Notes to User
We would like our users to know that this archive contains material from difficult material – including racism, sexism, reproductive issues, and terms and labels that are no longer considered acceptable. This content may be painful or uncomfortable for some users.
A note on navigating the archive: users may click on the images of text documents to make the images large enough to read. First, you will be brought to a page with the record’s metadata description. You will need to click on the image again to make it large enough to read.
Documentary Focus of the Archive
Our archive focuses on political activism by Michigan women from roughly 1960-1985, the era that encompasses second-wave feminism. We chose this era based on pre-existing knowledge and preliminary examination of finding aids. We wanted to approach this topic using a lens of intersectionality, and we looked for archival evidence of activism by diverse women with wide-ranging viewpoints. Each page of the archive explores a different cause in which women actively engaged during that time period and features items from political and social justice organizations as well as items from the personal papers of women activists, most of which had been donated to the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan.
Record Selection Criteria for the Archive
Because we chose materials from an existing archive, the selection was already biased toward those who have donated papers, such as formal institutions, women who were highly involved in these groups, as well as mostly white women. We did run into some issues on finding more diverse sources, and when we did find them, they were, for example, in a decontextualized mass of photographs documenting the lives of people of color in Detroit. These are important sources, but it would have been more powerful to find items directly created by women of color, as it would have given these women a voice. Because of this, it is important to note that our users need to be mindful in remembering the women who do not have as much of a presence here and yet contributed much to the causes described.
This archive is meant to provide an introduction to women’s activism in this era, and so we selected records that are visually interesting to take advantage of the online format. We are highly aware of matching content with user needs. As we wanted this archive to be for students, we did not want to feature any records that are high concept or too complex, but we also did not want to water down these movements. We looked into the rights of the items we picked as well, especially the photographs we wanted to use from outside of the Bentley, and we determined them to be fair use.
Archive Target User Group
The target user group of our online archive is comprised primarily of students, with the core demographic consisting of undergraduate or high school students seeking to learn about Michigan history, women’s history, or a more general scope of political history within the state of Michigan. However, there is a caveat to our user group, as some of the content within the archive could be deemed difficult or unsuitable for a younger audience.Therefore, use of the archive should be left to the discretion of the instructor or parent. Barring a judgement call on behalf of the student’s parents and teachers, the archive could prove useful in high school history classes, particularly for the purpose of Michigan history units.
The needs of our primary users are principally related to educational and research pursuits. In aligning with this need, it is our goal to contextualize the historical significance of our archive by pinpointing topics of activist activity. While it is our assumption that our target audience has a perfunctory knowledge of research methods, we are not necessarily targeting users who have experience in utilizing archives for the purpose of research, and as such, our archive needs to reflect this inexperience. Thus, our goal is to capture the attention of our user through the use of images and succinct documentation, providing enough historical context so that users are able to understand what they are seeing but not get bogged down in pages of text.
While our targeted user set is primarily comprised of students, we foresee a larger base of individuals interested in issues related to social injustice and feminist movements in the state of Michigan during the time period our archive covers. Therefore, we envision there being a number of possible secondary users. One likely secondary user group would be journalists covering political or social justice movements within the state of Michigan. It could be useful to a journalist covering a contemporary movement to be able to reference a movement's historical precedent. The intended format of our archive would make it easy for a journalist to quickly locate a reference to a particular topic as it relates to the general arc of the feminist movement in the state of Michigan. Other possible secondary user groups would be hobbyists or amateur historians, or even individials who were directly involved with the social movements or events detailed in the archive. Additionally, similar to the constructs of an archive discussed in Yaco et al.'s work (2015), the archive could prove useful for present-day activists who want to learn more about the origins of various political movements, and/or about the backgrounds of the activists who were there. Overall, our archive could prove useful for a wide variety of users who wish to research Michigan history through a feminist or female perspective.
Archival Concepts
Traditionally, archivists were understood to be neutral “keepers” of collections of records that had come together naturally or organically. Some traditionalists would argue that by organizing materials by topic or “pertinence,” we were creating an “artificial” collection rather than an archive (Eastwood, 2017). More recently, both archival theory and practice have recognized, and in some cases encouraged, the idea that archivists are active stewards whose professional practices add meaning to records (Millar, 2010; Duff & Harris, 2002; Yakel, 2003). In assembling this archive, we faced this tension. By selecting documents, arranging them for users, and providing metadata, we took an active role in making meaning and interpreting history for our users. The fact that we digitized materials to make them available for audiences who may never set foot in the repository further extended our role as mediators (Conway, 2015; Monks-Leeson, 2011).
The principle of provenance or “respect des fonds” holds that records from different creators should be arranged separately to preserve their context, and the original order should be maintained. Our archive followed this principle in many aspects, not because we set out to conform to it but because the thematic structure of our archive (by political issue) mapped onto the way the records were organized by the Bentley (by records creator, usually an individual activist or organization that set out to tackle a particular problem). We did note that the records of political groups were often more diverse (especially in terms of documents that reflected opposing views) than their names or even the finding aid indicated. (See Douglas, 2017 for a useful discussion of provenance as principle versus provenance in practice.) We did not, however, follow original order in how we included documents in our archive, and in fact, users may well juxtapose digital documents from our archive in additional combinations.
In creating this archive, we found that concepts from the archival continuum model, as well as archival value and archival representation were influential in the creation of our archive, especially because we intended this archive to be used for instructional and educational purposes. Caswell (2016) describes archival value as the idea that archival records are not neutral; rather, they hold different meanings based on the context in which they are found and the user accessing them. Similarly, Yakel (2003) describes archival representation “as a fluid, evolving, and socially constructed practice.” In reflecting on the creation of our archive and these two concepts, we found that the archive could not be neutral. We had to make conscious decisions about what to include and leave out of our archive, both for the purposes of scoping our project as well as making sure that the records we selected were relevant to the topics and themes we chose to discuss. We also researched our respective topics to provide historical context for the records on each of our pages, and in that process we had to choose which information to discuss and which information to leave out for the same reasons, which gave each record the context that Caswell describes and bestowed meaning based on our interpretations and the constraints of the project. In terms of archival representation, we also had to design metadata descriptions, therefore framing each record selected for our archive. On that note, it is crucial to acknowledge that our metadata descriptions do not yet contain the “inclusive and community-driven description” for which archives should strive (Winn, 2017).
We also found the idea from the archival continuum model that archival records are continually in the “process of becoming” (Caswell, 2016) as influential to our archive, especially in the context of education and instruction. When we provided historical background, captions, and metadata descriptions for the records in our archive, these records were subject to our interpretations. They may mean something specific to us but could take on a different meaning to a different user. As an instructional and educational archive, we intended users to interact with and think about the material. The archive is activated when each user accesses the archive, and they in turn interpret the material differently, based on the context in which they take in the information, their biases, and so on. The records are continually “becoming” as they interact with each user. Archives can often be used as accountability tools for the sake of governmental transparency (Shepherd, 2017; Jimerson, 2007), but our archive demonstrates that this concept has wider applicability. The women exhibited within this archive were working to enact political and social change, and they did so by both interacting with the government and working within the government. Because of this, the archival lines drawn in Shepherd and Jimerson’s work are not so clearly defined here.
Finally, as a group, we felt that we aligned with the sentiment that “One can maintain professional standards even while advocating a cause or defending a moral or ideological perspective” (Jimerson, 2007). We want our users to understand that past issues are also present-day issues. In doing so, we assert that it is possible to maintain our professionalism as archivists and create a space for social justice issues to be explored.