By Katherine Schlesinger

As guest editors of the special issue of Archivaria on person-centred archival theory and praxis, we, Jennifer Douglas, Jessica Lapp and Mya Ballin, are pleased to share a series of blog posts that reflect on the nature and enactment of person-centred approaches to archival materials and work. These blog posts complement the articles in the special issue, presenting a variety of perspectives on how centring the person in archival processes happens and why it matters. We're grateful to the authors for sharing their research and experiences! 

It is fitting that on the 100-year anniversary of the birth of Howard Zinn, the “People’s Historian,” archivists are purposively centring people in their own work, most notably in the service of formerly marginalized and silenced communities. Zinn was a fierce advocate for the oppressed, and an opponent of the notion of “neutrality” in the archives. In a paper presented to the Society of American Archivists in 1970, Zinn characterized the archival profession as an “inevitably political craft” whose biases privileged the records and stories of powerful people and institutions over those of ordinary people and equated archival claims of neutrality with passive complicity (Zinn, 1977).  One can draw a line from Zinn’s work to current people-centred, social justice-focused archival projects addressing reconciliation, repatriation, reparations, redescription, and gaps about the lives of those previously misrepresented or excluded from the archives. Moreover, Zinn’s rejection of the notion of archival neutrality opened the door to the recognition of affect and emotion in the archive, which are vital aspects of people-centred archival praxis, in all their wonderful and terrible manifestations.  

While most Library Information Science (LIS) students read and discuss the views of Howard Zinn, fewer are advised of the potential connection between social justice archival work and the emotional risks inherent in such endeavors for archivists and users of the archive, including the risk of trauma. This begs the question, is archival education sufficiently preparing the newest generation of archival professionals?  

Trauma is medically defined as “an emotional reaction to incidents of death, physical or sexual violence,” or to “extreme or repeated exposure to aversive details of traumatic events which only applies to workers who encounter the consequences of traumatic events as part of their professional responsibilities,” (Pai, North & Suris, 2017, p.3). It is the latter part of this description, a phenomenon also termed secondary or vicarious trauma, that puts archivists at risk while either working directly with aversive materials, or interacting with the people described in the records, or their survivors.  

Archives are full of traumatic materials, records describing the ordeals suffered by individuals, families, or communities, at times the direct relatives or ancestors of the very patrons wanting to access these records. What is considered aversive materials is subjective in the context of both cultural and personal terms.  However, they are most often associated with collections of documents about police violence, state-sponsored terrorism, or systematic societal abuses of power, such as slavery and forced family separations.  As communities begin to demand accountability for such actions, archivists are called upon to engage with these archival documents as evidence of past wrongdoings, for the purposes of reconciliation, reparations, or healing.  Repeated engagement with materials that document trauma can elicit a powerful emotional response from the archivist and the user, leading to serious mental stress disorders, including trauma.  

In the past, the archival profession suppressed the notion of emotional response, a shadow that still lingers over the profession and is compounded by society’s stigma surrounding mental health disorders or needs. However, archivists can embrace their humanity and acknowledge their emotional response to archival material while balancing the important work of people-centred, social-justice-focused archiving.   

To their credit, archivists and archival educators have recently initiated open and supportive discussions about archival trauma and recognize the need to create supportive environments and mindsets to care for those impacted by archival trauma. The profession is in the early stages of developing training and resources, mostly geared towards working professionals. Pilot programs for trauma-informed archival management have met success most notably in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.   

However, is the archival community overlooking the necessity and the opportunity to educate its newest members? Knowledge about the risk of trauma in the archive and training in trauma-informed archival management should ideally be provided at the LIS graduate student level, to prepare the next generation of people-centered archivists before they encounter traumatic materials in their first internship or job. As new archival literature is published on archival trauma and management, and workshops are more readily available online, it’s time to begin to extend this knowledge and training to LIS students. Newly minted archivists are eager to take up the call for social justice archival work. Trauma-informed training can only enhance their ability to approach such projects in a safe, effective, and truly people-centred manner. 

References

Pai, A., North, C. & Suris, A. (2017). Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in the DSM-5: Controversy, Change, and Conceptual Considerations [Review of the book Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed.; American Psychiatric Association: Arlington, VA, USA, 2013]. Behavioral Sciences 7(1); doi:10.3390/bs7010007. Retrieved from https://www.mdpi.com/2076-328X/7/1/7/htm 

Zinn, H. (1977). Secrecy, Archives, and the Public Interest. The Midwestern Archivist, 2(2), 14-26. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41101382. 

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Katherine Schlesinger is a Master of Library Science candidate at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Her academic interest is in emotion and affect in the archive. She is a member of Trauma-Informed Archives: A Community of Practice. 

By Siham Alaoui

As guest editors of the special issue of Archivaria on person-centred archival theory and praxis, we, Jennifer Douglas, Jessica Lapp and Mya Balin, are pleased to share a series of blog posts that reflect on the nature and enactment of person-centred approaches to archival materials and work. These blog posts complement the articles in the special issue, presenting a variety of perspectives on how centring the person in archival processes happens and why it matters. We're grateful to the authors for sharing their research and experiences!

Current technological developments have changed the way heritage institutions are conducting their activities. Those institutions are undertaking new strategies to involve citizens in the description and enrichment of cultural heritage. This is particularly the case in archival institutions, where citizens are invited to donate their archival materials such as personal diaries, manuscripts, photographs, and videos, to document the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on social, economic, and cultural levels. This contribution sheds light on the various manifestations of the collective documentation of the COVID-19 pandemic and describes how the archivist’s role is to be reinvented for a better citizen archives management. We also identify and describe the key challenges relating to this person-centred archival praxis, and how archivists can play simultaneous roles as stewards, mediators, and participants in this context.

Collective documentation of the COVID-19 pandemic: an enrichment of common documentary heritage

The collective documentation of the pandemic is viewed as a response to the statements published in April 2020 by UNESCO and the International Council on Archives (ICA), inviting policy makers, health authorities, managers, research institutions, and citizens to transform the COVID-19 threat into an opportunity to enrich the documentary heritage of nations (ICA, 2020; UNESCO, 2020). Since then, many citizens have been involved in those collective initiatives, that is, by sharing their personal archives with heritage institutions in the aim of describing how they are living their quarantine and illustrating their experiences and emotions. Examples of those institutions are several, chief of which are the Civilisation Museum in Quebec (Musée de la civilisation) and the Association of Belgium French-speaking archivists (Association des archivistes francophones de la Belgique), which have established collaborative approaches to collect, manage, and disseminate COVID-19 pandemic citizens’ personal archives. The virtual exhibitions on their respective websites show the diversity of content generated by citizens, including letters, diaries, and photographs. All those archives reflect citizens’ thoughts, emotions, and even memories, describing how the pandemic affected their everyday life. To take part in those initiatives, citizens were invited to log on to the platform and upload their personal archives. The latter should be described using various metadata such as the document type, its topic, and release date. Furthermore, archival material should be accompanied with a relevant description reflecting how the donated objects can help document the social, cultural, and economic impacts of the pandemic on citizens.   

Figure 2 The Civilisation Museum: collective documentation of the COVID-19 pandemic 

The donated archival material contributes to the enrichment of the documentary heritage these institutions are responsible for. To do so, citizens are to be involved in the description of their personal archives, as they are the actors able to enhance their intelligibility and highlight their archival value. In that sense, as creators, citizens are in the best position to describe their own archives and determine their value, whether it is emotional, informational, or evidential. Thus, considering the central role played by citizens in archives description, the collective documentation of the pandemic is viewed as a person-centred archival practice that can also be positioned between participatory archives and community archives. While the first one aims to solicit citizens to describe archives via an online platform (Huvilla, 2008; Theimer, 2011), the second illustrates the autonomous archival practices of sociocultural groups sharing common interests, ideologies, or identity traits (Iacovino, 2015). In both cases, citizens have more autonomy in describing archival materials, as they upload the latter according to their personal perceptions, generating heterogenous archival outcomes. Moreover, these actors have various sociodemographic backgrounds, which may influence their interests, needs, and power relations over personal archives. Henceforth, this collective practice might generate a series of challenges that are to be tackled by archivists to establish a balance between cultural institutions’ strategic objectives and citizens’ needs.

The collective documentation of the COVID-19 pandemic: what roles for the archivist?

The collective documentation of the COVID-19 pandemic raises a series of issues at the ethical, archival, social, and cultural levels. To tackle them, archivists must play several roles qualifying these actors as nomads: they can be viewed as stewards, participants, or mediators. Each role helps address specific challenges and, thus, requires different archival, social, managerial, and digital abilities.  

Figure 3 The archivist as a nomad 

On the ethical level, some citizens may not agree to get their photographs used by a third party in a different context and may want to claim their exclusive use by archival institutions. It is therefore important to be aware of the ethical aspects related to personal archives use. In this context, archivists play an institutional role as stewards, since they are concerned with regulatory requirements surrounding the dissemination of archives on digital platforms, particularly with respect to existing copyright laws. They ought to increase awareness about the legal considerations regarding personal archives use.

Moreover, from an archival perspective, donated personal archives should be described by citizens, as they are in the best position to express their thoughts and emotions in the most accurate way. Yet, while citizens are given more autonomy to describe their personal archives, it is also important to assess archival outputs’ compliance with recognized best practices. In this context, archivists are viewed as participants, since they are involved in the participatory description of citizens’ personal archives, with the aim of respecting the accurate description of the emotional, affective, historical, and artifactual values those objects may have. Thus, archivists are to engage in a continuous dialogue with citizens to ensure a better archival description of the donated material.

Furthermore, archivists can also play a role of mediators. This is particularly the case when it comes to helping citizens improve their digital and archival skills, as they might not have the same required abilities to use digital platforms to donate their own archives. Archivists should help users identify and describe their personal archives through the establishment of some guidelines regarding, for instance, recommended metadata, file formats and sizes, as well as the required details to be added to archives to enhance their discoverability and intelligibility.

