 My name is Joy Banks, and I am the Project Coordinator for the Clear Strategies for Advancing Hidden Collections 6-Part Webinar Series. Welcome to our fifth webinar, Overcoming Project Turtles, Approaches to Identifying and Managing Collection Red Flags. This series is offered through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It is my pleasure to introduce our speakers for today, Jessica Bitely, who will cover materiality risks and Yvonne Ng, who will cover content risks. Jessica is the Director of Preservation Services at the Northeast Document Conservation Center, or NEDCC. She works closely with the Center's departments to coordinate training programs, facilitate outreach efforts, and provide preservation information to individuals and organizations in the U.S. and abroad. She has performed general preservation assessments for cultural heritage organizations throughout the U.S. and has presented on a wide variety of preservation topics. Jessica received her MLIS from Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Yvonne is the Senior Archivist at WITNESS, an international nonprofit organization that supports people using video to protect human rights. She is also an active member of Transfer Collective and the Association of Moving Image Archivists. She recently taught a summer course on personal digital archiving at New York University and has previously worked at NYU Libraries, New York Public Library, and the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center. Yvonne holds an MA in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from NYU. Please welcome Jessica and Yvonne. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the first part of overcoming Project Hurdles. This 45-minute section will address red flags within our collections as they relate to the makeup of collection objects. Over the course of this session, we'll identify risks to our collections and the risks from our collections, as well as some of the activities and actions that can mitigate those risks. To get us started in our thinking, I'm going to introduce some of the broad risks related to collections care. I've also developed a scenario based upon situations and collections that I've encountered during the course of my work. You should have received the scenario prior to the webinar, however, you can also find it in the files listed here in Adobe Connect. After the scenario discussion, we'll review some of the ways in which our policies, or lack thereof, affect our ability to reduce risks. We'll then delve more deeply into a few specific common hazards that affect the long-term viability of our materials, and also pose human health concerns. We'll wrap up by revisiting the scenario and discussing priority actions before moving on to part two. You've probably figured out that my focus throughout this session will be on materiality. We're generally very comfortable thinking about the intellectual content of our collections. It takes a bit of a mental switch for information professionals to look not at what an object means or contains, but at what it is. The medium rather than the message. For example, while you might look at a book and say, yeah, this is a first edition copy of Alice in Wonderland, signed by Lewis Carroll with marginalia in the hand of the original owner. From a materiality perspective, what we also want to be saying to ourselves is, here we have a volume with a gilt stamped red cloth cover, a cotton rag text block, and at least three types of ink. Identifying the object as an object, often made of multiple materials, or what we would call a composite object, puts us on a path to identifying the hazard to that object and also the hazards we might face from that type of object. Identifying the riskiest risks from a materiality standpoint informs our prioritization for further action. In the time allotted, it would be impossible to cover all of the potential risks to and from collections materials, and there are a multitude of resources available to deeply explore particular issues. Many of these can be found on the wiki associated with this series. For now, I just really want to emphasize that a variety of factors pose a risk to the longevity of our collections. Likewise, a variety of factors pose a risk to anyone using those collections. The risks we face from collections may be inherent from creation, for example, nitrate film, or they may be accrued over time. For example, arsenic applied as a pesticide for taxidermied animals. It's also important to note that hazards to collections can exacerbate hazards from collections. We're going to spend some more time later discussing mold, pests, and also combustibles and explosives. These three areas pose risks to health and safety, and simultaneously they pose significant risks to the longevity of collections items. To get us started in thinking about risks, let's spend some time with a SwingGate Public Library scenario. We're going to move into discussion room to whiteboard some responses to a few questions about the scenario. For fresher, we will be putting the scenario on the screen for 60 seconds. But again, the document is available in the files area of the webinar screen. Just to let you guys know, you're going to have about two minutes per question, which I realize is quite fast. So I know almost no one really loves to spend time thinking about much less writing documentation. But really carefully considered and consistently enacted written policy can be the most effective tool to limit both your physical risk from collections and also a host of other risks like legal, financial, and reputational risks. In this section, we're going to talk more about mission, collection, development policy, deeds of gifts, and inventories, and about how each of these intersect. You guys were working on a poll in the beginning of this session. And I saw that a number of you had, if there's varying responses, some of you do have a mission statement, some of you don't. Some of you don't know. One of the things that I'd like you to take a moment to consider when thinking about your answer, we're thinking particularly here about unique, valued, or historic materials. So if, for example, you're a library and you say, yes, you have a mission, is the mission for the library or is the mission for the historic collection? And is that mission, if it is for the historic collection, the support of the library's overall mission? So getting into the topic, your mission frames your overall work. It articulates your purpose. Whether you have a mission already or not, ask yourself the following question, who am I doing this work for? Establishing audience can be very difficult, but understanding who you're actually doing your work for will help you to make decisions down the line about what to collect, what to keep, and what to remove. In archival terms, we talk about understanding our designated community, that group of primary users that our materials support. For collections in a research university, this may mean faculty and students. For a local historical society, this may mean residents of the town. Identify your primary users, but also consider secondary or desired users as well. Ask yourself, what's the broad purpose of this work? With historic collections, this will often be collecting, maintenance for as long as needed, and access. Ask yourself, how does my work