by Maria Tardiff
Campus libraries and archives have in recent years begun adding content warnings to how they catalog and describe their historical resources, and in some cases alter and update their wording to soften terms considered offensive by today’s standards.
An online list tracking the trend links to about 75 universities’ libraries, museums, historical societies and other archival entities across the nation that have added such statements “on harmful or offensive language in description and bias in cataloging.”
“This list includes statements about problematic language in both description and resources themselves,” states CatalogingLab.org, which maintains the list.
The group describes itself as aiming to create “better controlled vocabularies.”
The historical resources themselves are not changed, just the wording to describe and organize them among the groups, library representatives told The College Fix in recent interviews.
Emory University Libraries’ “Harmful Language in the Library Catalog” states “we acknowledge that some of our bibliographic descriptions may contain racist, homophobic, sexist, or otherwise derogatory and offensive language.”
“We are dedicated to finding ways to mitigate use of harmful and offensive language in bibliographic descriptions,” it adds, “and we invite you to contact us if you have encountered hurtful language.”
UCLA’s Clark Library states it is “revising our cataloging practices, checking records for accuracy and to eliminate, whenever possible, language that is biased or racist.”
The University of Texas at Austin uses several methods to address the issue, including critical or reparative cataloging, noting “practices at cultural heritage institutions are not neutral and never have been, and so the presentation and description of collections reflect human biases.”
Yale’s libraries tasked a Reparative Archival Description working group “with providing guidelines to remediate existing archival description and create anti-oppressive archival description in the future.”
Joana Stillwell, audiovisual archivist for the Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive, told The College Fix via email that “terminology evolves over time and that efforts to create respectful and inclusive description must be iterative and ongoing.”
The group’s content warning states in part that users “may encounter harmful language and content” with “outdated and/or offensive language.”
It adds such language “may no longer be appropriate” and that “these descriptions reflect power imbalances between archival professionals and the people represented in the materials.”
“When we discover unacceptable descriptions, we will update them by removing language that could be harmful to users or is offensive to the people being described,” the statement reads.
Elaine Shilstut, cataloging and metadata librarian for the Presbyterian Historical Society, told The College Fix that “our reparative description work focuses on the descriptive language that we, as archivists and librarians, control, not on altering the historical record.”
Shilstut said via email that the goal is to “make our collections more accessible to today’s researchers,” adding “we do not remove offensive language from historical documents, but provide important context that helps to explain why that language appears.”
Carrie Hintz, associate director of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library, told The College Fix “archives are committed to letting the historical documents speak for themselves without too much intervention on the part of the archivists, so we would not remove or alter documents that include offensive or outdated language, but we do want to explain to our users why they might encounter words or phrases that are not common or acceptable in contemporary contexts.”
Not all descriptions should be wholly changed, Pennsylvania State University Librarian Elizabeth Call told The College Fix, who noted the archival materials that may contain potentially offensive language “are often essential evidence for understanding the historical moment in which they were created.”
Call, head of Eberly Family Special Collections Library at Penn State, said altering archival content would defeat the purpose of maintaining an archive.
“Rather than erase that history, we believe it’s important to be transparent about it and, where appropriate, update our descriptive practices to be more accurate and respectful while still preserving the historical record,” she said. “Our role is not to determine which historical materials are acceptable or unacceptable. We preserve and provide access to the documentary record, even when it contains difficult or offensive content.”
“Our goal is … to describe materials as accurately and respectfully as possible, and to provide access to the historical record without endorsing the viewpoints represented in it.”
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Maria Tardiff is a student reporter at Kansas State University.
Figures. Wouldn’t want to alarm the snowflakes with the truth. Better to just steer them to the indoctrination section.
Context is 100% subjective, and therefore, has no place in academia nor libraries. It’s actually the re-writingof history. Totally unaccpetable.