Last but not least, considering the limited financial resources heritage institutions have, archivists are to play a mediation role while selecting archives to publish online. It is vital to establish a balance between both the strategic objectives of those institutions and social expectations regarding the pandemic collective documentation. Archivists should develop opportunities for a better understanding of citizens’ needs regarding the dissemination of pandemic personal archives. They may conduct periodical surveys with users to assess the quality of the donated material made online and adjust, if necessary, the prioritization process after getting the approval of their institution’s top management.

Conclusion

In light of what has been said above, the collective documentation of the COVID-19 pandemic is viewed as a person-centred archival praxis that makes archivists revisit their roles in the digital universe. From stewards to mediators, archivists are to develop multiple collaborative opportunities with citizens, who are nowadays more involved in the enrichment of common documentary heritage, thanks to web 2.0 features. It is legitimate to wonder to what extent archivists will have to control the heterogenous archival outputs generated by citizens, as those actors are getting more involved in heritage institutions’ collaborative projects.

References

Association des archivistes francophones de Belgique (2020). Archives de quarantaine: l’exposition virtuelle. Retrieved from: https://archivesquarantainearchief.be/expoaqa/s/expovirtuelle/page/expovirtuelle 

Eveleigh, A. (2017). Participatory archives. In H. McNeil and T. Eastwood (eds.), Currents of archival thinking, (2^nded.). Santa Barbara, CA Libraries Unlimited, 299-325. 

Huvila, I. (2008). Participatory archive: Towards decentralised curation, radical user orientation and broader contextualisation of records management. Archival Science, 8(1), 15-36. Retrieved from: link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10502-008-9071-0.pdf 

Iacovino, L. (2015). Shaping and reshaping cultural identity and memory: maximising human rights through a participatory archives. Archives and Manuscripts, 43(1), 29-41, DOI: 10.1080/01576895.2014.961491 

International Council on Archives (2020). COVID-19: the duty to document does not cease in a crisis, it becomes more essential. Retrieved from: https://www.ica.org/en/covid-19-the-duty-to-document-does-not-cease-in-a-crisis-it-becomes-more-essential 

Musée de la civilisation (2020). Documentez la pandémie. Retrieved from: https://uneheureaumusee.ca/documentez-la-pandemie/appel-a-objets/ 

Theimer, K. (2011). A different kind of Web: new connections between archives and our users. Chicago, IL: Society of American Archivists. 

United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (2020). Turning the threat of COVID-19 into an opportunity for greater support to documentary heritage. Retrieved from: https://www.ica.org/sites/default/files/dhe-covid-19-unesco_statement_en2.pdf   

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Siham Alaoui, MLIS, is a PhD candidate in archival science and public communication and a sessional lecturer at Université Laval, Québec, Canada. She is interested in digital documentary mediation and citizen participation in heritage institutions’ projects.

By Catherine Barnwell & Jacinthe Pepin

As guest editors of the special issue of Archivaria on person-centred archival theory and praxis, we, Jennifer Douglas, Jessica Lapp and Mya Balin, are pleased to share a series of blog posts that reflect on the nature and enactment of person-centred approaches to archival materials and work. These blog posts complement the articles in the special issue, presenting a variety of perspectives on how centring the person in archival processes happens and why it matters. We're grateful to the authors for sharing their research and experiences!

Catherine: When I attended the Association of Canadian Archivists [ACA] Conference for the first time in 2021, I had been working in the field for about a year and a half. I participated in a panel session focused on “Acknowledging Emotions in Archival Education,” led by Elizabeth Bassett, Ted Lee, Christina Mantey, and Jennifer Douglas. Though I was still unfamiliar with much of archival theory, acknowledging the emotional aspect of archival work seemed like a novel approach that helped me make sense of some of the realities I experienced (and still experience) in my daily work on the reference desk.

It seemed that there were parallels to be drawn between this perspective of archival work and the health field, but more specifically with nursing practice and theory. The concept of care is primordial to the discipline of nursing – and has been used in recent years by some thinkers to describe the affective relationships that are at the heart of archival work (Caswell & Cifor, 2016). This led me to ask what archivists could learn from research in nursing regarding person-centred care. Consulting existing frameworks for person-centred care from the field of nursing, and opening a dialogue with our colleagues in that discipline, could be the firsts steps in identifying the building blocks of a person-centred framework for archivists.

First, Jacinthe, can you tell me a bit about yourself and your field of research?  

Jacinthe: Early in my academic career, I was asked to reflect and write on the nature of nursing. With colleagues, we gathered responses given by nurse scholars and theorists in both French and English. A recurrent answer to the question was that nursing is both an art and a science, a relational and scientific practice, and that “le soin” [care] is the main focus of the nursing discipline together with the person and family’s health experiences (Pepin et al., 2017). Person-centred care/nursing and family-centred care/nursing are among the well-known frameworks guiding the clinical nursing practice.

C: How would you define care in the field of nursing? And what is person-centred care?

J: Many definitions of care can be found in the nursing literature but invariably, the patients and families and their health are at the centre of what we mean by care: listening to patients describing their specific health situations and contexts, evaluating patients’ health and their health projects or suggested treatments with them in relation with their values, beliefs, and habits, and joining reflection and knowledge to action in life transitions and life-threatening situations. McCormack and McCance (2006) were among the first authors to propose a person-centred nursing framework, whose processes include “engagement, sharing decision-making, having sympathetic presence, providing for physical needs, and working with the patients’ beliefs and values” (p. 476). What the authors call the care environment includes power-sharing and the potential for innovation and risk-taking.

Further, in their Clinical Best Practice Guidelines, the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario [RNAO] (2015) raised the ethical perspective where health-care providers demonstrate “person-centred-care attitudes and behaviours that are respectful of the whole person and their preferences, are culturally sensitive, and involve the sharing of power within a therapeutic alliance to improve clinical outcomes and satisfaction” (p. 7). With events such as the death of the Atikamekw woman Joyce Echaquan in a health care milieu in Quebec, cultural safety and cultural humility are now at the forefront of what we mean by patient- and family-centred care. How do you envision the place that care occupies in the field of archives?

C: It strikes me that these definitions, though they emerge from an entirely different field of research and practice, resonate with the Reconciliation Framework for Canadian archives in response to the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission [TRC] (The Steering Committee on Canada’s Archives, 2022). Among the strategies proposed for improving professional archival practice, the framework includes “providing First Nations-, Inuit-, and Métis-led cultural competency training” for archival staff (p. 35) and ensuring that reference archivists are trained to provide trauma-informed services to researchers consulting “emotionally distressing archival material” (p. 38).

When I think of the place that care occupies in archival work, I think first and foremost of my interactions with researchers in my role as a reference archivist at The Archive of the Jesuits in Canada. Of course, care is not limited to the relationship between archivist and researcher: it extends to all types of interpersonal relationships that form the fabric of our work. As Marika Cifor and Michelle Caswell (2016) write, archivists have “affective responsibilities” towards creators and donors of archival material, users of archival material, the people who are documented within the records, as well as broader communities (p. 24-25). For example, at The Archive of the Jesuits, I work with many researchers looking for genealogical information. Notably, The Archive holds material that speaks to encounters between Jesuits and various Indigenous communities across North America since the 17th century, including materials regarding the residential school operated by the Jesuits in Ontario. Ensuring that these archival documents are made accessible to Indigenous researchers and communities, and ensuring that researchers feel safe and welcomed in the reading room, is a priority.

Are culturally competent care and person-centred care currently being integrated into nursing curricula? If so, how are they being taught?

J: In nursing, actions are gradually being implemented throughout Canada to meet health-related recommendations of the TRC: 22 (integration of Indigenous healing practices into nursing care), 23 (recruitment and inclusion of Indigenous professionals and cultural safety education for all health professionals) and 24 (requirement for all to learn about Aboriginal health issues, including the history and legacy of residential schools, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples). At the last national day for Truth and Reconciliation, the Faculty of Nursing at Université de Montréal, together with the Centre intégré universitaire de santé et de services sociaux [CIUSSS] Centre-Sud-de-Montréal, held a Cercle de parole with Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants to share health experiences in the hope of regaining trust; this was an event open to our students and to all nurses and health professionals. Our planning committee included Indigenous and non-Indigenous members of the Faculty and the CIUSSS. Only through collaboration and power-sharing can we create authentic learning activities.

In proposing a person-centred care framework for nursing as well as for archives, one key concept would be cultural safety, which includes cultural humility.

C: It’s interesting that the Cercle de parole event brought together students, academic researchers, and nurses who practise in different clinical environments.

In addition to my position at The Archive of the Jesuits, I worked as a research assistant under the supervision of Anne Klein at Université Laval in 2021-2022. This project, focusing on the archives of the Québécoise playwright Pol Pelletier, entailed taking stock of her documents and compiling an inventory, with a view to assembling her fonds and preparing it for donation. Since I was unfamiliar with the history of theatre in Quebec, we decided to survey the documents together so I could better understand their context and meaning. Our method of working evolved as Pol began to understand the how and why of archival practice, and as I began to understand her artistic career and the makeup of her archive. Some days we had the stamina to go through many files; other days, one of us would be tired, or had something else on our mind. Some files also touched upon heavier topics that demanded more mental and emotional energy. The nature of this project required that I be attuned to Pol and to her needs and wants. This experience speaks to Caswell and Cifor’s (2016) proposition to rethink the archivist’s role as that of a caregiver.

J: It seems that the relationship you are developing with Pol is one of true presence, of journeying with her as you go through her files: it reflects engagement from both of you towards the same goal. McCormack and McCance (2006) wrote that engagement is a marker of the quality of the nurse-patient relationship and is one of the patient-centred care processes. Nurses often find it hard to not be able to spend as much time with their patients and families as they see would be required. It could even lead nurses to lose some of the meaning they find in their work, since care is so ingrained in nursing.

