 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Chicole Ward. I am director of learning, development, and equity at St. Wayne University in Robert. I welcome you to our Guides, Operators, and Academy. This is part two of a three-part series entitled Invisible Influencers, Examining Absence and Popular Narratives. It is a great pleasure to welcome you to this event. Through this conversation, we'll reveal how these mutual relationships, the relationship between archives, academy, and also library, is how this mutual relationship perpetuates or disrupts biased historical narratives. We have a wonderful panel and a wonderful moderator who will guide us through this session. Now, before I turn things over to our moderator, the son of Bert, I'd like to introduce you to our panelists. I will begin from my far left, which may be your right, Dr. Elizabeth McMahon. Dr. McMahon specializes in African history. Her research takes a multifaceted approach to thinking about the role of colonialism and its impact on interior emotional lives of Africans. Our first book, Slavery and Emancipation in Islamic East Africa from Honour to Respectability, is just one example of Dr. McMahon's publications which examines the role of empire and its links with enslavement, racism, and gender. Next, we have Leon Miller. Leon Miller is the curator of the Louisiana Research Collection and two-lane university special collections. He previously was Hale Archival Processing and University of Arkansas. He is the past president of the Academy of Certified Archivists and a fellow of the Society of American Archivists. Next, we have Dr. Richard Stein. Richard Stein is a scholar in the Asian Library for History and Anthropology, Political Science, Journal Studies, Africana Studies, Asian Studies, and Middle East and North African Studies. She provides academic support to these departments and programs in library instruction, workshops, research consultations, library guides, and selection books, journals, databases, and other scholarly resources. Next, we have Dr. Satina Davis. Dr. Davis is an assistant professor of voice and director of opera workshop at Xavier University of Louisiana. While actively performing as a soprano, Dr. Davis has held positions at Georgia State University, Clark Atlanta University, Spelman College, and Ellis' DEMMA inspired Atlanta Music Project as a vocal instructor, lecturer, and co-director. Her research interests include Spanish language, vocal repertoire, and intersections between opera and African diaspora. And last but certainly not least, I'm moderator, Lisa Hooper. As head of media services, Lisa supports the staff and student library working team dedicated to ensuring visitors have access to our extensive media collections, as well as creative technology. She also works with music and dance and theater departments to build collections and provide instructional and research support. She is also responsible for collecting film across all disciplines. We'll have a Q&A session at the end and take questions submitted in the Zoom chat if time permits. I'll now give the floor to our moderator, Lisa Hooper. Thank you, everyone, and if I can steal that microphone back to you from me as well. We'll pass it to the other side of the table. Thank you so much. Okay, those of you who are in the room here with us, instead of, I hesitate to say this in case you might all get up and run, the amazing Simifunk panel discussion that is happening at the same time on this campus. I'm so jealous I wouldn't be there, actually. I really appreciate those of you who are here for making the time to be here. All of you in Zoom land, thank you so much for being here. If you want to throw in the chat where you're coming from, that would be really awesome. I'd love to see where everybody's from. And so let's get this ball rolling. I see some people here in the room who I suspect have actually a lot of library experience. And some people online I know y'all have a lot of library experience and a couple of people I'm not too sure where you're from. I'm not quite recognizing your names, which is fabulous. Boston, thank you. Normal Illinois, yay. This is exciting y'all. So I am curious. I'm not really curious. I think I'm just going to say this. We have a vague mix of librarians, of researchers, of hopefully students and guests. So with different experience and effects for junior, very cool. With different levels of exposure to the practice of research as well as to the work of archives and libraries and just generally the academy. And so we're going to start, hopefully relatively briefly, to reverse engineer the information dissemination and creation process. And then we'll sort of dig into some of the media topics as we move along. Yeah. And Sakina, I'm going to start with you by May. And I want to backtrack in your career a little bit when you were a student. And also when you're just starting to come into the profession as a professional, which might have overlapped a little. And so you completed your undergraduate work at Spelman, a historically black liberal arts college in Atlanta, fabulous reputation. And then before going on to, yes, you did that obviously before you went on to complete your master's in doctorate in musical arts at the Conservatory of Music at University of Cincinnati. My limited knowledge of both institutions, they are very different, very different populations, very different identities and folk. So I'm wondering if you could share with us what your experience as a student coming up and what your experience was of music composed or even performed by non white, non male identifying composers. Like, what was that exposure like? And I'm going to, maybe we can share this mic and you can share the other one. There you go. So I've actually been thinking about that quite a bit lately. So this is really timely. I was exposed to music by essentially just people of color because I grew up in an environment where I went to an Afrocentric elementary school. So we were exposed to spirituals and work songs and protest songs from like kindergarten. And then I also went to a West African. I was part of a West African dance company in Atlanta. And so a lot of my learning was through my family, through those schools, through those companies by ear and non Western traditions, or let's just say non white traditions for the sake of simplicity. When I got into high school, I went to an art school and the voice teacher there, she's not there anymore, but she, her name is Don Marie James and she's from Jamaica. And so going to her recitals, I was exposed to Jamaican composers, Spanish art song literature, Negro spirituals. And so that's part of my high school experience. Then I got to Spelman and it was part of the curriculum. And I say it was part of the curriculum because African American music history was a requirement. It wasn't an