with these collections support my designated community? For example, a research university may wish to emphasize teaching and learning with primary resources. Finally, even if you're a part of a larger organization, establishing a discrete mission for your collecting functions is worth considering. But it must be considered within the context of the larger organization. How does your collecting function support the wider organizational mission? We also had a poll on collection development policies. And again, we're thinking in thinking about our answers to this question, we're considering more, you know, you may have a collection development policy for your library collection, your circulating materials, but in this context, we're thinking, do you have a collection development policy for your unique or historic materials? So your mission provides your touchstone, but your collection development policy clarifies your scope, defines the shape of your collection, and makes your decision process transparent. Some of the aspects of collecting that may be included in your policy include content areas, formats, languages, et cetera. Your collection development policy is a tool to help you ensure responsible future collecting. While the policy defines who you are, maybe the most important thing it does is that it allows you to find who you aren't and to explain why. For example, you may choose not to take on audio visual materials because the maintenance requirements are beyond your capabilities or because you have no equipment to provide reasonable access. When defining your collection, it can be helpful to understand the scope of other collecting organizations that are nearby or that have a similar focus. Knowing who else is collecting in a similar area helps in identifying gaps and gluts. Honing the scope of collecting allows us to focus on those materials that are most relevant and most appropriate to our resources and abilities. So for example, I went to a town in Western Massachusetts recently, I live in Massachusetts, where the public library and the historical society already had close ties and realized that they could easily become competitors for materials. The public library is in a brand new climate-controlled building with full-time staffing. It's really great for them, right? The historical society is in a historic firehouse that has been refurbished in only the most limited way. And they rely on volunteers who come by for about an hour each week. The library and the historical society came to an agreement that the library would focus on collecting paper-based materials and become the research hub of the town, while the historical society would focus on less environmentally sensitive three-dimensional objects and become the community hub. For them, this serves to both improve access to researchers and to improve the preservation outlook of collections. And our final poll on the deed of gift, which we have about an even split between yes, no, or don't know. And the numbers are rising. Fantastic. OK, so now you have a mission and you have a collection development policy. So when someone offers you materials, you need to have some method of both enforcing your scope and documenting the transfer of property. The deed of gift, which might also be called a donation form, a gift form, a donor agreement, or a gift agreement, does this for you. Essentially, this is a document outlining your rights to the materials being offered. As well as your responsibilities as they relate to those materials. The routine use of a deed of gift form allows you to review whether offered materials fit within your collecting policy. And it allows you to ensure that they don't pose any hazards to people or to your existing collections. Really, this is a chance to slow down and make a decision about the appropriate disposition of materials before they've made it into your collection. So ideally, you already have a deed of gift, which it looks like a number of you do. And it includes all of the elements listed on the slide, so names of donor recipient, description of the materials, transfer of ownership, an access statement, transfer of rights, a disposition statement, and definitely signatures. If you don't have a deed of gift for a collection, the next best thing is that you have some kind of documentation saying basically, hey, I want to give you this thing to which you reply, whoa, cool, I will totally take that thing. And then once you have it in your possession, you say, man, thanks for giving me this thing. Barring all of that, things get a little trickier. You can contact the donor or their family to see what might be possible. But if you can't find anyone to contact, you're going to have to move into research of your state's abandoned property laws. SEA's Abandoned Property Project is a great place to get started, but not all states have this type of law. And some states don't specifically address the needs of libraries, archives, and museums. The New England Museum Association has a really wonderful article about abandoned property and potential workflows. It can be found on the Wiki associated with this series. And of course, if you can, seek legal advice. So the foundational policy document for collecting organization is the Collection Development Policy. Depending on the size and scope of your organization, this may even be split into multiple separate policies. These stem from your guiding mission and inform your deed of gift agreement. Ultimately, though, any policy or documentation relies on some degree of intellectual control over all of the materials in the collection. This means you know, at least broadly, what types of materials you have, what their content is, how much you have. And it also means that you can find specific items with relative ease. I come to this from an archival perspective where we often describe an aggregate. I know a number of you do as well. This approach can be very dissimilar to libraries and museums, but if you're starting from zero or have large amounts of unprocessed materials, using an aggregate approach can be a good first sweep. As you work on your project planning, having a broad sense of your collections, their value, and the formats and risks represented will help you prioritize activities. So think back to the first webinar in this series. Really, all of your project planning relies on knowing what's going on in your collections. Likewise, thinking about the collection access session, cataloging can provide an impetus for inventorying and vice versa. The list of hazards on the screen can help you get started in understanding where risks might lie. Many of you already came up with a number of these risks because we were going through the scenario. Developing an awareness of your collections and potential risks to and from them can point you towards the most fruitful areas to explore for immediate action. For example, you have two taxidermied birds and 1,000 nitrate negatives. Start exploring what to do with those negatives. Also, get yourself a disaster plan for collections. Many, many additional resources can be found on the Wiki. I also want to mention if you have a sense that an item has been treated in a certain way. So for example, you have something that you think might have arsenic on it. There are material safety data sheets that you can look up to find out more about how