C: Engagement could be a second building block for a framework of person-centred archival practice. This would inevitably look different in different working contexts. In the case of the project with Pol Pelletier, we had no hard deadlines. Building upon the work of Christian Hottin (2003), who considers that the acquisition process can be viewed as the establishment of an interpersonal relationship, we were able to first spend time getting to know each other, which then facilitated the process of working through her archives together. However, I am conscious that archivists working within institutional settings would have to balance engagement with donors or researchers with the myriad of other tasks they have to accomplish within their work hours.

Another interesting aspect of the project surrounding Pol Pelletier’s archives has been the possibility of integrating Pol’s own ideas about her archives into my way of working. When I began to compile the inventory, the archival decisions I made were not based on institutional policies, but rather were rooted in my conversations with Pol and reflected the particularities of this work environment. Together, we brainstormed what the “final product” of this project would look like: for instance, where she would like her archives to be kept and what type of researchers would use them – historians, but also artists and the general public. We have not yet arrived at the final stages of transferring the fonds to a repository, but these discussions between Pol and myself have been vital to the development of the project and of my own archival practice.

J: Interesting. In her Strengths-based approach to nursing and health care, in which person-centredness is a pillar, Gottlieb (2013) insists on collaborative partnership where knowledge and decision-making are shared. It requires that partners set goals jointly and work together to determine a course of action that is right for the patient or family. Sharing decision-making almost inevitably leads to patients’ and families’ satisfaction with care, involvement with their own care, feeling of well-being, and feeling culturally secure, all of which are person-centred outcomes (McCormack and McCance, 2006). Equally important is the context in which the nursing practice takes place; a care environment that supports person-centred practice is one that allows for risk-taking and innovation together with patients and families. We mentioned earlier that cultural safety is essential to person-centred nursing as well as archival practice. I would add that by learning cultural safety with Indigenous communities, we are also enriching the person-centred practices that we adopt with all people and with other diverse communities.

C: In addition to cultural safety and engagement, sharing decision-making to work towards person-centred outcomes is a third building block that archivists could borrow from nursing frameworks.

In the ACA 2021 panel session mentioned earlier, one of the key points that emerged was that archivists sometimes feel unprepared to deal with difficult or emotionally charged situations. This aspect of archival work, as Jennifer Douglas and her research team highlighted, is not necessarily approached in archival education, though there are now concerted efforts to integrate trauma-informed practice, for example, into archival work (The Steering Committee on Canada’s Archives, 2022; Wright & Laurent, 2021). As culturally competent care and person-centred care have been integrated into nursing education, the concepts of person-centred archival practice that we have begun to draft here could become part of a more holistic and humanistic archival science curriculum. 

Thank you for sharing your theoretical knowledge of person-centred care frameworks, Jacinthe. It seems we have only begun to touch upon the possibilities for dialogue between our two fields of research and practice. As you said earlier about nursing, archival practice is not a “hard science”: it is a relational practice that is inevitably shaped by the people who create, use, and are documented within records, and the relationships among them.

References

Caswell, M. & Cifor, M. (2016). From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives. Archivaria, 81, 23-43.

Gottlieb, L. N. (2013). Strengths-Based Nursing care: Health and healing for person and family. Springer Publishing.

Hottin, C. (2003). Collecte d’archives, histoire de soi et construction de l’identité : autour de deux fonds d’archives de femmes. Histoire et Sociétés, 6, 99-109.

McCormack, B. & McCance, T.V. (2006). Development of a framework for person-centred nursing.

Journal of Advanced Nursing, 56(5), 472–479.

Pepin, J., Ducharme, F., Kérouac, S. (2017). La pensée infirmière (4e édition). Chenelière éducation.

Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario. (2015). Person- and Family-Centred Care. Toronto, ON: Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario. 

The Steering Committee on Canada’s Archives. (2022). Reconciliation Framework: The Response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Taskforce. https://archives2026.files.wordpress.com/2022/02/reconciliationframeworkreport_en.pdf 

Wright, K. & Laurent, N. (2021). Safety, Collaboration, and Empowerment: Trauma-Informed Archival Practice. Archivaria, 91, 38-73.

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Catherine Barnwell is an archivist at The Archive of the Jesuits in Canada. She has also worked as a research assistant with professor Anne Klein at Université Laval, focusing on acquisition and donor-archivist relations through a case study of the archives of Québécoise playwright Pol Pelletier.

Jacinthe Pepin is a professor at Université de Montréal’s Faculty of Nursing who was until recently the scientific leader of an interdisciplinary research team funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec, Société et culture (FRQSC, 2013-2025) that focused on health care professionals’ learning. She also happens to be Catherine’s mother.

By Itza A. Carbajal

As guest editors of the special issue of Archivaria on person-centred archival theory and praxis, we, Jennifer Douglas, Jessica Lapp and Mya Balin, are pleased to share a series of blog posts that reflect on the nature and enactment of person-centred approaches to archival materials and work. These blog posts complement the articles in the special issue, presenting a variety of perspectives on how centring the person in archival processes happens and why it matters. We're grateful to the authors for sharing their research and experiences!

At first glance the child appears insignificant in archival practice - not yet a finalized preservation-worthy version of itself, full of unknowns and unfulfilled potential. Or the child appears as the part of a whole, with children as study subjects representing bountiful sources of information for research or scholarly advancement. But where is the child as a member of our community, one that contributes their own learned experiences, hurdles, and growth for other children to lean on? For this ACA blog post, I ask the archival community what it would mean to include the child as a person into the archive. To see the child as a person means to view the child not only as a mere subject for analysis, but also as a creator whose work is worth preserving and as a user whose participation merits attention, resources, and inclusion. This inclusion, like many others of underrepresented and neglected populations, asks the archival community to abandon previous principles such as exceptionality, rarity, or order in hopes of centering the needs of the child subject, user, and creator - no matter how messy, incomplete, or insignificant their stories might seem. Like other epistemological shifts where attention moves away from the objects (i.e. records) to the people behind or within the object, this post calls for concern for how and why the archival field should pay attention to its literal future.

I begin with a brief exploratory review of existing archival literature on children available through one of the longer standing American archival academic journals, the American Archivist. Then I will assess the types of records currently found in the country’s prominent archival institution, the National Records and Archives Administration (NARA). The combination of literature and available collections, while limited to only two institutions, helps situate the current conditions of child visibility in the American archival context. For purposes of this post, I define children or the child as a human being under the US legal age of 18 years old. Child then also refers to babies as well as adolescents with the precaution that generalization across ages (and other demographic markers) should be avoided as children exist as a diverse population of people from various backgrounds, abilities, races or ethnicities, and other demographics. The grouping of all these youth categories under the age of 18 as children rests on the assumption that archivists take different classification approaches when describing or discussing a young person or young people. When searching for literature or collections and materials, the following list of terms were used: child, children, kid, kids, youth, adolescent, adolescents, baby, babies, toddler, toddlers, teen, teens, boy, boys, girl, and girls. These terms themselves denote the constantly changing perception of childhood and adolescence as well as the complexities of describing people of multiple ever shifting identities.

The Child as Subject

As an archival subject, the child can be found in family portraits or as part of news stories and artistic sketches. We might find the child frolicking in the background of a home movie or noted as a dependent in some government form. Children might be found in school yearbooks or as study participants mentioned in a published book. In the National Archives and Records Administration catalog, children appeared in roughly 15, 927 photographs or other graphic materials. These ranged from photos of children with animals, children in school, children with adults, or children in promotional materials. Textual materials on the other hand showed children as evidence of atrocities or historical events from Native boarding schools and programs for impoverished children to children’s discussions with President Nixon or efforts to establish child labor laws (McCracken, 2015). Like other objectified people, children can be commonly found as subjects of research, from photographs of deceased children to those with medical conditions serving as at times unwilling participants (Jordan, 1960; Mifflin and Pugh, 2011). Children also show up as members of other marginalized groups such as those of early immigrant communities, incarcerated youth, and survivors of violent acts. (Daniel, 2010; Farley and Willey, 2015; Holden and Roeschley, 2020). These children as subjects remain part of a larger whole of ignored or harmed populations such as women and domestic abuse survivors. Rarely do we see the child expressing their lives, their accomplishments, their valuable memories as simply a child contributing their knowledge rather than as an object in need of study. In most cases, we tend to encounter the child through an adult self, recounting what they now see as memorable through the lens of their adult perspectives. 

The Child as Creator

It may then come as little surprise that the child as an archival creator does not get a chance to appear as an active subject when archival institutions still heavily rely on adult donors. Few instances exist where an archival collection boasts of its young creator, with even the most famous of children waiting until adulthood to find merit in sharing their life stories. The instances where the child creator emerges may be part of an art project intentionally using child artists or as unwilling contributors producing objects and records for or with adults. For example, in the NARA catalog, children appeared in materials such as letters detailing their reactions to nuclear bombs or as signatories to a scroll pledging allegiance to George Washington as part of the US Constitution Bicentennial commission (Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, ca. 1987; President Reagan, 1982 – 1983). Given NARA’s focus on government records, many records created by children are those directed towards presidents such as the letters on nuclear bombs to Reagan or the drawings sent to Ford (President Ford, 8/1974 - 1/1977). Few records created by children exist within this archival institution’s collection, likely a result of both children’s resource restrictions such as a lack of owning documentation equipment like cameras and lack of consideration of the child as an active contributing citizen. Luckily, as technological use and access increases, more children now gain access to creating records from photographs to videos and social media posts. 