elective. Everyone who was a music major had to take it. It was a very popular class for non majors. And so I learned about the entire trajectory of African American music history in the 20th century in the US, going from spirituals all the way to hip hop. And so classical music was in that conversation. It wasn't separated. Then that was applied, that repertoire was applied in the Glee Club in the pieces that we sang with the choir as well as in applied lessons. And so things like Margaret Bond's Dream Portraits or Undine Smith Moore or Florence Price or William Grant Still, these were names that I saw on different people's recital programs all the time. So when I went to CCM, and it was a huge cultural shock, the first time I had really, outside of one year in middle school, the first time I'd really gone to a majority white institution. And, you know, I was figuring out how to find what I was used to because I was used to being surrounded by people of color. And so I assumed that I wouldn't necessarily be in a space that focused on composers of color, and that's what I went in with. And I was like, okay, what I didn't realize is how few people knew about composers of color. I went to a recital once of a doctoral student who is African American, complete recital of African American composers, which is more regular now. But back in like, what, 2010? That wasn't as regular, even though it wasn't that long ago. And he sang Margaret Bond's Dream Portraits. And I was like, okay, cool. I've heard that before. And somebody in the audience went up to him afterward and said, oh my God, I've never heard these songs before. And in my head, I'm like, what? What do you mean? And that's when I realized, oh, I have a certain body of knowledge because it was normalized at an HBCU and in the communities I came from that was not normalized at a PWI. And it was interesting just to notice that. But also it was something that going back, I realized that it affected me in a way because I was used to seeing myself reflected in the curriculum in performance. And I didn't see that as much at CCM because it's conservatory because it is a predominantly white institution. And so there were a couple of instances where I felt like I was able to share that knowledge, but it wasn't seen as what was standard. It was seen as what was okay, you have that, that's cool, but this is the core. And that was, it was very interesting and impacted me more than I realized. And I had to really deal with that after I went back to Atlanta and started teaching at HBCUs and I was just like, oh, that's what happened. That's what this experience was. So yeah, that's me. I'm so sorry. Totally good. Thank you. That rather tracks with my memory of PWI, PWI universities where I only learned very white, very male composers. So there are a lot of names that are surfacing that are new to me and it's so amazing. Also a little bit overwhelming at how much I missed. Liz, I'm going to track over to you if I may. So, so far as I know, you're not a performer. Is there something we don't know? Maybe you are. No. Well, teaching is performance. True. Teaching is absolutely performance. So you are a performer and a fabulous one at that. But in addition to a teaching performer, you're also a very experienced and skilled researcher. And so in your area of expertise, again, so far as I'm aware, is East African studies. You haven't corrected me yet. Right. So I'd like to pose sort of a similar question for you. If you can sort of reach back to when you were coming up in school and early in the profession or even what you see among your younger colleagues, your earlier, early career colleagues. So what your experience of non-white, non-male identified subject matter and importantly scholars? I think, yes, that's on. Okay. So one of the things I was in an African history program and in the United States, the study of African history tends to be white dominated, which is contrary often to what people expect and has everything to do with colonialism. And, you know, it's baked into the African Studies Association. And so what was truly missing from my study in my PhD program, you know, there were African scholars, but the majority of people whose work I was reading were white identified scholars. And we learned nothing about African American scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois and the work that he had done for a century on African history. Right. And we were taught, well, you know, Africans don't work with African Americans and African Americans don't study African history. And there was this artificial divide structured and baked into the study of African history. It was deeply, deeply racist. And, you know, there have been multiple times since the African Studies Association was formed in the 1950s where scholars have really challenged that and tried to start a conversation in thinking about the colonial history. The colonial history of the African Studies Association in the United States. And there's just white supremacy dominates. It continues to dominate in the scholarship in so many ways. And so that is a huge gap in the study. I mean, my education was the exact opposite. And it's taken decades of teaching myself and learning and working and sitting at the feet of my fabulous colleagues here, like Denise, like Denise Frazier here as well as Roseanne Adderley and others to learn and to actually read outside of the field. So I think that that is crucial. Thank you. Yeah, crucial indeed. So sort of thinking about some of the comments that you all just made in my mind in my library mind and library and how I'm like, I don't remember seeing these resources by scholars or composers of color coming up and was that simply because nobody put them in front of me. I didn't do the work, probably both, or were they just not in the library or the archive at the time. And so at this point I'm going to jump to the archivist in the room, Lee Miller. And so far as I understand this is my take the modern European and North American archive and library were both created with very targeted goals and audiences in mind. So Lee, I'm hoping you could sort of briefly share with us where the modern archive as we know it came from. Why were they created? Who were they for and how might that create inclusion and inclusion that might feed into our experiences as researchers and performers. Sure. Thank you, Lisa. Great historian of archives was Ernst Posner and Posner argued that archives started with the Samarians sometime between three and 4000 BC when they constructed buildings to house clay tablets that preserved commercial records and land transactions. The ancient Chinese had well developed archives as well as the Romans and the Greeks, but modern archives today are generally considered to have started with the French Revolution. The French Revolutionaries wanted to loot the