to handle these items. Now, as I mentioned at the beginning, we're going to go a bit more deeply into a small set of risks that represent a hazard, not only to human health, but also to the longevity of your collections. These include mold, pests, and combustible or explosive material. But first, I want to start by addressing some basic prevention strategies. These largely have to do with environmental risk because many issues can be mediated by careful environmental control. Mold can be prevented, pest activity can be reduced, and chemical degradation can be slowed. Your building is the first line of defense for your collection. Addressing maintenance issues quickly saves money. It also reduces risks from disasters, as well as risks from mold and pests. A building walkthrough from basement to roof will help you identify problems and goals for mitigation. Inspect your roof and gutters and clean them regularly to forestall leaks. Take notes of area of past water infiltration. Really, keep an internal log of maintenance issues over time so that you can identify recurrent problems and more effectively advocate for repair. Use the building walkthrough to do a thorough review of your collection storage areas. Look for dampness and stagnant air pockets. Take note of heating and cooling sources and air vents. Determine whether any collection materials are stored along outer walls or near windows. Also consider water sources above and adjacent to collection storage, so things like bathrooms, water pipes, kitchens, where you might have leaks or water infiltration. Monitor your storage environment. Even if you have an HVAC that monitors and has reporting functions, it's really wise to do independent monitoring as well. There are two main reasons for this. First, HVAC monitors are not recording what's going on in the actual stacks. They record at a certain point and it's usually near the vents. This isn't always representative of actual collections conditions. Secondly, independent monitoring over time gives you a better sense of collections conditions and arms you with empirical data to advocate for improvements. Your monitoring decisions will depend upon your capacity. If you're rarely in the building holding the collection, there are environmental monitoring tools that allow you to set a threshold for humidity and then they send you a text and an email when that threshold has passed. I honestly think this is the coolest tool that has ever been developed. If you have time but not very much money or no money, the use of an inexpensive MinMax monitor, something you buy from Home Depot, that you check and record at a regular interval, particularly during humid months, this might be more feasible for you. Larger institutions with committed staffing may wish to purchase data loggers and commit time to exploring trends in sustainable preservation environments. In the US, much of this research is being performed by the Image Permanent Institute and their website has a really extensive list of resources. Another way to get an additional perspective on risks is to bring in the fire department. This is also a really great opportunity to discuss priority collections with them. So in case you have an emergency, they know what needs to be salvaged first, if possible. And of course, you also want to let staff and researchers know where the risks might lie. So clearly label any hazardous materials in both your discovery guides and on the boxes. Finally, explore your options. If you have an untenable space and an alternate suitable space may be available, make that a long-term goal. If you don't have an alternate suitable space, you can also explore microchanges like moving materials away from outside walls, away from windows and heating sources, things like creating space for airflow and storage areas, moving materials away from vents or using baffles, and also purchasing a dehumidifier or if you have particular materials of freezer. So some general strategies. Now we're going to move on to mitigation of specific problems. All molds pose a health risk, and some people are more at risk than others. So people who have compromised immune systems, people with allergies to mold and mushrooms, to penicillin, and anybody with respiratory issues like asthma is going to be more at risk for mold. Probably almost all of you have some kind of mold sensitivity at this point if you work with collections. So mold is first a sensitizer which then becomes an allergen and then can later become toxic. Typing mold takes time, is costly, and it's really honestly often inconclusive or offers an incomplete picture of what's going on. Also, knowing the kind of mold doesn't really affect the general course of action. If you have mold, you pretty much know you have a problem that you need to deal with. The active mold needs to be rendered dormant, and dormant mold needs to be removed. Understanding issues in your storage space and performing environmental monitoring can help you address problems before they become disasters. But sometimes things happen that are just beyond your control. If you do have a mold outbreak, assess the extent, quarantine the materials if possible, and review your insurance information to determine whether you have coverage and to what extent. Consider reaching out to other organizations that have dealt with a mold outbreak or contacting a conservator or preservation professional to discuss next steps. Most conservators and preservation people are readily available and happy to talk about issues, so don't hesitate to be in touch with people. Consider the values, uniqueness, and importance of the molding materials before choosing a route. In most instances, contacting a service provider that has experience working with collections should be really high on your list of steps. This is almost always what I suggest first. In general, though, you really want to avoid any treatment that involves heating your materials, adding additional moisture to your materials, or irradiating them. Because of the potential health effects of mold, infestations are ideally treated by professionals with the appropriate equipment. Many service providers will actually even take really small amounts of material. If you must handle molding materials, it's best to have your personal protective equipment on hand. So this includes things like gloves, probably nitrile is your best choice, goggles, an N90 or N100 mask, so no dust masks. Those aren't going to do much for you, and also full-length clothing. Essentially, you want to cover yourself as much as possible. Like mold, pests pose a risk to the longevity of our collections, and they're more likely to be active in warm, dark, and humid areas. The best practice and cultural heritage is to follow integrated pest management techniques. These include preventive measures, such as ceiling holes and cracks, investing in door sweeps, routine housekeeping and trash removal. I really want to emphasize this. It's not that exciting, but it is really important, and also clutter reduction. IPM also includes monitoring using a variety of traps and collecting data about trends over time. The goal of monitoring is to help identify the source of the pest infiltration, and then to identify solutions to stop the infiltration or infestation. If an infestation has established itself in a collection item or item, these should be bagged