The Child as User

Overall, the child has received a relative amount of attention as a user given the field’s increased concern for diversifying their user base beyond the traditional historical scholar. As an archival user, the child normally exists as a student, part of a larger group of children first corralled by the ever-watchful eye of an educator and then by the archivist. Given the age limitation for children noted in this post, this section did not consider articles primarily focused on college students despite its dominance in discussing the topic of student users. More generally, archival literature looks at student users, specifically those in grades K-12, in relation to increased incorporation of primary sources into educational instruction and teaching standards (Gilliland-Swetland, 1998; Hendry, 2007; Garcia, 2017). Despite the lack of records about children by children, institutions like NARA provide many archival materials that aid in the advancement of the child as a student. For example, by creating supplemental teaching units archival institutions encourage younger users to explore archival materials when needing to accomplish educational goals (Corbett, 1991). Exploration has also extended to children, especially high school students, to explore personal and family history through archival materials (Culbert, 1975). Sadly, unlike libraries, archival spaces do not provide safe kid or teen spaces, oftentimes forcing the child to act more like an adult than is necessary. This has limited the expansion of the archival child user since current expectations of users may require subject expertise, specific cognitive or tactile skills, as well as resources like mobility or technology access, all assumed characteristics of the established adult user. 

Ultimately, the child remains to be included fully in archival practices and in archival scholarship as a subject, creator, and user. But a word of caution must be said  before we proceed to rush these people into this field. As childhood studies warns us and feminist thought has reminded us, the child cannot be treated as a mere object of passive, patronizing care. Rather the child, in order to avoid ongoing victimization, objectification, and marginalization, must be welcomed as an active agent seen as capable of contributing, critiquing, and questioning the very field that wishes for their participation. Otherwise, the care we claim to afford others remains merely a care for our own image and sake. 

Bibliography

Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. (ca. 1987). Scroll. Records Relating to Publications, Reports, and Meetings, 1985 – 1991Record Group 220: Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, 1893 – 2008 (6850912), National Archives and Records Administration, United States.

Corbett, K. (1991). From File Folder to the Classroom: Recent Primary Source Curriculum Projects. The American Archivist, 54(2), 296–300. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.54.2.1657t38867754355 

Culbert, D. (1975). Family History Projects: The Scholarly Value of the Informal Sample. The American Archivist, 38(4), 533–541. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.38.4.w20j37111k256780 

Daniel, Dominique. 2010. “Documenting the Immigrant and Ethnic Experience in American Archives.” The American Archivist 73 (1): 82–104. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.73.1.k2837h27wv1201hv.

Farley, L., & Willey, E. (2015). Wisconsin School for Girls Inmate Record Books: A Case Study of Redacted Digitization. The American Archivist, 78(2), 452–469. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.78.2.452 

Garcia, P. (2017). Accessing Archives: Teaching with Primary Sources in K–12 Classrooms. The American Archivist, 80(1), 189–212. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.80.1.189 

Gilliland-Swetland, A. (1998). An Exploration of K-12 User Needs for Digital Primary Source Materials. The American Archivist, 61(1), 136–157. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.61.1.w851770151576l03 

Hendry, J. (2007). Primary Sources in K-12 Education: Opportunities for Archives. The American Archivist, 70(1), 114–129. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.70.1.v674024627315777 

Holden, J., & Roeschley, A. (2020). Privacy and Access in the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Records. The American Archivist, 83(1), 77–90. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-83.1.77 

Jordan, Philip D. 1960. “The Challenge of Medical Records.” The American Archivist, 143–51. 

Juliani, R. (1976). The Use of Archives in the Study of Immigration and Ethnicity. The American Archivist, 39(4), 469–477. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.39.4.bv1313755u726704 

McCracken, K. (2015). Community Archival Practice: Indigenous Grassroots Collaboration at the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre. The American Archivist, 78(1), 181–191. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.78.1.181

Mifflin, Jeffrey. 2011. “‘Visible Memory, Visual Method’: Objectivity and the Photographic Archives of Science.” Edited by Mary Pugh. The American Archivist 74 (1): 323–41. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.74.1.e56q052870087625. 

President (1974-1977 : Ford). (8/1974 - 1/1977). AR 4: Paintings – Drawings. White House Central Files Subject Files on Arts, 8/1974 - 1/1977Collection: White House Central Files Subject Files (Ford Administration), 8/9/1974 - 1/20/1977 (4504963), National Archives and Records Administration, United States. 

President (1981-1989 : Reagan). (1982 – 1983).[Letters from Children re: Nuclear Bombs]. William P. Barr's Office Files, 1982 – 1983Collection: Records of the White House Office of Policy Development (Reagan Administration), 1/20/1981 - 1/20/1989 (135838336), National Archives and Records Administration, United States.

Yaco, S. (2010). Balancing Privacy and Access in School Desegregation Collections: A Case Study. The American Archivist, 73(2), 637–668. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.73.2.h1346156546161m8 

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Itza A. Carbajal is an American doctoral student at the University of Washington Information School focusing on children and their records. Carbajal’s proposed dissertation analyzes how records embody childhood trauma and whether archival records may provide release or relief from traumatic memories. She is also on the board of the Children’s Photography Archive (https://cpa-staging.childhoodpublics.org/)

By Krista Jamieson

As guest editors of the special issue of Archivaria on person-centred archival theory and praxis, we, Jennifer Douglas, Jessica Lapp and Mya Balin, are pleased to share a series of blog posts that reflect on the nature and enactment of person-centred approaches to archival materials and work. These blog posts complement the articles in the special issue, presenting a variety of perspectives on how centring the person in archival processes happens and why it matters. We're grateful to the authors for sharing their research and experiences!

Let me start with a story. A few years ago, I was doing groceries with my partner. We exchanged a few polite words with the cashier, asking how her day was. When she finished ringing us up, she watched as we exchanged a few words about points cards and our grocery budget. It was probably all a very familiar sight to her, and it was certainly unremarkable from our perspectives. Seeing us act as family in this very mundane way, the cashier asked, “Are you sisters?”

The cashier saw something that seemed familiar (a family grocery trip) and tried to make sense of what she was seeing. Unfortunately (for us), she wildly misinterpreted what was happening. This particular example will likely only be a familiar experience to other queer women (more on the “gal pal” phenomenon in a bit), but most people can relate to what went wrong: a stranger missed a very important contextual clue and as a result made some pretty poor assumptions. Maybe as a kid you wore glasses and people assumed you were a bookworm. Maybe you’ve been misgendered by strangers emailing you. Maybe someone on social media has put words in your mouth because they don’t understand where you’re actually coming from or what you’ve actually experienced in your life.

These moments are unfortunate, but you’re there to correct them. Records in archives are created by, about, and for people during their lives. They are then given to archives for strangers to look at, with no one there to correct the misinterpretations of those strangers. So instead of an awkward laugh and a brief explanation that my partner is, in fact, my partner, this misinterpretation turns into a musing in a book. Or worse, the signal that I am a queer person is completely dismissed, allowing for the assumption that I am straight – a false narrative that all of my records are then contextualized by. And maybe that doesn’t matter in a given context: I’m not sure my being queer is relevant to the work I do on file format characterization for digital preservation. But maybe it is relevant in more subtle ways. Maybe being queer informs how I define the concept of family in metadata standards I write. Maybe being queer informs my response to a pandemic because I relate public health crises to the AIDS crisis. Those things may not be explicit in records because my records are created for my own purposes rather than with a public audience in mind. The friend I’m writing to knows those things about me, so I don’t need to explain them.

The idea that context is important is far from new in archives. In fact, context is king in archives. We know that out of context, some records become meaningless. It is the entire rationale behind the ideas of provenance and original order, two of the fundamental principles of archival arrangement in Canada. We know that the creator is important to understanding a record, and we know that we may only be able to understand a record based on other adjacent records. By keeping records together, maybe we (or someone) can make sense out of nonsense.

At this point I expect more than a few people to be thinking, “Okay, but Krista, we already describe creators! That’s what biographical histories are for!” And you’re not wrong. But I don’t think we always write biographical histories in a way that a) genuinely combats this problem or b) acknowledges the magnitude of how this problem lands differently depending on who people are. Beyond listing a name and some biographical details that a researcher could discover in the records themselves, there aren't very specific details about how a biographical history ought to be written. I would argue that your standard biographical history isn’t particularly useful to understanding the creating context for most records. Unless you have detailed information about how someone’s high school shaped them, knowing what high school they attended doesn’t really help to figure out how the person thought, what influenced them, what they valued, or how they worked. So maybe being able to answer those questions about who someone isis actually what we should focus on in our biographical histories so there is less space for wild misinterpretation at a personal level. One way to write a contextualized description of someone is to provide a social location for them. That is, where does the person sit in society? Where do they fit in with norms and where don’t they? Where can we assume normative things to fill in contextual gaps and where can’t we? What fills in those gaps instead?

Moreover, we name archival fonds for the “creators” of the records, but when we look at the content on the microscale, the supposed creator isn’t the author or the sole author of most of the content (I mean, just look at the copyright clearance necessary if you want to know how many authors the “creator” of a fonds is hiding) and is often not the decision maker for what made it to the archive and what didn’t (Douglas 2018). When we turn to the influences authors have, what they’re writing about, and who they’re writing about, we can also see that no author is an island. No one creates records in a vacuum. Context extends beyond individual authors to the context authors lived and created in. Here is where we get things like Tom Nesmith’s 2006 concept of “societal provenance.” And then we come to a level of complexity around worldview and how that frames the very notion of authorship. Krista McCracken and Skylee-Storm Hogan (2021) trouble the concept of provenance on this ground when they argue for Indigenous communal ownership of information by, for, or about Indigenous peoples, regardless of the supposed provenance of who wrote it down. Archival theory within a Western archival paradigm being what it is (and I am explicitly not making a claim that it is universally appropriate or better than other forms of knowledge and memory keeping), I think one small step we can take to do a little better, to acknowledge the true complexity of provenance and context, to account meaningfully and helpfully for the factors that shape our lives, what we create and what we collect, is to capture some of that complexity in our descriptions.

