Three webinars will be offered on May 22, May 29, and June 05, from 3:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. U.S. central time, each day. Speakers include Stephanie Bredbenner, Stephanie Luke, Sharon Mizota, Sara Pezzoni, Rachel Searcy, Jessica Tai, and Katherine Wisser.
This three-webinar series will touch on various aspects of reparative description work, presented by archivists engaged in that work. The first session will focus on two projects related to the incarceration of Japanese American citizens during the second world war. Archivists involved in these projects will reflect on their individual projects but also provide a comparative perspective to see what variables can impact project decisions and to reinforce the notion that there are multiple ways to resolve issues. The second webinar will focus on one institution’s implementation of a reparative framework across their collections, including pragmatic approaches to policy development, procedures, workflows and documentation for the review and revision of legacy description. The final webinar will focus on a strategy for assessing your reparative description initiative. This will include an overview on the Maturity Model for Reparative Description created by Stephanie Luke and Sharon Mizota and will conclude with a conversation between presenters on how an adaptation of this model can be used to address challenges and opportunities in reparative description initiatives. All webinars will include time for questions and answers for participants attending the live sessions.
Upon completion of the series, you’ll be able to:
- Understand the challenges that archival materials offer to the reparative description of legacy description and metadata
- Formulate strategies for creating and remediating descriptive metadata for objects with outdated language or sensitive subject matter and promote long-term sustainability of this work through holistic reparative approaches
- Discuss real-world examples of descriptions of historical materials to identify approaches to making metadata more representative of and sensitive to the communities depicted in materials
- Effectively promote institutional reparative metadata work through outreach efforts
- Consider strategies for assessing reparative description initiatives underway
Speakers:
Stephanie Bredbenner is an archivist supervisor at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where she leads a small team of archivists and archives assistants, processes collections, and assists with the reference and instruction programs. Previously, she was a processing archivist and museum archivist. Stephanie was a founding member of Yale University Library’s Reparative Archival Description Task Force in 2019 and served on the RAD Working Group until 2022. She has presented and written about reparative approaches to archival work since 2018, including her involvement with reparative projects at Yale and decolonization initiatives at the San Diego Museum of Us. She holds a B.A. in history and English from Bryn Mawr College and an M.A. in Archives and Records Management from the University of Liverpool.
Stephanie Luke is Assistant Professor-Metadata Librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She formerly held the position of Metadata Librarian for Special Collections at the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries where she served as Chair of the DEI Committee for Metadata and Digitization. She holds a B.A. in English from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an M.A. in English from Indiana University Bloomington, and an M.L.S. with a specialization in Rare Books and Manuscripts Librarianship from Indiana University Bloomington.
Sharon Mizota is a DEI metadata consultant who helps archives, museums, libraries, and media organizations transform and share their metadata to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion in the historical record. She has over ten years of experience managing and creating metadata for arts and culture organizations. She is also an art critic, a recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers’ Grant, and a coauthor of the award-winning book, Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Sara Pezzoni is the Photograph Collections Coordinator in the Special Collections department at the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries where she manages reference and reproduction requests for photographic material and coordinates digitization projects. She served on the UTA Libraries DEI Committee for Metadata and Digitization and participated in advancing its goals from 2020-2023. She holds a B.A. in Communication Studies from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and a M.S. in Library and Information Studies from Florida State University.
Rachel Searcy is the Accessioning Archivist at New York University Libraries. Previously, Rachel held positions focused on processing, metadata, and digitization at NYU's Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. She holds an MS in Library and Information Science with a concentration in Archives Management and an MA in History from Simmons University, as well as a BA in English and History and a Certificate in Celtic Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Jessica Tai (she/her) is the Processing Archivist for Faculty Papers and Institutional Records at the Bancroft Library. Prior to her role at UC Berkeley, Jessica was an archivist at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where she was the inaugural chair of the Library's Reparative Archival Description Working Group from 2019-2022. Jessica held previous roles as a project archivist at UCLA Library Special Collections, and a research team member for the Community Archives Lab at UCLA. She is the author of “Cultural Humility as a Framework for Anti-Oppressive Archival Description,” published in the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies special issue on Radical Empathy in Archival Practice. She received her BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design and her MLIS with a concentration in archival studies from UCLA.
Kathy Wisser is an associate professor at the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University in Boston, Massachusetts. She received a BA in History from Bates College in 1989, completed a MA in History from the University of New Hampshire in 1997, an MSLS in 2000, and a PhD in Information Science in 2009, both from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her dissertation focused on classification theory and discourse.
Wisser worked for the North Carolina Exploring Cultural Heritage Online as a Metadata Coordinator from 2003 to 2007, and in Special Collections departments at the University of New Hampshire and North Carolina State University. While pursuing her Master's degree, she had various assistantships including the University of North Carolina's Davis Library systems department and for the Association of Library and Information Science Education. After completing her Master's degree, she was a NCSU Libraries Fellow, where she worked in cataloging and special collections prior to becoming the NC ECHO Metadata Coordinator.
Beginning in 2000, she served as a teaching fellow at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, teaching a required course on cataloging. Other courses she has taught at UNC and SLIS include the information organization, history of libraries, indexing and thesaurus construction, advanced cataloging, metadata and the introductory and advanced courses on archives, including a course on Government Archives. In the 2008-2009 academic year, she also served as Director of Instructional Services for SILS at UNC, which included running the field experience program for the school. She has advised over twenty master's papers. At SLIS, she was appointed the SLIS Associate Director in 2021 and has advised numerous Master's thesis and independent studies. Over the course of her career, Wisser taught numerous NC ECHO workshops on metadata, Encoded Archival Description, and related topics throughout the state of North Carolina. For SAA, she has taught EAD, EAC-CPF and MARC workshops.
Wisser has served as Chair of the SAA EAD Roundtable 2003-2004 and the SAA Description Section 2004-2005, Chair of the Archival Educators Roundtable from and from 2006-2019 served in a leadership capacity for encoded archival standards (EAC-CPF and EAD). In August 2021, Wisser was inducted as a Distinguished Fellow for SAA.
Who Should Attend?
Librarians and archivists who want to begin repairing harmful descriptions of materials but aren’t sure where or how to begin. This webcast is meant to assist information professionals in the practical implementation of reparative projects.
What You Should Already Know:
Attendees should be familiar with basic DEIA concepts and understand the importance of reparative work to descriptions of materials.
Highly recommended prerequisite, Reparative Description: Fundamentals
A&D Tier: Transformational
A&D Core Competency:
3. Descriptive Standards: Apply rules and practices that codify the content of information used to represent archival materials in discovery tools according to published structural guidelines.
5. Discovery: Create tools to facilitate access and disseminate descriptive records of archival materials.
6. Ethics: Convey transparency of actions taken during arrangement and description and respect privacy, confidentiality, and cultural sensitivity of archival materials.
7. Risk Management: Analyze threats and implement measures to minimize ethical and institutional risks.
Fees: Advance / Regular
SAA Members: $149
Employees of SAA Member Institutions: $149
Nonmembers: $199