rich. And so they gathered state archives from various buildings, various attic lofts, various institutions, and gathered them together in one place, the French National Archives. But something else they did was to throw the doors of the archives open to the public so that the archives for the first time, state archives for the first time, which previously had been considered state secrets. State archives for the first time were available for public inspection for a couple of reasons. First of all, it allowed the public to sort of guarantee good government, it allowed the public to hold the government accountable. And secondly, it allowed people to guarantee their own rights. I own this piece of land. It says so in the French National Archives. I have the right to print this government decree. It says so in the French National Archives. The European archival tradition began with government records, a concept of good government, and a concept of individual liberty. The American archival tradition is quite different, occurred somewhat later, and it occurred in two major waves. The first great wave of the American archival tradition was 20 or 30 years after the American Revolution. Revolutionary war soldiers were dying out, and with them their memories of the past. The founding fathers were dying out, and with them an important connection to the founding of the country. And so there was almost a generalized fear that if we don't take steps soon, America will lose its collective connection to its founding. Therefore, organizations were created primarily in the northeast to preserve the papers of the founding fathers. Note that these were not state records. Instead, they were the personal papers of VIPs, men considered historically important, and they were collected not necessarily by state archives, but by wealthy private collectors, wealthy private historical societies, organizations such as the Massachusetts Historical Society, the oldest historical society in the United States. The term elitist should simply be assumed. And so unlike in France, where the French archival tradition focused on state records, good government, and citizen rights, the American archival tradition began with personal papers, collecting non-governmental papers, and memorializing individuals considered important. If the first great wave of the American archival tradition began 20 or 30 years after the American Revolution, the second great wave of the American archival tradition began 20 or 30 years after the American Civil War. In the South, reconstruction was ending, and the so-called myth of the lost cause was metastasizing. Elite white Southerners expressed a need to memorialize the Confederate dead, but it was really, really more than that, because by portraying as heroes people who fought for the right to buy and sell other human beings. The Southern elite was seeking to return to power by minimizing the true horrors of slavery, by emphasizing individual Confederate heroism, by creating archives to propagandize the narrative that slavery was benign and the South was fighting for a just cause. The cause of states' rights, or the cause of individual liberty, the cause of this, the cause of that, anything other than the simple fact that the South fought for the right to buy and sell people. As in the North, after the American Revolution, the new wave of Southern archives often involved the creation of historical societies, private historical societies that collected the papers of prominent Confederate leaders. The Louisiana Historical Association, for example, was founded in 1889 and amassed a large collection of Confederate documentation that we now preserve in Howard Hilton Memorial Library. So the European archival tradition emphasized governmental records and good government. The American archival tradition emphasized personal papers and so-called great men. But in both cases, and my real point with all of this, in both cases, archives were created with an intention, with a purpose, with specific goals that people wanted to accomplish. That is, more often than not, archives are created to promote an agenda, and you can glean that agenda by analyzing the kinds of materials that archives chooses to collect and preserve. Thank you, Lee. That was shockingly thorough and informative in a very compact period of time. I mean that in the best of possible way. Okay. And so we just got a request in chat to you enunciate as we speak over the mics because it's a little difficult to pick up in Zoom. So we're going to try to enunciate. I'll try to enunciate better as well. Okay. So, wow, that was like a lot. But let's, and I can very easily see how absences are cropping up in our history and our timeline. But let's move it to you, Rachel, who is here representing the libraries this time. Can you sort of do a little bit of the same? How did the modern academic library and academic lending library come to be? Who created it? Why? And who is it for? Okay. Thanks, Lisa. And thanks. I'm honored to be with you all as panelists and being conversation with the panelists from last week. This is a huge question. And I was hard for me not to start writing like a thesis while I was trying to figure out how to answer it. And one thing I just want to say, I was in preparing for this. I was reminded of a quote by Toni Morrison where she says, something like I didn't write it down, but when you say American, it's often implied that that means white, right? And everything else is a hyphen or hyphenate. So I just want to say that when we talk about like the modern library or the modern archive, just make sure that I'm being culturally specific and nationally specific. So I want to talk about the U.S. First of all, also as a scholar of Spain and Latin America, like immediately when someone says the modern anything, I'm like, but what about medieval Spain and colonial Latin America? So I just want to like say that just to start and kind of define what I'm going to be talking about. And I'm so happy to have heard from Sakina on HBCUs because I want to build on that a little bit and just think about the differences between building the modern academic library at an HBCU versus a PWI. So we can't assume that there's just like one kind of modern academic library, right? Spellman or Howard, which I'm going to talk about a little bit, or Xavier or Dillard are going to have very different libraries at institutional histories than somewhere like Tulane. So I mean, God, I have so much to say. So let me try to cut it down. Just to briefly know, you know, the first university in the United States was Harvard. And it was chartered in 1650 and the explicit pledge of that charter was to educate, quote, English and Indian youth. So there is a settler colonial project that's at the core of the U.S. University and a cultural assimilation project. And the actually the first