and quarantined, the surrounding area should be cleaned, and effort should be made to identify the type of pest causing the damage. The method of extermination will be to, sorry, I just got tongue tied, sorry guys. The method of extermination will be determined by the object type, the extent of the infestation, the type of infesting pest, and institutional resources. Freezing and anoxic treatments are the two most common choices, really based upon efficacy, cost, and lack of toxicity. The Harry Ransom Center has a document online called Approaches to Insect Problems in Paper and Books, and it includes a super helpful list of the non-paper items that should never be frozen. And this is helpful also if you have a water event or a mold issue. So also, it's important to use pesticides only as a last resort and never, ever directly on collections. It's worth noting that there's a really long history of attempting to reduce pest activity in collections, and a lot of this treatment now poses a potential hazard. One example of this is the widespread use of arsenic to preserve taxidermied animals. I believe mercury was used to preserve botanical specimens. The American Museum of Natural History has a really great resource called residual pesticides that outline steps for figuring out if pesticides were used on your collections of materials. Although insects, you know, spiders, et cetera, these are the kinds of things that pose maybe a mental health risk for some people. The human health risk comes primarily from your vertebrates. Rodents and bats serve as vectors for like a variety of diseases. The risk is really much greater. Now I'm going to be a little gross. Sorry. The risk is greater if you come in contact with it. They're saliva, urine, feces, or blood. The point of this is that things that traps that cause mice to become injured are more risky from a health standpoint. So care should really be taken in trapping to reduce contact with any animal fluids, if you can. Many hazards lurk in places that we might not expect. You know, we may make assumptions that the guns in our collections aren't loaded, that powder horns are empty, and that grenades have been rendered inert. Often I think it's really a lack of familiarity with handling these types of objects, and it leads to a lack of action. You'll find a veritable trove of potentially combustible and explosive materials in collection storage areas. Not all of them are obvious. Not all of them are collection items. Unless specific documentation exists, assume guns, mines, grenades, et cetera, contain live ammunition. These types of materials, due to grade over time, have become less stable. So consider the item's value to your collection, and contact your police department for assistance. This may include deactivation or disposal of the object. Anything where you're unsure of the deactivation status should be clearly documented in Discovery Guides, also in your emergency plan. Identify any particularly combustible materials in your collection. So for example, you guys came up with the nitrate film earlier in the scenario. And understand that munitions and nitrate will have specialized handling procedures. They'll also have insurance implications, and this will affect your decision to keep or dispose of them. On the flip side of this, we may also have things in our collections that were designed to be fire-retardant at a time when the materials used weren't understood as a health risk. So these include objects like gas masks and fire suits, which may be made with asbestos, as well as a lot of other early firefighting equipment. Finally, I want to point out that while not all of us will have combustible or explosive collections items, a truly surprising number of organizations keep materials that pose these types of hazards in or near collection storage areas. So here we're thinking of things like solvents and certain cleaning supplies. Limiting collection storage areas to collections materials and having an emergency plan that has been shared and practiced will help in reducing risk to humans and to collections from our combustible or explosive objects. Ultimately, if it's moldy, smelly, flaky, broken, bubbling, gooey, covered in powdery-looking spots, or just an actual weapon, it probably warrants further investigation. Don't panic. If you have it, someone somewhere probably has dealt with it already. There is a vast world of professional practice devoted to examining objects of questionable stability and formulating plans for reducing risk. Ask for advice, not just from your professional network, but from allied professionals. Really look outside of your normal realm to see what else is being said about these objects. While I hope to have given you a sense of the issues and some tools for dealing with more common hazards, particular needs are going to vary across organizations. Many of the aspects I've discussed are explored more deeply in the resources on the Wiki. Now we're going to do one more activity, thinking back to SwingGate. And let's move into the discussion room. Here we go. So thinking about our list earlier and thinking about the discussion that I just went to. Has anybody come up with any additional risks to the people or to the collection? I am going to move us back into the classroom and go over my last slide for you all. So in the end, it's really all project planning. Know your collections, prepare your policies, assess your risks, identify your resources, think about your goals, determine your priorities, consider your capabilities, and make a plan. And really think about doing some of the easy things now just because they aren't the biggest thing that you could do or the most effective. If they can get you moving forward, that's really important. Now I'm going to feed control to Yvonne for part two of this session. Thank you so much, Jessica, and hello, everyone. So in the second half of the webinar, I'm going to be focusing on red flags that we might encounter related to the content of our collections, in particular, the ethical challenges that emerge in collecting, preserving, and providing access to different types of content. So I'll start with a brief introduction about ethics in general, and then we'll spend the remainder of the webinar exploring four scenarios. And for each, we'll talk about the ethical concerns that might be raised, and then I'll share some useful strategies that others in the field have employed that enabled them to move ahead with their own projects. And then we'll conclude with time for questions and feedback for both Jessica and me. So to begin, it's important to note that there's no single correct answer to our ethical questions. No one-size-fits-all approach. I think we all know this, and hopefully it'll become even more evident as we go through our scenarios. So this webinar might not give you the answers to the specific ethical problems in your collections, but I hope that the questions and strategies that we discuss will inspire your own approaches. So to ground our discussion, just let me offer a baseline definition of ethics. First, ethics are based on our core values, sense of justice, and our empathy and compassion. This comes from two ways of thinking about ethics, one that sees it in terms of universal principles, impartiality, and justice, and another coming out of feminist theory that sees ethics more