This lack of real context for who people are also lands differently for some marginalized groups, and I’m going to speak for myself as a queer person and use the "gal-pal" problem to illustrate this, though it applies far beyond this one illustration. I think (hope?) by this point that most people have at least heard of issues where historians, archaeologists, and other researchers have ignored signs of queerness. Sometimes this develops out of a desire to avoid applying modern concepts of identity onto people from different times, places, and cultures (it can be frustrating, but I get it). Sometimes it’s out of a softer homophobia: they don’t want to “offend” the family or their readers (which assumes being queer is inherently offensive). And sometimes it is out of brash homophobic insistence that queer people could not possibly exist, despite all the evidence to the contrary. There are lots of examples of this: Skeletons in burial sites buried as a married couple, called “lovers” until DNA shows they are two men or not a cis man and cis woman. All of a sudden, the "very clear evidence" that this was a couple is rewritten to the pair having been close friends or brothers. Because they’re between people of the same sex, the love letters between historical figures that speak of burning lust and intense emotional attachment take on false interpretation; lust and emotion are treated as a stylistic flourish. There is a history of researchers going out of their way to deny and erase queerness, even when it’s extremely obvious. Coming back to my example, queer women couples have often been referred to as “gal pals” or similar so people can avoid acknowledging that they are in a relationship with one another. It’s a form of intersectional erasure, a kind of invisibility unique to queer women’s relationships (as queer men’s relationships tend to be hyper-visible). And, yes, this continues today when people ask if you are sisters and is something so prevalent that it’s become a bit of a joke among many queer women.

I’m not saying that researchers should label and out every queer person they come across in their research -- that would be taking things too far in the other direction -- but I am saying that getting more personal contextual information from creators themselves while we can (no one is immortal here!) is a good thing to do. It is especially important to get clarity from people who have been historically marginalized and erased so that future researchers don’t repeat the same problematic practices, ultimately to the detriment of their understanding of a person’s life, work, and records.

Specifically, if we want to bring the complicated, messy reality of records creation and knowledge recording to our description, we need to situate the people who contributed to record creation (Haraway 1988). What is the worldview someone is working from? What is the context of their life beyond the superficial? What communities do they belong to? How were they influenced in their life to become the person they were? Where and how can their knowledges be attributed? These things both are and are not individual factors. Some of them are cultural, situational, and demographically systemic. Others are about more personalized family histories and influences such as professional training and mentorship.

This is a very high-level description of something that can be complicated and difficult to conceptualize, let alone implement. But if we really understand that archives are just some of the records left to us by living, breathing, complicated, fallible people and if we care about how those people are represented and that people are not misrepresented or erased by the strangers looking at their records, we have to do more to ensure we’re doing right by them, by all the authors whose works are in the fonds, and the communities and people those records represent.

Citations

Douglas, J. (2018). A call to rethink archival creation: Exploring types of creation in personal archives. Archival Science, 18(1), 29-49. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-018-9285-8

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066

McCracken, K. & Hogan, S.S. (2021). Community First: Indigenous Community-Based Archival Provenance. [Special issue on Unsettling the Archives.] Across the Disciplines, 18(1/2), 23-32. https://doi.org/10.37514/ATD-J.2021.18.1-2.03

Nesmith, T. (2006). The concept of societal provenance and records of nineteenth-century Aboriginal-European relations in Western Canada: Implications for archival theory and practice. Archival Science6, 351-360. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10502-007-9043-9

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Krista Jamieson is a queer archivist living in Hamilton, Ontario. She has an MLIS from McGill University and an MA from the University of Amsterdam in AV archiving. She is currently the Digital Preservation Business Lead for the Bank of Canada and a part-time PhD Candidate in FIMS at Western University. 

By Lexy deGraffenreid and Ben Mitchell

As guest editors of the special issue of Archivaria on person-centred archival theory and praxis, we, Jennifer Douglas, Jessica Lapp and Mya Balin, are pleased to share a series of blog posts that reflect on the nature and enactment of person-centred approaches to archival materials and work. These blog posts complement the articles in the special issue, presenting a variety of perspectives on how centring the person in archival processes happens and why it matters. We're grateful to the authors for sharing their research and experiences!

Introduction & Background

Adopting a person-centred archival praxis that privileges the language, culture, and preferences of those represented within collections has been a priority for Special Collections at Penn State since mid-2019. We aim to utilize an ethic of care, in which archivists prioritize the voices of those documented by and within records over traditional practices that prioritize documents themselves as well as the paradigms of predominantly white collectors and institutions. However, developing and implementing a more person-centred praxis is ongoing and has been evolving over a series of years. Due to the COVID-19 shift to remote work, Special Collections undertook a high-level audit of finding aids to evaluate completeness and to assess the presence of offensive language. This audit identified a broad array of obfuscating or offensive descriptive practices, which decreased the discoverability of archival records and perpetuated silences surrounding marginalized communities within our collections. This audit further identified that additional assessment was needed to understand the depth and breadth of these concerns.

Before further assessment, archivists determined that we needed to reconsider legacy archival practices and recentre the practice of archival description onto the perspectives and preferences of marginalized records creators and/or subjects. Our premise was that archival description should be accessible to and discoverable by the people and communities whose experiences are reflected within our collections. Moving towards a person-centred praxis required both self-reflection and adopting external expertise. As we do not have a community advisory group, it was necessary to take the time to research and pull in community-driven expertise and resources to better inform our descriptive practices. In summer 2020, in order to research more inclusive practices, we launched the Inclusive Description Working Group, which ultimately decided to author a style guide and resource guide for inclusive description. During summer and fall 2020, the working group began to compile resources such as community-driven thesauri, toolkits, and current projects to build an in-depth resource guide to ground the intended style guide in existing recommended practices and to be used as a learning resource. At the outset of the project, due to competing priorities and limited staffing, the working group decided to recruit an archival studies graduate student, Ben Mitchell, to conduct research and help draft the guide. In this next section, we will discuss developing and authoring the style guide as a working group after recruiting our graduate student to help develop the guide.

Developing the Guide

The project began with an extensive literature review. The literature review consisted of three major components. First, the working group worked independently to collect resources for review. These resources largely consisted of policy statements and style guides from similarly sized institutions, controlled vocabularies, active communities, and academic articles. These resources were compiled into a spreadsheet and served as the base for the literature review. In the following weeks, Ben reviewed the resource guide, selected a limited number of resources, and began to construct the literature review. The literature review was primarily structured around Archives for Black Lives’ guidelines. The group decided to focus on six general guidelines: 

1. Language, Power, and Politics

2. Accessibility and Audience 

3. Voice, Tone, and Expertise 

4. Cultural Humility, Identity, and Naming 

5. Violence, Oppression, and Challenging Content 

6. Archival interventions (choosing mediation or not) 

These guidelines would go on to form the backbone of the style guide, with additional, more technical categories for punctuation, formatting, etc. The working group examined the selected resources through these six lenses to inform the style guide. Most of the writing was done by Ben, but the group met weekly to make edits and discuss the findings.  After final edits were made, the group began drafting the style guide itself. The writing process for the style guide followed the process for the literature review. Again, Ben did the majority of the writing, with continuous feedback and edits from the rest of the group. Each week, Ben drafted one to two guidelines for the style guide from the literature review. This work largely consisted of summarizing and transitioning the academic language of the literature review into the more technical language of the style guide. The style guide was designed to be easily understood, quick to reference, and to have minimal jargon.

In addition to meeting as a group for edits, Ben also met with individual group members to assist with the writing process. The group recognized the individual strengths and competencies of specific members and decided they would lend these skills to the writing process. For example, one member of the group had experience with controlled vocabularies, one member had experience with standardizing grammar, and so on. This way, the perspectives of the whole group could be included while retaining a singular voice for consistency.

After this process was repeated for each section of the style guide, the entire group met one more time for final review and edits. The process was designed to be highly iterative with editing done consistently throughout each stage. Furthermore, the style guide was specifically designed to be updated and edited based on evolving social conditions and changing archival standards. 
 
Adoption & Implementation 
 
The ultimate purpose of both the style guide and resource guide is to embed more inclusive practices programmatically into description workflows. The adoption of the guide’s practices happened alongside its drafting. Several collections requiring reparative redescription were prioritized as a result of the audit and served as useful test cases for researching and adapting people-first description methods. The guides formally launched in summer 2021 when Ben Mitchell presented them to all employees at a Special Collections employee meeting. The Interim Co-Head of Collection Services then implemented the guide across the Collections Services Team (a subset of the overall Special Collections Library charged with overseeing collection ingest, accessioning, description, and management) by introducing it in trainings alongside the local accessioning manual and processing manual. The expectation is set team-wide to consult the guide and implement more person-focused, inclusive practices for any accessioning or processing projects which document a marginalized person or group. 

Implementing the guides has had positive impacts across the Collection Services Team’s work. It is employed from the point of accessioning as a way to use more inclusive language in all parts of the collections services workflow to ensure that our minimally processed finding aids are person-centred in the potentially years-long interim between accessioning and processing. This care is especially necessary because our extensible accessioning guidelines indicate that collections under five linear feet are considered completed at the point of accessioning and many of the recently acquired collections documenting Black life or the LGBTQIA+ experience are small collections of less than five feet. For collections documenting marginalized persons or communities, the priority is to centre the voice of that community rather than to accession collections rapidly but insufficiently. This prioritization allows for a fuller, more robust minimal finding aid which is hoped to be more discoverable to researchers. Adopting this people-centred approach to extensible accessioning and processing forces archivists to recentre their praxis onto an ethic of care which prioritizes elevating the voices of marginalized creators and records subjects over traditional archival practices that minimized or excluded them through insufficient or obfuscating description.  

Ultimately, the adoption of the style guide will have an impact beyond Special Collections. The University Libraries’ most recent strategic plan includes the charge to “ensure equity of access by evaluating current descriptive access points within library catalog records, digital collections metadata, and archival description; create a plan to perform remediation on legacy descriptive practices; and identify and utilize alternative authority sources and a local style guide/thesaurus.” Members of the Inclusive Description Working Group form part of the action team assigned to this charge and the Guide is being used to inform broader projects around assessment and remediation across the library’s access points to create libraries-wide description that is more responsive and inclusive of marginalized voices. Recentring archival description on the experiences and preferences of people and their communities is not a single project. It requires an ongoing, iterative, and sustained program that is adaptable to the stated needs of the people whose voices we hope to centre. By creating and implementing this Style Guide to Inclusive Description and associated resource guide, and by adopting its recommendations in practice, we hope to build the scaffolding of a more diverse, people-centred repository that represents the diverse experiences of our community.