press in North America, Mexico had a press over 100 years before FYI. So it's not the first press in America. Okay, the first print shop that was in North America was in Cambridge in the house of the president of Harvard College. And their earliest outputs were in English Bible and a Bible in Algonquin. So that again gives you the idea of this settler colonial project that's at the inception of U.S. universities, academic publishing, and then libraries, which the seed library collection for Harvard was John Harvard's personal library, who was a white Puritan minister. So you can imagine when he donated that in 1638, the kind of composition of the personal library of a white Christian minister and what kind of books would have kind of formed that initial canon of the university in this country. And then, okay, so a second example would be Tulane. Last week, a bunch of our colleagues and myself, we took the tour of truth of resistance that is run by students organizing against racism or soar. This is student group at Tulane. And they highlighted that Tulane was chartered in 1884 explicitly for the education of quote young white persons. The namesakes of the Howard Tilton Memorial Library, which is on this tablecloth right here, are Charles T. Howard and Frederick William Tilton, two white men who were both strong supporters of the Confederacy. And so one of the kind of seed founding collections of Howard Tilton Memorial Library, which Lee would know more about because it's in Jones Hall, in special collections, was Charles T. Howard's, was donated by Charles T. Howard's descendants at the same time that they founded a Confederate museum in Harmony Circle. Okay, so all of this, I just want to say I came across all of this researching to answer this panel. These things are, you know, widely publicized on the websites at Tulane. And I'm bringing all of this up just to say that every modern academic library has its own history that evolves in connection to the institution that it's attending. Another very interesting element of Tulane libraries is the strength of the Latin American and Caribbean collection. And so on the one hand we have this huge Latin American studies program and Latin American library Tulane, which creates a presence, we're thinking of presence as an absences, right, creates a presence of this study and the diversity of cultures in Latin America and the Caribbean on campus. Now it's important to also know why. So why, why that is, is that Sam Nilsen-Murray, who was the director of Kuyang El through company and then United Fruit Company, donated a large sum of money to found the Middle American Research Institute in 1924. And he purchased the personal library of William Gates, who was the founding director of Mari, the Middle American Research Institute, which consisted of materials purchased in Mexico such as unique indigenous painted manuscripts, Spanish colonial administrative papers and rare books. And so I just, again, I'm sorry I've already gone on for too long, but I wanted to highlight that we can celebrate the diversity and the fact that we have a strong representation of Latin America at Tulane and know that there is financial and material trail that goes back to these banana companies that were extractive, operated under white supremacist philosophies that Central America was there to be exploited and that they could, Sam Nilsen-Murray did in fact undermine democracy by protagonizing a coup in Honduras in 1911. So those things are true at the same time, you know, and there's, I don't think there's any problem in just being upfront about it. And that is why our, one, a unique element in our library is how it is today. And then finally, I want to bring up the example of Howard because it's such a different story. And it shows us that we shouldn't just talk about the modern library and defaults talking about the white library, right? Founded during Reconstruction in 1867, the founding collections from the board, which consisted of prominent members of the local black community and wealthy abolitionists included manuscripts about Africa and abolitionism. And then I want to highlight the name of Dorothy Porter, a black librarian at Harvard in the 1930s, who made a huge impact on that collection and the library profession writ large. Dorothy Porter, together with Catherine Latimer, the first black librarian at the New York Public Library, and Frances Lydia Yochum, a white librarian working at Fisk University, another HBCU, challenged the Dewey classification system at the time in the 1930s. So there was, at the time, Porter says in an oral history interview that the only classifications for black studies materials that were being used were the one for 326 for slavery and 325 for colonization. And so black poets were being catalogued under colonization, not as black poetry, right? So Dorothy Porter, Catherine Latimer and Frances Lydia Yochum, all women, by the way, were pioneers and challenging that classification system. And guess what else I found when I was researching this in an article by Zita Cristina Nunez. She mentions that Porter brought into Howard Library rare music compositions by the likes of Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Sondres. So, oh, I'm there, sorry, but that was very long. But yeah, thanks. Now that I just learned so much, I feel like I need to sit with that for a very long time. I'm like, I thought I knew a lot of this and clearly I need to go back to school on many fronts. So this is amazing. Wow, right. So there's so much information that we just got and I wish we could stick with that. But for a time we're going to sort of keep powering ahead a little bit. And I'm going to stick with you just a little bit longer, Rachel, because we know you are both a published scholar as a researcher, which means you've been a researcher in libraries and as a researcher in archives. But you are now a very capable professional librarian. You're fabulous at what you do. And so you clearly have solid experience in many worlds, right? And so I'm calling asking you to put your librarian hat on squarely. And briefly summarize. Cliff notes is best. I know there's a lot, like books and books have been written, but sort of summarize for those who are not familiar with some of the main methods that folks like you and I use to bring books into the library and fill the shelves for students and faculty and researchers. Okay, I will be more brief than my last answer. So I'm going to, again, to be specific, talking about a well endowed R1 university like Tulane, right? Because this is going to look very different at different universities. But so there's something I didn't know about before I became a librarian, which is called an approval plan, okay? These are contracts with book vendors that outline parameters for what you want to ship automatically and what you want to receive