contextually in terms of relationships, care, empathy, and response. So let's not argue the merits of one approach over the other, but keep both senses in mind as we go forth in this webinar. So in the most basic terms, ethics outline our responsibilities to each other. They're the principles that guide our social behavior that are also determined by our relationships and particular context. Sometimes we face dilemmas in which our principles clash or compete with each other. And at those times, we reflect back on our values, consider who is affected by our decisions, and our relationship and responsibility to them. A code of ethics provides a means for a group of people to define their collective values and principles and to hold themselves accountable to them. But they're not set in stone. So while there might be some very basic timeless principles, codes of ethics can and should evolve to reflect our contemporary sense of right and wrong. And finally, ethics hold us to a higher standard than the law. So think of the law as a baseline set of rules and regulations, whereas ethics move us to think and act beyond the requirements of the law. So following one's ethical principles is often a matter of conscience rather than enforcement or punishment. So just here are some links to resources on ethics in the library, archives, and museum world. All of the links in the presentation today will be available in the resource library. So the first three on this list are the core codes of ethics published by the professional associations ALA, SAA, and AM. And most of you are probably familiar with at least one of these codes. I've also included the Zine librarians code of ethics as an example of a code that addresses the issues faced by a particular type of content and community of creators and users. If you're interested in codes of ethics, their purpose and function, the webinar here by Miriam Springle and Bert Altman provides a nice overview. And finally, the article by Michelle Caswell and Marika C4 is a really insightful one that discusses radical empathy as a framework for archival ethics. So let's move right into the scenarios. For each scenario, I'm gonna launch a discussion pane and ask you to spend two minutes brainstorming the ethical questions that come to mind and any strategies that you want to share. Then following the brainstorm for each scenario, I'll talk us through some of those questions and strategies. So here's the first scenario. Your non-tribal collecting institution has a historic collection of Indigenous music recordings. The analog tapes are degrading and there's an opportunity to undertake a mass digitization project for preservation and to provide online access. Legally, the recordings belong to your institution. However, you know that they were created in the context of colonial extraction and appropriation and that laws do not provide the means to recognize the Indigenous group's rights in relation to the recordings. The recordings may also have cultural, religious, and political meanings that your institution is not aware of. So we're gonna switch to the discussion pane in a second where the text of the scenario I just read and these questions below will still be visible and ask you to share your thoughts on what ethical questions might need to be addressed in relation to this digitization project and what strategies can be employed to proceed with this project in an ethical way. So in preparation for this webinar, I made a list of some of the questions that occurred to me which overlap with many of the excellent questions that you raised. I'm actually quite certain that many of you have more experience working with Indigenous and Native American collections than me and I don't claim to have any expertise in this area, but I did consult a number of useful resources which I'll share with you that informed this section. So some of the ethical questions that occurred to me, my first question was, so given how it was acquired, does my institution have moral rights to this collection? So we know that they have the copyright, but some jurisdictions around the world recognize moral rights of Indigenous communities to works that draw from their traditions, customs, and beliefs as in this scenario. This doesn't apply legally in the United States, but it could be used voluntarily as an ethical guide. So if my institution doesn't have moral rights, should the collection be repatriated? International and national laws recognize repatriation rights of Indigenous communities. This doesn't explicitly include archival materials, but repatriation could be offered voluntarily in that spirit, but is that the right choice for the care and management of this collection? Next, whose knowledge and value systems should form the basis of policies concerning this collection, for example, in relation to its digitization? Native American and quote, unquote, Western approaches to caring for collections may sometimes differ. So for example, a Native American knowledge system might dictate that certain materials of value should actually not be artificially preserved, or there might be objects that are considered sacred to Native Americans that require specialized care in rituals that are not normally performed as part of Western preservation. So related to this question, should access be restricted for culturally sensitive materials? Should certain materials not be digitized or preserved? And this question of who decides? Culturally sensitive materials can include information that's private or sacred or taken without consent. There might be information that's considered specialized or privileged knowledge. This is another question that you guys raised in the chat. Should information resources like catalog records be updated to reflect non-eurocentric understandings of the materials? So descriptive information created by people with little knowledge of the materials context can be inaccurate, derogatory, or just not describe or classify people and their materials in a way that they would describe or classify themselves. So whose perspectives should catalog records reflect? Finally, as most of us said, most people would say that community consultation is ethically important and necessary. But we know that building trust in relationships takes a long time. Will that time consuming consultation impact the survival and preservation of the materials? So given all of these questions, what are some ways to move forward? First, a key resource is the protocols for Native American archival materials drafted by a group of cultural heritage professionals from 15 Native American First Nation and Aboriginal communities. These protocols go into much more detail that we can cover today and would be a good first place to look. One of the key recommendations from the protocols is to consult community and engage in shared stewardship. The point here is to build relationships of mutual respect and trust. And many of you pointed that out. So shared stewardship is an alternative concept to traditional custody. As Michelle Caswell has explained and others, it sees material less as property and more as a cultural asset that's held in trust through relationship between the institution and the community. As part of shared stewardship, another strategy is to incorporate traditional knowledge and value systems into the collecting, processing, preservation