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Lexy deGraffenreid is the Head of Collection Services at Penn State University’s Eberly Family Special Collections Library. Ben Mitchell is a STEM Librarian at the University of Rochester, but previously served as the Special Collections Discovery Assistant at Penn State.

by Rebecca Murray with Renée Belliveau

I’ve had the pleasure of sharing a virtual table with Renée over the past two years on the ACA Communications Committee, but we didn’t start talking about her books and writing until this summer. It’s been a unique pleasure to work with Renée professionally and to read her writing. I had the opportunity to ask her a few questions after reading her most recent novel, The Sound of Fire, this summer.

Rebecca: Your novel, The Sound of Fire, is a beautiful blend of historical fact and creativity. You’ve written a really strong account of the tragic fire that raged on the Mount Allison University campus in December 1941. You show many perspectives including that of the fire (which we’ll get to), but I’m curious what elements or perspectives, if any, were missing from the narratives found in the archival or published record?

Renée: There were many perspectives missing from the archival holdings at Mount Allison University, which were understandably focused on students and faculty. I unfortunately did not have access to accounts by physicians and nurses who attended to the wounded, or by parents and community members. However, I was able to imagine what they might have experienced that harrowing night.

This is one way in which the fictionalization of the story was helpful. Rather than focus solely on the perspectives for which we did have archival records, I was able to include others who were affected by this tragedy. Usually there were records that gave me flashes of inspiration, such as the many telegrams sent by frantic parents eager for news of their sons, or newspaper mentions of the medical professionals who cared for injured students at the Amherst, NS hospital. My job was simply to breathe life into them.

Mount Allison campus, ca. 1904. Mount Allison University Archives -- 2007.07/51

Rebecca: I’ve read a lot of Canadian literature recently and the elements and the landscape really prove themselves to be pivotal characters in our country’s stories, time and again. Sackville, New Brunswick is, in my mind, known for its proximity to the marshlands and of course any story set in the east conjures up some imagery of water or shorelines no matter the setting’s proximity to the coast. Your focus on the fire is of course apt and points to danger (an obvious one in this case) in the otherwise idyllic landscape. How did you go about incorporating this perspective into the story, and what kind of mood or zone did you have to get into to do this? I presume the writing process was different from the other perspectives you wrote.

Renée: The voice of the fire came to me unexpectedly near the end of my first draft. I had not intended to anthropomorphize the fire itself, but as soon as I wrote the words down, I knew I had found the central thread that would allow me to bring so many disparate perspectives together.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I was inspired by novels like Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, which is narrated by Death. I remembered Zusak saying in an interview that he endeavoured not to make Death sound malicious. I had the same intention when writing from the perspective of the fire. I wanted it to be more of an observer than a villain.

While the book is in third-person narration, when the voice of the fire appeared, it was in first-person. It was also much more poetic, so I did have to put myself in a different mindset to expand that perspective (usually by reading poetry). But I had spent the entire novel shifting perspectives and adopting different voices, and Fire was simply an extension of that.

Mount Allison men’s residence fire, 16 December 1941. Mount Allison University Archives – 2007.07/962.

Rebecca: You’ve chosen to highlight so many voices rather than just focus on a select few. You also chose to come back to some voices time and again, whereas others seem to have their moment and we don’t necessarily hear from them again. How did you make these choices? How many narrators or perspectives is too many? I think many readers are used to a duo or perhaps trio of narrators, especially in current historical fiction, but you’ve surpassed that — without causing confusion. How have readers responded to this and is it something you think you could take on again?

Renée: I’m so glad to hear you didn’t find it confusing! Not every reader agrees, but this narrative structure was inspired by the archival records themselves. There were so many voices speaking to me from the archives that I never imagined writing it any other way. The book intentionally lacks in depth in favour of breadth. I wanted to show how many people had been impacted by this fire, and how it had affected them in different ways.

As with all historical research, there were contradictory accounts in the archives, which, to me, is as important as the story itself. By including all these voices, I was able to dive deep into the nature of truth.

I did initially compile a list of all the perspectives I wanted to include in the book, but writing was a much more fluid experience. From one day to the next, I got to choose which voice I wanted to embody. It was a very intuitive process. I didn’t focus on the number, but my editor and I did eventually cut or combine a few of them for the sake of clarity.

There is a long tradition of writers using this interconnected format in short story collections, and I would gladly take up the challenge again in that medium.

Rebecca: As archivists, we know records are not neutral: there’s bias in the historical record, there’s bias in the published record (for example newspapers). And certainly, for the characters in your novel, they have their own personal biases and perspectives as the tragedy unfolds. How did you balance your professional training, your creative spirit and your (presumed) desire to tell an honest account of what transpired during that horrific night?

Renée: Throughout my research I was faced with contradictory accounts of what happened that night, and I also encountered recollections that were refuted by the records themselves. That, I think, was the most interesting part of this project.

There is a slogan pinned to the wall of the Mount Allison University Archives which reads, “The truth is in here somewhere.” It is part of our job as archivists to find the “truth”— but truth is malleable, and memory is fallible. The experience of writing this book really made that clear for me, and fiction enabled me to play on that a bit.

Spoiler alert: I was recently asked why I did not make up a cause for the fire, which was deemed accidental. I was not willing to take so much creative license. There is always room for interpretation, but as an archivist, I wanted to remain faithful to the written record.

Rebecca: Do you think that being an archivist helps or hinders the historical fiction writing process?

Renée: I think it helps, especially with the research process. Not only are our technical and research skills invaluable, but as an archivist, I approach the records with so much respect for the individuals depicted in them.

Archivists are not supposed to interpret records, but I see my writing as an extension of my work as an archivist. By writing about history in an approachable way, I am doing outreach and inviting readers in.

Rebecca: Do you have other projects on the go that you’d like to share?

Renée: My current novel-in-progress was also inspired by voices I encountered in the archives, but I’m approaching it differently. Although I fictionalized the characters in The Sound of Fire, I was surprised by how many readers were able to correctly identify the real individuals who inspired them. This time, I’m writing about a larger historical event and supplementing my archival research with plenty of literature so that I can draw on the experiences of many rather than a few and envision new characters entirely.

I’m also continuing to focus on Canadian history. Archivists throughout the country know how many fascinating stories are hidden in our collections!

Rebecca: Do you have advice for any other aspiring authors in the archival or information science world?

Renée: The magic is in the details, and archival records are full of details that are glossed over in history books. Take note of what sparks and sustains your interest!

_______________________________________________________

Renée Belliveau is a writer and archivist from Sackville in the Siknikt district of Mi’kma’ki (New Brunswick). She is the author of The Sound of Fire, a novel based on the true story of the devastating 1941 fire at Mount Allison University, and a memoir about her father’s battle with cancer entitled Les étoiles à l’aube. She holds degrees from Mount Allison University, the University of Waterloo, and the University of Toronto. Follow her on Instagram: @reneecbelliveau

Rebecca Murray is a Senior Reference Archivist at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, Ontario. She is an avid reader and Editor of the In the Field blog.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst is in the final year of her MASLIS the UBC iSchool. Her areas of interest include community and artist archives, intellectual property rights, and public programming. She currently works as an archivist at VIVO Media Arts Centre and Karen Jamieson Dance. 

Item E-04633 - Alert Bay. BC Archives. [ca. 1917].

This post is a continuation of Archival Research, Indigenous Protocols, and Documentary Filmmaking: A Case Study of British Columbia – An Untold History, a two-part blog post that reflects on my experience as an archival researcher for the documentary TV series, British Columbia – An Untold History, and the three key steps – education, relationship-building, and identification – that led to the creation and implementation of an Indigenous Protocol in the production of the series. This post concludes by sharing some individual observations that point to some challenges, setbacks, and changes that arose in doing this work in hopes of using it as a guide for future consideration and improvement in documentary filmmaking practices.

Read Part 1 here.

EDUCATION

One of our first undertakings as a team was to look for existing literature on using Indigenous archival materials, and more specifically within film and media contexts. The On-Screen Protocols and Pathways: A Media Production Guide to Working with First Nations, Métis and Inuit Communities, Cultures, Concepts and Storiesserved as our foundation, specifically Chapter 5. Working with Archival Materials,which was written by Marcia Nickerson with contributions from Alanis Obomsawin, Loretta Todd, Jesse Wente, Lisa Jackson, Gregory Younging, Hank White, Jean Francois Obomsawin, Stephan Agluvak Puskas, and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril (amongst others), as a commission for imagineNATIVE, the world's largest Indigenous Film and Media Arts Festival. The guide is intended to be used by “screen-storytellers and production companies wishing to feature First Nations, Métis or Inuit people, content or concepts (traditional or contemporary cultures, knowledge or intellectual property) in their films, television programs and digital media content” (Nickerson, 2019, p.6) to:  

• Provide decision-making guidelines for communities, content creators, funding bodies, and industry partners; 

• Share best practices developed by Indigenous screen storytellers; 

• Educatescreen content creators, production companies and gatekeepers about Indigenous worldviews, cultural and property rights, and the protection of Indigenous cultural practices; and finally, 

• Encourage informed, respectful dialogue between communities, content creators, and production companies (Nickerson, 2019, p.6).  

Other related resources that were consulted were shared in the course syllabi of FNEL 480A: Endangered Language Documentation and Revitalization with Dr. Candace Kaleimamoowahinekapu Galla and ARST 585: Information Practice and Protocol in Support of Indigenous Initiatives with Dr. Tricia Logan, offered through UBC’s iSchool and First Nations and Endangered Languages (FNEL) Program. These texts include: 

• Indigenous Repatriation Handbook - Prepared by the Royal BC Museum and the Haida Gwaii Museum at Kay Llnagaay - Jisgang Nika Collison, SdaahlK’awaas Lucy Bell, and Lou-ann Neel. 2019. 