is kind of an offer or a slip, which refers to back in the day when it was actually a paper slip you would get and go through, but now it's electronic. So you set up an approval plan for book collecting to automate the collecting work to some extent. The majority of U.S. academic libraries use the vendor Gobi for English language content. So I was thinking about Liz a lot when I was preparing this because Latin America, so for the Latin American library, which is incredibly robust here, there are about 13 approval plans that are not this kind of automate, they're automated, but it's book dealers throughout Latin America and the Caribbean who are doing the selecting based on the parameters that you give them. We don't have that for Africa at all, right? So again, this goes back to what you were saying before and in terms of different institutional priorities. For anything, for example, for African studies, we use Gobi usually, which is part of EBSCO, this mega capitalist information services provider. And EBSCO has employees who profile the new publications that come out. So if you're publishing a new book, there's an employee at Gobi who will assign the subject, if there's interdisciplinary topics, what kind of press. And so that metadata is what is used when I say, okay, I want you to automatically ship every book from a major academic press about Latin America. You're relying on the work of those profilers to tag the book Latin American Studies just to give an example. So if they don't do that, it's not going to come through and if you're not doing the work to double check, you're not going to get that book, right? The main thing for Cliff's notes to note is that in the self-published books, which often are outside the gatekeeping structures of academia, will not be in Gobi. Same with small independent presses and same with, they do have multilingual content, but the vast majority is UK and US publications. So it's capturing this very Anglo-centric publishing production. And if you do not have the well-compensated labor and time of librarians to make sure that you are looking for small press publications and things outside the mainstream, your library is not going to get them. Somebody has to do it and that is not automated so you cannot automate equity and diversity in collections. You need people actually working to do that. Yes. There's a lot of automation that is intentional and there is a lot of individual work that has to happen. Okay, this is a soapbox that I'm not going to step up on because time. Lee, let's see if we can briefly summarize. Archives are a very special place with a lot of history and a lot of history in the practice of collecting. So can you just get a general common sense, lay the foundation for our conversation to briefly summarize the most common ways that materials come to be archived? Well, different archives collect materials in different ways depending on what kinds of archives they are. The first thing to recognize is that the vast majority of information created by society is not kept in archives at all because it's a praise that's being not worth keeping. Well, not worth keeping to whom? Who decides what to keep and why? The active deciding what to keep in an archive is called appraisal. And of the various archival functions, outreach, arrangement, description, access of all of those, archival appraisal is the most undefined, the most vague. Large organizations such as governments, corporations and universities use a records management process. Guidelines called retention schedules will say things like the president's correspondence should be kept for seven years then transferred to the archives, or grant applications should be kept for 12 years and then sent to the archives, or bills and receipts should be kept for three years and then destroyed. And so over a many-year process of winnowing and weeding down the records of an organization, eventually all that's left are the things of praises having permanent value, things that should be kept forever, and those are the things that are sent to an archive. That's the definition of archives. Records deemed worthy of keeping forever. A significant fact about this kind of an archive, the government archives, the university archives, the corporate archives is that it only preserves things it already owns. Tulane creates its records, it owns its records, it keeps its records in the university archives that it owns. But there's a second kind of archives called the collecting archives, or collection archives, or research archives, and that's what I do. I'm a research archivist. I go out, I talk to groups, I talk to roadway clubs, I read obituaries religiously every day. I try to find out what's out there that needs permanent preservation. Then I talk to who owns it, I try to get them to donate it to Tulane if they want to, I take title of it, and I bring it back to special collections. An important distinction here is that the Tulane University Archives, which is a part of special collections, preserves Tulane administrative records primarily for helping Tulane run the business of Tulane University. A research archives, like the Louisiana Research Collection, acquires material Tulane does not own solely for the purpose of helping researchers. Corporate archives help their corporate overlords. Research archives serve researchers. A problem with research archives is that collecting is too often a function of who you are and who you know. In our case, that was in the past very connected to the Tulane board. At least one Tulane board member has been Jewish for as far back as we have records. The Tulane student body since the late 1800s has been a quarter Jewish or more. And New Orleans, for most of its history, had the second largest Jewish population in the south. So we preserve one of the largest holdings of Jewish materials in the country, including the records of most temples, synagogues and congregations in the area. Tulane board members were leaders in the old elite carnival crews. So we preserve the largest collection of pre-World War II original carnival float and costume designs in the world, primarily for old money, old elite, uptown crews such as Comus and Proteus. Many Tulane board members had been prominent Confederates. The first president of Tulane had been aid to camp for Robert E. Lee. The founder of Tulane University had been a Confederate general. And so where today are the papers of Jefferson Davis? They're part of Howard Tilton Memorial Library. Where today are the Gettysburg letters of Robert E. Lee? They're part of Howard Tilton Memorial Library. Where are the papers of Stonewall Jackson? Anybody? They're part of Howard Tilton Memorial Library. Thank you, Lee. I actually did not know so many of those people had papers here. I think I had a sense, but was not fully aware. And that is sort of raising in my mind