and access policies in a meaningful way. And for more on this, please check out the article by Kim Christian that's linked at the end of this section. And to put these ideas into practice, the Sustainable Heritage Network has useful templates and examples of agreements and policies on their webpage that's linked here. So some more strategies. Protecting privacy and confidentiality is nothing new for archives and the principle is embedded in the SAA code of ethics. So respecting restrictions on culturally sensitive materials is just a matter of applying this already held idea to different kinds of restrictions that exist in traditional knowledge systems. This is part of being considerate to the moral rights and ethics of care that go beyond intellectual property law. Copyright law doesn't address certain concepts like community ownership, privileged knowledge, protection of ancient works and intangible cultural heritage. So TK or traditional knowledge licenses and labels by localcontext.org linked here is a great example of how these principles can be put into practice. They're an extra legal tool designed especially for tribal materials that are held in non-tribal institutions and in the public domain. They're sort of analogous to Creative Commons to make users aware of appropriate access, use and circulation of tribal materials. So the graphic here is just a few examples of the available TK labels, there's many more. So the final strategy for this scenario, engage in collaborative curation, improve description with culturally appropriate and accurate information, add notes or disclaimers about inaccurate or disrespectful content. Doing these things can only improve identification and understanding, retrieval and access. And finally, encourage community access and use of this collection, make the collection of valued resource for the community that it represents. A great tool for collaborative curation and access is Mukatu. Related to the TK licenses project, Mukatu is a free and open source content management system designed for collaborative management and sharing of digital cultural heritage using community defined access protocols like the TK licenses and labels. And here are just a few more resources related to culturally responsive care for Native American and other materials. Kim Christian's article gives more information about TK labels in Mukatu. Ellen Ryan's case study describes a consultation process between Idaho State University and the Shoshone Bannock tribes at Fort Hall. Not specific to Native American materials, Burgess Jules's article takes a critical big picture look at the impact of erasures and the inability to acknowledge uncomfortable truths in our archives. And Tara Robertson's article looks at the ethical issues raised by the digitization of a collection with a different kind of cultural sensitivity, the digitization of the lesbian porn magazine on our backs. So let's move on to the second scenario. We're gonna do this again. Your public collecting institution is interested in collecting social media, so tweets, YouTube videos arising from a contemporary social movement as many important events are being documented by individuals on social media rather than by traditional news outlets. The movement is decentralized and involves many grassroots organizations, activists, journalists and concerned citizens. Lately as the movement gains momentum, government and police have been cracking down on protests and those that they see as leaders. There are concerns about surveillance and harassment. So again, let's spend two minutes to share your thoughts on this scenario, what ethical questions need to be addressed in relation to this collection project and what strategies can be employed to proceed with this project in an ethical way. So let me share with you the ethical questions that I had come up with. So this came up in the chat. Could my collection draw unwanted attention to somebody be used to invade their privacy or surveil them? Social media are contemporary records. They contain personal information of everyday people who might not normally find themselves in an archive and there's no traditional deed of gift which Jessica talked about. And in this scenario, the creators or subjects may be youth, people of color or activists or other people who may be more vulnerable to actions and authorities. Next is published social media quote unquote public data. Should there be any expectation of privacy if it's already out there in the world? So is like social media public like a published work or is it like a conversation I'm having outside with a group of my friends but I wouldn't expect a stranger to be recording? The next question which came up in the chat, do I need consent to collect? I think in general, we would all agree that consent is important but if you're collecting a hashtag for example, there could be thousands of individuals. So what degree of consent is good enough? For example, is providing an option to opt out sufficient? Then another point that was raised is consent versus informed consent. Are the people who are consenting aware of the extent of what is collected and the potential consequences? So for example, people who consent might not be aware of the metadata that's collected along with their content or how the data might be used by others. Should user deleted posts continue to be preserved or made accessible in the collection? So this relates back to the question of public data. Is it considered already out there once you've published it the first time? On the flip side, will important voices or parts of history be lost if we don't capture social media? So there's so many ethical concerns we might just say forget it but what do we lose if we don't do it? A lot of under reported issues and under reported voices find their way on social media and only on social media. Are we writing those voices out of history if they're not collected? And finally, should I violate the terms of service of the social media platform provider in order to harvest and preserve content? Those third party terms of service may not allow for the collecting, scraping, downloading, et cetera. So let's look at some strategies to work through this. First, it is worthwhile to recognize that public data like social media about an individual when brought together and analyzed can be revealing and invasive of privacy and the privacy of those in the individual's network. So we can use methods to anonymize data but de-anonymization can still occur through analysis. So a well-known example of this is the secretive and unidentified UK graffiti artist named Banksy. Last year a group of researchers combed through data in the public domain. So newspaper articles, the geography of artworks, electoral rules to confirm a hypothesis about his identity. As Jacob Metcalf and Kate Crawford outlined in the article which I'll share, the researchers analysis revealed patterns about a private citizen's behavior and movements that clearly seemed invasive of his privacy. So with that in mind, it's best to find a way to get informed consent from content creators. Informed consent means consent that's given voluntarily where the use and purpose are fully disclosed and the subject is fully able to understand the consequences. Also provide a clear removal policy and mechanism, especially if you're using an opt-out consent