• Digital Ethics and Reconciliation: Digital Ethics Report - University of Victoria Libraries. March 2019.  

• Digital Ethics and Reconciliation – Appendix E: Literature Review - Karine St-Onge. March 2019.  

• Shared Stewardship of Collections - Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. July 2019.  

• Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action – Museums and Archives - Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015. 

• Final Report: Native American Protocols Forum Working Group. 2012. 

• The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services. Published by the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) and endorsed by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library, Information and Resource Network (ATSILIRN). 1995, 2005, 2010.  

• Aboriginal Archives Guide - Association of Canadian Archivists. 2007.  

• United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples - United Nations. 2007. 

• Protocols for Native American Archival Materials (PNAAM)- Hosted by Northern Arizona University. 2006

The Series Producer, Leena Minifie, also hosted a mandatory Indigenous Protocol training session to review the protocols and procedures laid out by imagineNATIVE’sguide, and expanded on the concepts by educating on local Indigenous cultural protocols, storytelling practices, consent processes, and governing structures. Conversations around anti-discrimination and anti-oppression within archival research were also part of the training. The session was not only attended by the team of archival researchers, but also by the producers and editors to ensure knowledge and resources were being equally distributed to the filmmaking team at large to build awareness, understanding, and compliance across all levels of the production.

RELATIONSHIP-BUILDING

The colossal task of contacting First Nations groups and individual community members in BC was originally initiated by the Series Producer, Leena Minifie, and Lead Researcher, Jennifer Chiu, to begin relationship-building and to determine who (if any one individual person or a group) has the authority within the community to give consent to the use of archival materials that depict members and ancestors of their Nation. This work occurred prior to my arrival as an archival researcher, but my understanding is that once the archival materials had been selected for use in the final cut, a dialogue began again with the Nations / individuals to clear permissions for use if they contained “Indigenous Content” and / or were designated as “Culturally Sensitive Materials,” based on the definitions listed above. Efforts to consult with the Repatriation department at the Royal BC Museum (RBCM) and the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre to discuss protocols for access and dissemination of culturally sensitive archival materials were ongoing at the time of my departure. A consultation meeting with Lou-ann Neel, Acting Head of Indigenous Collections & Repatriation Department and Curator of Indigenous Collections at the RBCM at the time, also took place to discuss, compare, exchange, and identify gaps in our methodologies.

IDENTIFICATION

It was imperative that the archival researchers included descriptive metadata for all of the archival materials entered in the internal database system in order to identify and retrieve all of the Indigenous materials selected for the series. This process followed a high-level to low-level identification strategy. After retrieving all of the Indigenous materials from the database, myself, the licensing and permissions specialists, and the series producer developed and applied a classification system that determined the “cultural sensitivity” of an item based on how much metadata (specifically date, location, and Nation) was available to identify and describe it,³ as well as other visual indicators (to the best of our knowledge) that would fall under the definition of “Culturally Sensitive Materials,” meaning: images that depict Indigenous masks and carvings, traditional regalia, sacred ceremonies (such as potlatch), places (such as gravesites), and the institutionalization of Indigenous peoples including hospitals and Indian Residential Schools and students – with particular attention paid to the date of the creation in respect to survivors. We identified three classifications of images in this process: those that were “complete” and included all of the associated metadata that we needed for context and to seek consent from the Nation or authoritative consenting figure; those that were “incomplete” due to missing some essential information and which required further research and consultation; and those that were “exempt” and completely unusable due to a lack of attainable information (commonly referred to as “orphan images” in the field of archives) and the high cultural sensitivity of the content. This classification system was included in the metadata of each individual item in the database and informed next steps for clearing licensing and permissions, as well as the final selection of archival materials for the series. 

CHALLENGES & SETBACKS

Item : CVA 137-2 - [Indigenous fisher]⁴ catching salmon in the Fraser Canyon. City of Vancouver Archives. [ca. 1893].

Typically, resources such as labour and time to take on a project of this scale are often extremely limited. Institutions generally don’t have employees who can devote sustained attention to and assistance with a multi-part project of this size, and most documentary film projects don’t have a whole team of twelve archivists to work with. Imbalances of labour were also present in that BIPOC employees were often tasked with performing extra emotional labour through relationship- and trust-building with Indigenous communities, educating others, imparting information as designated authorities with specialized cultural knowledge, in addition to their regular responsibilities. The fast pace and quick turnover demands of the film industry also felt at odds at times with archival research and consent processes, which asks for sensitivity, self-reflexivity, and meaningful relationship-building; all of which takes (and should take!) time.⁵ More conversations and consideration in the early stages of the project for Indigenizing description, such as incorporating Indigenous languages into descriptive metadata, would have also been welcomed. Indigenizing description would have also provided an opportunity to subvert the racist and bigoted language that we often found used to describe and locate archival materials and documents. Overall, the main hindrance of the project was time (always at a premium) and labour (always restricted by budgets).

While the clearance work was still ongoing when I left the production, I believe the success of the project was in its refusal to accept current industry standards in documentary film production; the efforts made towards rethinking “best practices” in documentary filmmaking which is primarily concerned with intellectual property rights and ownership (copyright and fair use) by instead seeking consent directly from the Nation communities represented in the archival materials; and the implementation of new strategies and educational opportunities with the support of the Director and Producers which sought to remediate harmful practices of the past. By challenging industry standards in documentary film production through the development and implementation of an Indigenous Protocol, this archival research process has laid the foundation for others to reference and to carry on. In the future, I would encourage directors, producers, and archival researchers to consider how this framework of direct community consent and cultural sensitivity may also be applied to other racialized groups (under)represented in archives and historical documentary contexts.⁶

Thank you to Hans Ongsansoy and Leena Minifie for the editorial feedback and support on the original paper.

End Notes

3 - After my work with the series was complete, I came across the CFLA-FCAB’s Indigenous Matters Committee’s Red Team-Joint Working Group on Classification and Subject Headings and the National Indigenous Knowledge and Language Alliance (NIKLA)’sFirst Nations, Métis, and Inuit Indigenous Ontology Google Doc Spreadsheet (2020) which would have been a useful resource to consult for this work.

4 - Title changed to address outdated and racist language in the original title.

5 - Kimberly Christen’s article “Towards Slow Archives” (2019) puts forth the idea and practice of “the slow archives” as a decolonizing approach which creates a temporal disruption to make space for listening, critical reflection, relationship-building, and intentional acts.

6 - Over the last decade, archival literature has addressed the concept of permission and consent, specifically in the areas of community archives and Indigenous archives. See for example: “Archival Consent” (2018) by Julie Botnick; “The Role of Participatory Archives in Furthering Human Rights, Reconciliation and Recovery” (2014) by Anne J. Gilliland and Sue McKemmish; and “Come Correct or Don’t Come at All:” Building More Equitable Relationships Between Archival Studies Scholars and Community Archives” (2021) by Michelle Caswell et al.

Sources Cited

Local Contexts. “About.” Last modified 2022.

Local Contexts. “TK Labels – TK Culturally Sensitive.” Last modified 2022.

Museum of Anthropology. “The Collections.” Last modified 2022.

Museum of Anthropology. “Guidelines for the Management of Culturally Sensitive Materials.” 2020.

Nickerson, Maria. ON-SCREEN PROTOCOLS & PATHWAYS: A Media Production Guide to Working with First Nations, Métis and Inuit Communities, Cultures, Concepts and Stories, May 15, 2019.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst is in the final year of her MASLIS the UBC iSchool. Her areas of interest include community and artist archives, intellectual property rights, and public programming. She currently works as an archivist at VIVO Media Arts Centre and Karen Jamieson Dance. 

Poster for British Columbia: An Untold History, produced by 1871 Productions Inc. and Screen Siren Pictures for Knowledge Network.

Developing an Indigenous Protocol for a documentary is an ongoing, multi-step process where a one-size-fits-all approach does not apply. Despite the compressed deadlines that are standard in the television and filmmaking industry, as well as the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic during production, telling a collaborative and culturally sensitive story requires the time and care that an Indigenous Protocol mandates. I learned this first-hand while working as an archival researcher for the documentary TV series British Columbia: An Untold History, produced by 1871 Productions Inc., a subsidiary of Screen Siren Pictures, which aired on Knowledge Network. In this role, a pressing set of questions came forward that brought to bear on the project as a whole: How might one undertake ethical research in colonial archives and how can that approach be reflected in the filmmaking and production process? In this two-part blog post, I share how education, relationship-building, and identification became pillars of our project team's approach. In the second part, I provide a framework and suggestions for what can be done better the next time the cameras roll.

From February through October 2020, I worked as one of six archival researcher student interns and one of twelve researchers (in total) in the archives department for British Columbia – An Untold History.¹ The series covers a wide ranging history of the province now known as “British Columbia” through a multi-narrative and story-telling approach. The project also includes an interactive digital media timeline that supports the series by sharing additional stories, personal accounts, archival photos, and documents. Both the TV series and digital media timeline were created and conceived of as online educational tools for secondary and post-secondary schools, memory institutions, and educators throughout the province and beyond.

During my time with the production, I did a significant amount of archival research in online databases of both large institutions, as well as regional and community archives, to source archival materials that supported the stories included in the documentary series and the digital media timeline. I also worked with the personal archives of individuals featured in the series. Communicating and building relationships with individuals, as well as professional archivists and local historians by exchanging stories, archival materials, knowledge, and resources was a meaningful and necessary part of this work.