all these specters of people who are in our collections and really important people who might not be in our collections. I think we are very lucky to be situated in a history-rich city with people who value history. So, you know, we also have Amistad Research Collection in town. We have the Historic New Orleans Collection. And I see Heather is here. Thank you so much for being with us online, Heather. And we have, what is it? The Louisiana New Orleans Jazz Museum? Louisiana Jazz Museum? We have, anyways, the short versions. We have a lot of institutions that value a very rich history. Even depending on which institution here within the city, you're going to get a very different historical narrative if you limit yourself just to those. So, researchers, especially students, important fact, can't do a one-stop shopping. So, I'm taking note of time. I have two more questions, which are sort of for everybody. So, we're going to try to keep these thoughtful, but also moving. So, if y'all have questions online, drop them in the chat. If you guys are in the room, feel free to ask us questions. Thank you, Roseanne, for joining us. It makes me so happy to see you. Okay, so, I'm going to do a second of setup, but I feel y'all can probably figure out where I'm going. So, when I'm hearing about these traditional practices of collection development in libraries and archives, I'm already seeing how that can impact opportunities and approaches for research and performance, right? And in my imagination, it's creating something of an academic echo chamber, right? At least in my mind, it's very echoey in there. And I, when I think of an academic echo chamber, I'm sort of also thinking about what we see really often in social media, where one really smart sounding idea can sort of get repeated and amplified and just share it over and over again until somebody actually does the work and goes, oh wait, that's not quite right. Let's revise this, except it's a little bit hard to backtrack with that revision because it's been adopted so broadly as common knowledge. It's not always true, but it happens a lot, and I get that sense from what I'm hearing from you. And so, that's my setup. Again, we hear a lot about it in social media and media literacy, but I'm wondering if you all have found yourselves in either an academic or especially in your roles, Sakina or Dr. Davis, as a performer, do you find yourselves in academic echo chambers? I mean, if you don't, that's fabulous. Share that. But if you do, I would love to hear those experiences. And maybe if we could start with you, Sakina, and then Liz, and then we'll capture Leah and Rachel. So, before I start, just so I'm clear, we're talking about as an echo chamber because this is a new term for me. No, no, it's perfectly fine. I'm learning. That's great. But something that is kind of like information that's repeated over and over again to the point of excluding other information and other narratives. Yeah, I can give you a quick example. Okay, go ahead. So, I'm thinking in academia, those of you online and in person who are able to join us in the discussion in this series, when we were talking a little bit more exclusively about the work of Joseph Bellon, Chevalier de Saint-Charles, who frankly inspired this entire series. There has been a question bouncing back and forth over time about, you know, who wrote the symphony concert dance first? I learned up growing that I grew up learning that it was Mozart who wrote it first. I learned that I was hearing it. It was just in the atmosphere and academic echo chamber because if any of us had done the work and just gone to look at the works list of Joseph Bellon, we would have discovered Joseph Bellon, a French Creole person of color did it three years before Mozart. And Mozart just happened to spend time in the same house as Joseph Bellon when they both wrote one at the same time. But again, Joseph Bellon was already three years into it. So it's part of what I mean by an echo chamber where we keep hearing the same academic historical narrative over and over again to the point where we forget if we just do a little extra labor we could discover maybe there's something not quite right. Does that make sense? No, yes, it totally does. And so I'll be brief but I believe that there are academic echo chambers. I believe there are artistic echo chambers. We're talking about repertoire. So the opera world has been relatively as much as opera can be blown up recently especially with Black Lives Matter and this influx of voices of color and composers, performers, and ministries of color saying that this is not okay. The standard that people have been trying to preserve for centuries should have moved on a long time ago. And so there's definitely an echo chamber. Some of it has to do, of course, with money and different operatic companies say these shows sell. So we're going to keep with these shows. These are the shows that are great opera. That's what audiences are saying. But then of course it's like what audiences? What audiences are you actually trying to get into your seats? What are the limitations of what opera actually is culturally? And so that echo chamber is being disrupted by, for example, New Orleans the Opera Association just did a very interesting and exciting production of Matter and Butterfly that had a lot of conflicting comments and critiques and praise. And so again disrupting the echo chamber is something that's happening a lot in opera today because we're saying, okay this is problematic. Should we still perform it this way? Should we perform it at all? And a lot of people culturally are holding on to that narrative that they were given that if it's not done this way it's not opera. It's not good music. So then you have that and that extends to art song and any other genre of music as well. Then academically it's about what can actually train students well. So I'm talking about repertoire for the most part but I'm also talking about the kind of history. So for example when I was a student music history music history books, talking about western music history didn't include composers of color. If they did maybe Burley maybe William Grant Steele and that's it. Now when I started teaching in 2015-2016 books like Norton have more composers of color earlier on but they still don't have Joseph Alon. And so you have this narrative now that okay in the 20th century people of color started composing stuff as if they weren't doing it the entire time. And so I definitely see that happening a lot and it's a problem not just NPWIs, it's a problem in HBCUs because that curriculum is still the standard regardless because that's the world we're pushing our students into. So I don't know that I would say this is an echo chamber as much as trying to think about how do we destabilize a field. And in the historical profession it is very important