Part Two: Consideration of Archival Concepts and Practices
- Essential to our understanding of archival description was Duff and Harris (2002)'s piece on the subject. The authors ask if "archivists participate actively in the construction of a record’s meaning and its significances?" They go on to pose the idea of the archivist can be as a storyteller (265), and suggest a liberatory descriptive standard that is open about the dimensions of power it represents, open about the process by which it was constructed, and "posit[s] the record as always in the process of being made, the record opening out of the future" (284). Liberatory descriptive standards take the needs of their users and seeks to be open to retelling of stories (285). All of these ideas were incorpoarated into the how we approached our archive's descriptions.
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Representational belonging is a term that describes the way archives can "empower people marginalized by mainstream media outlets and memory institutions" and imbue them with "the autonomy and authority to establish, enact, and reflect on their presence in ways that are complex, meaningful, substantive, and positive to them in a variety of symbolic contexts" (Caswell et al., 2016, p. 57); an archive seeing yourself, your history, or your community recognized instead of erased has the power to deeply touch the lives of users. In the context of queer community archives, we know that increased visibilty of these archives can help "bolster the role of activism and outreach in archival practice " (Wakimoto et al., 2013, p. 308) and draw in younger members of the community, which in turn can educate them about archives (p. 311). Having desgined this for the queer community specifically, we wanted users to feel that they were being seen in the historical record, and that the knowledge they'd gained could help empower them.
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Duff et al. (2013) also emphasize that archivists need a strong “subject knowledge” in order to meet their users’ needs (72); when you have that base, you can then do the work of being able to anticipate what a user might be looking for even if they can’t articulate it (82). So in light of that, we conducted a lot of research about our topic to see what types of artforms we could represent beyond traditional things like paintings or sculptures; people might not know what sort of art they’re looking for, but if we have a better idea of what’s out there we can be better able to direct them. This led to a lot of the selections in our Contemporary section, where we drew from comic strips or graphic novel memoirs.