in it as well as possible.”
We spent most of our time, however, in community conversation. Guiding questions included:
- What are your takeaways and questions from the readings?
- Do you have different concerns with visual content versus textual content?
- What strategies for harm reduction are available at different points in the life cycle of creating digital collections? These points include selection for digitization, description, digitization, publishing in digital collections, retrospective and reparative work, etc.
- What practices might work for digital collections versus digital exhibitions? What practices scale for larger collections? What practices don’t scale but are worth the investment of time for smaller selections of materials?
- What strategies from any of these resources could we implement now at Harvard Library? What strategies do we want to implement, feasibility aside?