that we base our arguments on evidence. We have to have historical evidence we have to have archival evidence or oral histories but we must have evidence for the history that we write. But what that means is that there are huge absences in what we write and what we can write because those materials were not saved, they were not preserved in archives and collections. And so scholars like in the past decade like Marisa Fuentes or Sedia Hartman have really tried to destabilize the field in the way that we write history and treat evidence and think about evidence. And so I think that that has been somewhere where it's not as much an echo chamber but as trying to kind of move the field over and think about how we insert all of these people who are missing from the historical narratives and try to pull their voices from what archival materials we have right? And reinterpret that and you know Sedia Hartman offers us an idea that at some point there has to be some creativity in this process of writing history and that's always been there. It's just been framed as objective rather than acknowledged as creative. Can I have that microphone? Actually give me just a second. So I absolutely want to hear from you Lee and Rachel but also for time I wonder if you can sort of blend that because Sakina and Liz also sort of moved it to my second question to talk which is fabulous. So if you could still sort of think and echo chamber that sort of is created through the work we do but also briefly touch upon the work that is being done now. I like the way you use the word destabilize I always think let's disrupt this narrative. So either destabilize or disrupt this historical narrative. Where do we fit in as librarians and archivists to sort of help move that forward? Do you want to go first? I'm always happy to go. Archives in America have undergone a sea change over the last 20 years. Archives were primarily for 50 years governed controlled by white men with PhDs in history. And over the last 20 years the archival leadership has turned over toward multiracial women from library backgrounds. That's a completely different perspective because when the archival profession was controlled by white men with PhDs the whole point was objectivity over and over and over. We're not saying anything about the materials we preserve. We're just preserving these things and you can make whatever you want of them. Well that in itself is an odd opinion. And one of the wonderful one of the great points that's been made over the past 20 years is that just the act of collecting itself is stating an opinion. The act of what you collect and what you don't collect determines the narrative. And so the archival world has become much more aware of the past 20 years of what it's done in the past to shape the historical narrative in particular directions. Another thing that's happened over the past 10 or 15 years is to move away from the concept of archival documents and toward the concept of primary sources. Now I come from a generation where historians said primary sources were a white patriarchal fallacy. And so it's a shock to me to see primary sources coming back to the fore in archival land. I come from a background where primary sources were used as an excuse to support the great men great man history, political history and diplomatic history. And now to see archives defined as repositories of primary sources, which is something very, very new. We would never have said that 20 years ago, but today people call archives over and over repositories of primary sources is very odd for me. I'm not sure what to make of that. I always say well, secondary sources are important too. Every single thing in the archives can be used as a primary source, sure. But it can also be used as a secondary source depending on the kind of research you're doing and the methodology that you're using. So archives right now is in a stage of transition where these things are still being worked out. It's a very exciting time to be an archivist. I think there's a lot of possibilities for destabilizing and a lot of people who are doing that work. And I think that if universities don't invest in their libraries and archives and library workers that work can't actually be done. So for example there's something that's happening right now a lot is preparative description in terms of revisiting the ways that materials are described often with racist terms or and then going back and reviewing how they're described and changing those descriptions because that's how people discover materials is how they are described in our catalogs and finding aids. But if you have a backlog of processing and cataloging and you just are working to get everything you're buying processed, you can't go back and do reparative description. There needs to be an investment by universities in these efforts and I fear that libraries are caught in a paradigm of subservience to what's going on on campus or like a paradigm of subservience where it's like you're serving what's happening on campus rather than investing in libraries as centers of academic knowledge where librarians and archivists also have the power to change the way that materials are collected and described. So reparative description is one possibility citation, you know, students come to us and how do I cite an APA or Chicago? Okay, well what about the politics of citation? Librarians are positioned to help teach that but we don't often have an audience for it or the space and time to talk about that if I have one instruction session that's 15 minutes long in an entire semester and the students have never checked a book out of the library. I'm not going to have time to talk about citation politics and the fact that you know as Sarah Ahmed says that citation is a system of reproduction and white men are being reproduced over and over again in that system and global majority scholars are not being cited as often as white men. So those are just two examples of ways that library and archive professionals are working to destabilize the system and these conversations are happening but again if you only have a one year project archivist physician for someone to do a preparative description and then the job is gone, you can't keep up with that right? So that's my little soapbox about investing in library and archival work. So thank you and I did just get a question in chat that okay wait that was really powerful yes to everything y'all were saying I'm like wow this is really energizing for me I did just get a question if you happen to know the great authors on the politics of citations are you able to spit this from memory or shall I email them? Do you have them trapped in your memory? Well Sarah Ahmed has the kind of in the reproductive cycle citation that's cited over and over again a blog post about it Catherine McHenry because actually you can visit