model, there needs to be a clear and responsive way for people to do so. The two creative strategies listed here come from the beyond the hashtags report. You can see the cover here. The authors of this report collected tweets to study online Black Lives Matter activism, but to prevent bringing unwanted scrutiny on previously obscure users, they only collected tweets by users with over 3,000 followers or tweets that had at least 100 retweets. And then they also posted links to tweets instead of reproducing them, which allowed for users to delete their tweets both from their own accounts and the collection all at once. Finally, publish ethical codes and policies to model norms and practices for social media archiving. I think this came up in the chat as well. Social media archiving is very new and the ethical and rights management issues are not really all worked out. So creating norms and practices will help guide other collecting institutions and create broader understanding and acceptance. So for example, the Documenting the Now project is a joint project of three university partners that's exploring and documenting these issues and also developing tools for Twitter collection and curation. They have a very active blog and Slack channel that's worth checking out. So here are just a few more resources on social media archiving. NC State has a social media archiving toolkit which documents their work to build a social media archiving program in their libraries. The next article by Burgess Jules again comes from the Doc Now blog. Burgess is one of the principles on this project. I mentioned Metcalf and Crawford. They're from the big data world and their article was the source of the Banksy example that I shared. The Annette Marcom article looks at the OKCupid fiasco which some of you might be familiar with in which a researcher published unanonymized personally identifying data of thousands of users of OKCupid internet dating site claiming it was ethical because the data was already online. So let's move into scenario three. So your library has received a request for reconsideration of library material from a patron regarding a well-known children's book published decades ago. The book portrays a class of people in a way that most contemporary audiences including your library's review panel would agree is clearly offensive. The panel must decide what to do with book. Keep it on the shelf, restrict access to it somehow, remove it from circulation entirely or something else. So let's do this again. What ethical questions arise in this decision-making process and what strategies can be employed to deal with this challenged book? So here are my questions. Should a library deem any materials offensive at all and should it opine on what is suitable for children attains to read? So as you've all mentioned, intellectual freedom is a key value in libraries and many would say it's not their place to save whether something's offensive or to censor or restrict something even if it is or to decide for parents what's suitable for their children. So does removing offensive materials from circulation violate freedom of information and freedom to read which are fundamental values for libraries? I think many of us would say yes. But on the flip side, does keeping offensive material and circulation serve to normalize and reinforce negative stereotypes say about already marginalized groups? So by sort of doing nothing and staying neutral, are we really not being neutral at all? Related to that question, does keeping offensive material on the shelf discourage marginalized groups from seeing the library as a welcoming space somewhere that they can go? So in this sense, does it actually limit access to library materials by those who might actually need it the most? And then finally, is it in the interest of children because we're talking to a children's book here to shield them from viewing offensive material or can exposing them to it help teach critical thinking? Because we don't know what people will do with information. Offensive material can be used, as many of you mentioned, to educate and expose the prejudice that underlies it. So here are some strategies. First, be prepared, have a documented collection development policy and selection criteria in place. So I'm just echoing Jessica here that outlines the objectives, responsibility, criteria, procedures for selection and reconsideration and policies on controversial materials. In the policy, you can refer to the principles of intellectual freedom that are found on the ALA Library Bill of Rights. So when controversies arise, you're prepared and you can use your policies to help rationally explain your library's collecting program. You wanna have documented procedures in place for the formal reconsideration process and you wanna follow that process. You wanna handle challenges in a consistent way, enable those doing the review to not rely on their personal beliefs but on established institutional standards. Your decision has to both be and appear to be fair and judicious. And be prepared to explain this process and timeline to the individual making the challenge. You wanna be able to respond respectfully and clearly. People have the right to complain and they wanna know that they're being heard. So this scenario was actually based on the example of Tantan Okongo, which is a Belgian children's comic book from the 1930s that's frequently challenged for being racially offensive. Brooklyn Public Library is one institution that received such a challenge and they decided that the book was indeed offensive and moved it to a special collection of historic children's literature that's available by appointment only and used primarily by researchers. And this choice was not without controversy but moving challenging materials to adults or more restricted areas is a choice that some libraries make. In contrast, another library that received this same challenge was the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts. They decided that changing the access status of a book constituted a form of censorship which is contrary to their mission. They stated that it was not the job of the librarian to say what a community should or should not read. So they decided to keep the book on the shelf but suggested creating programming in the library around the issue of racism. So I think this case study is a good example of different libraries making different but both ethically considered choices that they felt made sense in their specific context. So the final strategy for this scenario is if all is lost, you can contact the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom for Help. The office has a lot of resources on its webpage and an online mechanism for reporting challenges and asking for assistance. And here are just a few more resources on challenge materials, a couple links to ALA and then two articles that describe the TAN-TAN decisions at BPL and Jones Libraries in more detail. So our final scenario. Your institution is taking part in a community archiving project in collaboration with a community that has been historically under and misrepresented in the archives. Your institution hopes to build a lasting relationship with the community and engage it in preservation and use of the archives. While the community understands the long-term value of their materials and wants them to be