In this project, archival photographs, moving images, and textual documents are used to tell a history of the emergence of British Columbia, which joined confederation in 1871. Needless to say, it was essential for us – not only as archival researchers, but also as a production team as a whole – to think critically about the ways in which we were sourcing and using archival materials, and the people who are inextricably connected to and represented in them. Because archival records have long been used as tools to uphold power, it was imperative for us to begin by acknowledging that archives are not neutral and neither is the act of working with them – especially for a historical documentary; a filmic genre that typically declares authority and proclaims fact. It was also important for us to recognize that the majority of archival records we gathered either overtly or covertly document and legitimize the creation of the colonial nation state of “Canada” and “British Columbia,”² and that the majority of these records continue to be housed and preserved by state-funded and operated institutions, instead of with the communities who were documented – if they were documented at all. Many of these archival records are also deeply connected to Indigenous nations and peoples who preceded European colonization in the Pacific Northwest of “British Columbia,” who endured and resisted intentional acts of genocide, cultural assimilation, and displacement from their lands by the state and foreign settlers. Additionally, racialized immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers – many of whom experienced government-sanctioned exploitation, discrimination, marginalization, and extradition – also suffered and endured, as evidenced by historical records and personal accounts. With all of this in mind, I sought to approach this work experience by asking: How might one undertake ethical research in colonial archives, and how can that approach be reflected in the filmmaking process?  

MAP 537 Lower Mainland, B.C. : land subdivision. [1870?], copied [197-?]. City of Vancouver Archives.

Within the context of documentary filmmaking, my attempt to answer these questions lay in the disruption of industry standards, focusing specifically on the licensing, rights, and clearances department which dictates how archival materials are acquired and used in film. Under the leadership of the Series Producer, Leena Minifie, an Indigenous Protocol initiative was developed and implemented with assistance from myself, the series’ licensing and permissions specialists, and others to function as an internal system for identifying and clearing items-for-use that contained “Indigenous content”which meant: images that depict Indigenous people, ceremonies, sacred places, and traditional practices. In the first episode, about half of the images that were collected for use and identified as “Indigenous” could be categorized as “Culturally Sensitive Materials” today. The Museum of Anthropology’s Management of Culturally Sensitive Material Guidelines define “culturally sensitive materials” as “items that, owing to their power, require special care and handling and/or may only be viewed by certain people” (Museum of Anthropology, 2020). Additionally, MOA acknowledges that culturally sensitive materials “may have a non-material side embodying cultural rights, values, knowledge and ideas which are not owned or possessed by MOA, but are retained by the originating communities” (Museum of Anthropology, n.d.). Local Contexts, an international consortium of information practitioners dedicated to “[supporting] Indigenous communities to manage their intellectual and cultural property, cultural heritage, environmental data and genetic resources within digital environments” (About, 2022) suggests using a “Culturally Sensitive” Traditional Knowledge label on materials to identify “cultural and / or historical sensitivities” (TK Culturally Sensitive, 2022). This can include materials that “[have] only recently been reconnected with the community from which it originates, that the community is currently vetting and spending time with the material, and / or that the material is culturally valued and needs to be kept safe” (TK Culturally Sensitive, 2022). Cultural sensitivities for a material may “...arise from legacies of colonialism [...], the use of derogatory language or descriptive errors within the content and/or content descriptions” (TK Culturally Sensitive, 2022). In consideration of these two definitions, it was important for us to recognize the implications of using such archival materials in the documentary, and to lay out the necessary steps to determine whether or not it would be ethically sound to do so.

Developing the Indigenous Protocol for the series was an ongoing, multi-step process where a one-size-fits-all approach did not apply. In many ways, it was ever-shifting due to the specific informational and cultural needs of each item and subsequently, each individual Nation, Band, or Tribe. The ever-expanding network of professional and personal connections continued to build upon previous work – work that was not always visible or that I was privy to. For these reasons, in the second part of this blog post, I will share three steps – education, relationship-building, and identification – that were undertaken to my knowledge and based on my first-hand experience to help develop the Indigenous Protocol for the series. It is also important to recognize prior thinking and work that influenced the development of this protocol. Lastly, I will conclude with a few individual observations that point to some challenges, setbacks, and changes that arose in doing this work in hopes of using it as a guide for future consideration and improvement in documentary filmmaking practices.

Thank you to Hans Ongsansoy and Leena Minifie for the editorial feedback and support on the original paper. 

End Notes  

1 - Prior to working on the documentary series as an Archival Research student intern, I assisted with archival research to develop stories to pitch to Knowledge Network, beginning in December 2018.

2 - See for example, Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst’s article “Colonial Encounters at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: ‘Unsettling’ the Personal Photograph Albums of Andrew Onderdonk and Benjamin Leeson” (2015) which addresses the role of photography as a documentary tool to fictionalize and validate colonial settlement of British Columbia at the turn of the 20^th century. 

Sources Cited

Local Contexts. “About.” Last modified 2022.

Local Contexts. “TK Labels – TK Culturally Sensitive.” Last modified 2022. 

Museum of Anthropology. “The Collections.” Last modified 2022.

Museum of Anthropology. “Guidelines for the Management of Culturally Sensitive Materials.” 2020.

Nickerson, Maria. ON-SCREEN PROTOCOLS & PATHWAYS: A Media Production Guide to Working with First Nations, Métis and Inuit Communities, Cultures, Concepts and Stories, May 15, 2019.

Amy Tector works at Library and Archives Canada and is adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa and a sessional instructor at Carleton University. Amy’s debut novel, The Honeybee Emeralds, was published in spring 2022. Her second novel, The Foulest Things, is the first in a loose trilogy centered on murders and mayhem in the archives. Follow her on Instagram @amytectorwrites.

Rebecca Murray is a Senior Reference Archivist at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, Ontario.  She is an avid reader and Editor of the In the Field blog.

On what felt like the hottest day in Ottawa this summer, local author and archivist Amy Tector biked to meet me at a coffee shop just west of downtown.  Our sandalled feet bobbed under the tiny table, and our cold drinks perspired in the heat despite the air-conditioned store.



Amy’s most recent novel, The Foulest Things, (to be published September 27th, 2022) is a murder mystery set in Ottawa.  The protagonist is Jess Novak, a newly employed archivist at the Dominion Archives.  She’s working through a series of farm ledgers that have just been acquired through auction (there’s a great side story about a cardigan mishap), and she stumbles across letters that date from the early days of the First World War, linking the past to the present.  I asked Amy about her choice to use letters as the connection to the past and as a way to shed light on a contemporary mystery.

Amy told me that almost everything she’s written has been influenced in some way or another by A. S. Byatt’s Possession (which, no, I haven’t read but have added to my list!).  Amy admitted that writing the letters was tricky; she needed to convey information specific to the storyline yet be natural and channel the character.  Amy wrote The Foulest Things at the same time as she was completing her PhD in literature with a focus on representations of disability in Canadian novels of the First World War.  Immersed in the perspectives of young men from that era, she was able to take what she’d learnt from these works and use that as inspiration in her own writing.

The letters play a key part in the contemporary mystery, and it’s a popular theme in the historical fictionesque genre to use historical letters as a way to dip into a historical perspective or storyline without devoting every second or third chapter to that perspective or narrative.  Amy’s done it in a really thoughtful and creative way, giving the protagonist another layer of historical detail to absorb as she balances placating her mother, trying to stay on her boss’s good side, and keeping her snoopy colleague at bay.  Not to mention having a social life!

Before I had finished reading The Foulest Things, I already knew that Jess Novak was a great protagonist and that she’d speak to a lot of professionals in the GLAM sector.  I noticed a lot of parallels between Jess and magazine intern Alice Ahmadi in Amy’s debut novel, The Honeybee Emeralds.  On the surface Alice and Jess are very different, but they both seem to fall into a story they couldn’t have seen coming, each grappling with secret histories while trying to figure out who to trust, how to make it to work on time, and still enjoy life as young women in the bustling metropolises of Ottawa (ahem) and Paris.  I think of Alice at the safety deposit box (you’ll need to read to find out more!) and Jess with the file folder of letters and can’t help but feel that they’re living through similar experiences.  I asked Amy to tell me a bit about her choice to put young female professionals at the front of these stories.

Amy spoke of drawing inspiration from her students (she teaches at Carleton University) and of enjoying being in the classroom as a way to keep in touch with youth.  She told me, though, that the similarities between Jess and Alice were not planned and that hearing my thoughts was one of the lovely things about talking with readers - hearing about their reactions to her book, the things they loved the most, that have stayed with them, has really touched her as a writer.

I think that many archivists could probably relate to Jess or Alice in that we’ve probably all got a special box, collection, or memory that we can recall from those early moments in our career.  Something that shaped our work, touched us deeply, and that perhaps has given us that touchstone from which to continue our work over the years.  Am I the only one with an email folder or One Note tab of good memories related to my work?  It’s not exactly a safety deposit box at a historic bank in Paris. Maybe it’s a little closer to Jess’s file folder?  Something that caught our fascination, that puzzled us, that drew us further into the line of work that surely revealed more surprises than we could have anticipated when we started.

I asked Amy about her thoughts on the relationship between being an archivist and a creative writer.  She agrees that there’s definitely something there.  The potential for storytelling as a result of our work, our interactions with records and researchers, opens the door to something more.  She spoke of opening a box and looking at records, such as photographs, and asking herself: What's in here?  What can I learn?  Archival records are amazing sources for feeding creative and artistic interest, whether it's writing or another medium.  Archives are rich repositories of stories, many of them waiting to be told.

I asked Amy if she had any advice or for other aspiring authors, especially those in the GLAM sector.  She said, “Believe if you write that you are a writer - no caveats needed.”

Amy really emphasized the importance of finding a group of people to share writing with.  She said she’s been with the same group for almost 20 years and has learned from both the critiques she’s been given and that she herself has given to others.

She also recommends The Shit No One Tells You About Writing podcast, which focuses on the craft of writing and the publishing process with a focus on the Canadian context.

As busy as she’s been writing and editing, Amy’s also been reading a lot!  Her favourites this year include Letters to Amelia (Lindsay Zier-Vogel), which is chock full of archives content (including historic love letters!); The Final Look (Dianne Scott), a novel set on Toronto Island in the 1960s, which Amy found fascinating; and Dark August (Katie Tallo), a murder mystery set in Hintonburg.

Amy has three forthcoming titles (Keylight Books): The Foulest Things, Speak for the Dead, and Honor the Dead.