our library guides on citation go to library let me do my little instruction session go to library.julane.edu click the button that says library guides and go to the library guide on citation and we have a whole section on the politics of citation which refers to projects like site black women the gender balance assessment tool which my colleague Sean Knowlton I know has had a hand in creating that guide so yeah and I'm happy to email more references to anyone. Well done that was a nice tie in thank you Rachel brilliant okay it is 432 and so I want to be extremely mindful of time if y'all need to go I will not tie you down to your seats the doors are not locked but I also anybody in this room have questions anybody else in chat have a question yeah Tim Thank you so much for this so something that I was wondering about we have this big necessary problem of archives telling a story based on these such materials and that story being extraordinarily one-sided at the same time I wonder what you kind of think of what is the space still for things like right to be forgotten through digital privacy for those kind of other imperatives we're talking about composers and people with a certain amount of expectation that they're going to be part of the public record versus you know when you're talking about history but primary sources people who never had that expectation people who might want to be part of the public record do you think that there's an overriding interest here I'm curious I'm going to try to paraphrase that for Sim and what not and this is going to be a really big paraphrase I apologize that was a fabulous question and so as you noted we do have this big problem sort of filling in these informational representative gaps but you were specifically asking especially now in the modern age with this concept of the right to be forgotten and so how as collectors how at researchers how do we deal with inclusive representation documentation about our history and culture while also being mindful and or respectful of right to be forgotten who wants to make it okay I'm just be very clear I'm not a trained librarian I love libraries though libraries are wonderful I worked in one when I was a student it was great but I don't know much about right to be forgotten I do know quite a bit with the little experience I have with ethnomusicological research about right to access information and some information is supposed to be held within the community and if you're not within the community then you aren't supposed to have earned that access because people aren't sure what you're going to do with it some of that has to do with long traditions and some of that has to do with mistrust so when we're talking about communities that are not trusting of archives or not trusting of researchers trying to get information I think that because most of the work that I dealt with has to do with marginalized communities that typically don't have a voice but I think that it has to do with actually going to people and going to descendants and asking what is it that you want us to do with that information because there's lots of information I think should be in archives I think should be performed but making sure that these conversations put the people that we're trying to serve in a position of authority and saying what is it that you want us to do I'm not sure if that lines up with right to be forgotten but I think that was an important answer let's go ahead can we leave them like that I want to echo what you just said and there are certainly there's been a recent controversy in my field because someone wrote an essay about secret societies and things that she learned when she married into a community as a white woman then published on it and there was a significant backlash for a number of reasons and one of them was that she did not have the right to share that information and so that is definitely one aspect that you really have to think about the positionality of people when they are trying to write about that history so that's one thing the other thing is this has really come up in digital projects and digital humanities work Kim Gallin who has written significantly on African American digital humanities projects and she's fantastic and she has a project that is recording people, African American people who passed away in the United States from COVID-19 and then I have a project that is using letters written between Americans and Africans during decolonization and for both of us we have these kind of aspects of privacy that we're dealing with and we've both taken the response and this is in the present day somewhat so it's a lot easier for us to do this that we have made those materials accessible and available online but we have set up systems so that we can take down information in a second if somebody either the individuals comes or their descendants come and say this isn't okay you've got to take this out we've got it set up to take it right away and we also have take down statements and things like that and for me part of that is copyright but it's also about privacy and so that's a real question and you can look at it in multiple different ways that I think historians and archivists have to kind of cope with that thank you for that 20 years ago archivists have said you don't have a right to privacy today it's completely different today we would argue that organizations and individuals have a right to determine their own futures and have a right to determine what other people learn about them in the past we would have acted as the authority and gone to people and taken their papers and said we know best what to do with your stuff we will take it and handle it as we know best today instead we work with community groups and particularly Native American groups but also African American black groups to work with them to create their own archives in their spaces in their safe spaces we might give them workshops on what archives means what to do with it what a Hollinger box is basic things but once we sort of give them this introduction they create their own community archives they decide what's important to save what's important to save they decide what to make public they decide who can use it and who can't often times with Native American archives only members of that particular group can use those holdings and that's up to them and that's perfectly fine so attitudes toward privacy in archives have shifted 180 degrees can I have one of those thank you okay y'all thank you so much for that can you ask that question like I'm so glad we had the best panelists we could ever imagine and it is quite a bit past time it's 4.39 so I want to thank all of you for being in here in person and everybody who joined us in Zoom and a really special thanks to each of you for giving us your time and your expertise and knowledge I appreciate it so much