preserved and accessible, they're also suspicious and wary of the institution. For example, some members of the community might wanna scan and digitize their materials but don't necessarily wanna deposit them with the institution or have them allow access or provide detailed identifying metadata. So what ethical questions need to be addressed in relation to this community-based project and what strategies can be employed to proceed with this project in an ethical way? Okay, so let me share some of the questions I had. Okay, and of course they echo many of your questions. So how do we build a more diverse, inclusive and accurate collection, something we all want, without repeating the steps of the past, like resorting to the extractive colonial approaches that we talked about earlier? If the community has wealth out of reasons for being suspicious of the institution, to what degree should I encourage them to deposit, allow access and share metadata if they're reluctant? So what is my responsibility for protecting the community versus building my collection? Does the idea of a citizen archivist devalue the knowledge and skills of professional archivists? So the idea of personal digital archiving is very popular these days and community archive projects promote a more flexible idea of what we call archival work. What effect does this democratization have on archival professionals? And related, how flexible should we be with established archival standards in community-based initiatives? So is it okay to promote less than ideal but perhaps more realistic practices as acceptable standards? And finally, is it irresponsible to hand digitized records back to a community if that community doesn't have the resources for ongoing preservation? So is it fair to digitize materials for people and expect them to be able to manage them going forward on their own? So let me share some strategies. First, really important, center your goals and policies on people and communities and not on building your collections. Over time, your collections will probably grow and become more diverse if the institution is seen as a trusted partner in the community. Trying to make collections diverse when the institution is actually not in its makeup or constituency, risk repeating those colonial patterns of the past. Next, provide tools and space for creating, organizing and sharing community archives. Support the community with the parts of the archival process that are difficult for them to do on their own. So for example, the DC Public Library has a memory lab, which provides otherwise very difficult to access legacy audio visual playback machines, digital converters and a computer that patrons can sign up to use to digitize real videotapes, cassettes and slides. Next, the term post custodial describes a collecting framework in which archivists provide management and oversight without physically acquiring or taking custody of records from record creators. So the archivist acts more as a facilitator in partnership with the community of record creators. Expertise on both sides is harnessed in the work of preservation, description and access. It's sort of more of a with instead of a for approach. Recognize that even with the best intentions and planning, missteps will occur. This is not a reason to not pursue community archiving projects. Instead, as you go along, engage in ongoing self-reflection with the community about the process. The South Asian American Digital Archives is an example of a post custodial archive. On their website, they discuss their approach and how they've gathered feedback from their community to better understand needs and interests. And finally, recognize power relationships between archives and marginalized communities and respect any resistance to traditional institutions and approaches. So instead of feeling seen as judged or guilty, let's just try to build understanding and address ways of doing things that exclude or oppress. For example, one way to open up archives to a more diverse community is to be inclusive of varied formats or modes of expression like ephemera or oral histories. There are different ways that experiences can be documented and shared besides written records. For example, the police archive of police violence in Cleveland is a non-institutional community archive that collects stories of encounters with law enforcement. It's doing so by recording oral histories, collecting community organizing documents, and openly inviting online contributions in diverse formats and perspectives. In recognition of the specific risks to its community, it deliberately avoids collecting provenance and identifying information from its contributors. And I'm gonna skip talking about these resources because I know we're kind of running short on time and just go to my closing slide. So in closing, we've discussed a wide range of content, content that's questionably acquired and culturally sensitive, social media, content that's offensive, community-owned content. And so hopefully it's been useful to discuss the specific examples rather than talk more conceptually about ethics. And all of the scenarios, the considerations have centered around the people that were responsible to including content creators, individuals and communities represented or affiliated with collections, users, both current and future. Our home institutions, our organizations and our coworkers and peers. Sometimes we have to make hard decisions and in doing so, it's important to keep in mind that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Our choices need to be made in context, knowing where we are situated and recognizing existing inequalities of power. And ultimately, we can only try our best. And what's important is that we don't shy away from making ethical choices and just passively perpetuating social injustices, but that we try to confront these problems and move forward. So that's it from me, and we're going to move to questions and feedback for both either Jessica or myself. Well, that being said, do either of you have anything else that you would like to share with anybody? I don't, in particular, I do, I know that we didn't get to touch on copyright in this session, but I know it's a topic of deep interest to a lot of people. And one thing that I took out of my slides that I do want to mention is that just because you have a deed of gift where somebody says that they have the rights to the material doesn't, not to scare you, but it doesn't mean that they do. But likewise, if you digitize something, we're as a field leaning towards more openness and sharing, which in some ways is great, but we tend to claim rights that we don't have. So I think considering those aspects of copyright is really important, is not overstating what rights you have to an object. Yeah, and I guess I deliberately avoided copyright because I was trying to look sort of beyond what the laws sort of require of us, and especially if the laws don't recognize certain ethical, moral rights that people might have over their collections. Yes, and we did, we made an intentional choice to kind of avoid copyright in the interest of time since we knew that we would be short of that already. So. Yeah, I just wanted to say thank you for all the participants for your excellent points that you raised in both my webinar and Jessica's. I thought you all raised really great ideas.