 but it's my great pleasure, my absolute great pleasure to welcome Dorothy Berry. Dorothy is the digital curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. She's a specialist in the description and discovery of African American cultural heritage with an experience leading projects at major public and private institutions in the United States and has become a highly called upon speaker. We're so glad to have her today, as well as a writer around the themes of marginalised people's histories in unexpected collections. Her work has been published in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Uproot, the Public Domain Review and Lapens Quarterly. It's with great pleasure that I'd like to invite Dorothy onto our screens for our inaugural talk with an inclusive collections and inclusive libraries event. Welcome Dorothy. Thank you. I'm going to share my screen now. Great. Thank you all for coming. I am so glad to be in conversation with everyone this morning, especially with colleagues that I've never met from across the world. So I had a little intro planned, but I feel like I've been intro'd enough. So I'll move on to a little introduction of the presentation itself. I'm going to present two case studies of different projects dealing with discovery and access of African American cultural heritage materials. I want to say at the outset that any sorts of case studies like this are, by their nature, related to the unique holdings of an institution. And so perhaps some of the specifics of these two case studies will not be applicable to the work or the collections that you have at your institution. But I think that there should be techniques, themes, or possibilities that can be drawn out that would be relevant across collections and especially to not necessarily collections focusing on the African diaspora, but perhaps on other marginalized groups as well. So the first case study I'm calling describing and discovering blackface in special collections. So this is perhaps a little different than what we often think about when we talk about EDI work and decolonial work in glam sector. But racially inflammatory materials are often a pretty large proponent, not proponent, but percentage of collections, especially in institutions that have been collecting for a long time. Description of conversations in special collections are often focused on updating the vocabularies on inherited descriptions, which may be on totally innocuous collections. But some collections are inflammatory regardless of language and require extra thought when we think about access. So I'm going to talk about a particular project background as it relates to the work at Houghton Library. And I'll say that both of the case studies have to do with my work at the previous institution, Houghton Library, because I really wanted to focus on things that are applicable to folks in libraries and archives, and because I've only been at the museum for three months, so I don't really have enough here to give you a good case study yet. So I'll talk about the project background, about developing the research guide at Houghton, then how we implemented it at Houghton Library at Harvard University, and then a separate implementation of the guidelines at Brown University and then some project takeaways. With the Blackface Ministry material, the questions from users, regardless of their interest, is often, why do you have this? What's the market for this? Why does this still exist? Blackface Ministry will see as a performance form that was the most popular entertainment form in the United States and in much of Western Europe. I can't say for all of Western Europe, but I know for Scotland and England, percentages were also incredibly high for popularity in the 19th through mid 20th century. But it is also an art form or a performance form that today is so obviously offensive because it's a form that's based on performing the idea of racial stereotypes that to contemporary users, it is generally sort of an immediate visceral response that is negative, which is fairly appropriate but is difficult if we're trying to provide research materials. And especially as we expand our demographics of users, perhaps traditionally, I know Houghton Library has a huge theatre collection and it had a very large minstrelsy collection. Traditionally, the researcher demographics were a very certain type of white male theatre scholar who was perhaps used to or had particular views on these materials, but then as the demographics expand, we get different questions that sort of had been able to be avoided historically. I developed a individual project goal one year after seeing and hearing particular feedback that I received, not because I was particularly involved in the theatre collection, but from researchers who knew of my work with African-American collections and wanted to have more of a personal conversation about their negative feelings about interacting with minstrel materials. So I developed this personal project, individual project to identify our current collection and the descriptions, create localized recommendations because it would need to be based on how our materials work and provide tools for future description. One of the things I often heard from colleagues was that like I was saying earlier, this material was so viscerally upsetting that their reflex was to sort of get it out as soon as you can. And of course, everyone who works in libraries knows that we're also pushed with timelines anyways. So providing tools so that future catalogers and archivists would not need to do huge amounts of research in an area that might be uncomfortable for them if they just needed to quickly describe things in a way that both worked across our collections and was what we felt was appropriate to the collections. So to give some stats on what I'm talking about, in one of the initial inventory, there were 226 individual items with catalog records, so that single item manuscripts, publications like books or playbills, not playbills, but scripts, periodicals or archival collections that had their own catalog records. There were 3,172 items in the archive space, which is the finding aid backend tool that we used, so that's posters, more publications, manuscripts and photographs, and 10 distinct archival collections relating to Blackface Minstrelsy collections like further Blackface Minstrelsy, but again, making it difficult not only to see the massive materials, but also from the user perspective, not really just dealing with simple access, you would have to do a lot of research to find all of these materials because they're not co-located. And continue on the co-location note, the top 10 subject headings were minstrel shows, minstrel music, popular music, and songsters. But there were no shared access points across those 226 catalog records themselves, with the most frequent heading only hitting 51 of the items. And so, really not doing the job of subject headings even before getting into if these are the appropriate subject headings that we wanted to use. After identifying the materials in our diverse description, and not in the EDI way, just having too many types of description for the same material, the recommendations were to focus on user experience and ease of discovery over library specific, librarian specific domain knowledge. So that had to do with some of the vagaries of subject headings and analysis and sort of the ability for catalogers to select subject headings based on individual items and really wanting us to look at it holistically from the outset. We also wanted to focus on thematic co-location over format co-location. As I said, there were 10 archival collections and some of them were minstrel photographs or minstrel playbills, although there was also an omnibus minstrel collection that had photographs and playbills. So we wanted to really focus on a user who was searching for material by theme, not by format, as that reflected our knowledge of our users. And then focus on description and surfacing African Americans over timely processing. Something else that came up as part of this project was that because our theater collection was so rich in minstrel see materials and had been since the 19th century when it was a popular form, the theater curator was collecting new minstrel material, but while doing so was searching out unique material that focused early African American performers, because although this was a performance style that involved people performing and blackening their face with burnt cork to perform as African Americans, it was also one of the earliest formats in the United States where African Americans could perform, even if they had to blacken their own faces to perform as Black people. So we were getting these unique materials, but because they were being processed so quickly and not with necessarily the communication to get that information over, we weren't even surfacing this diversity of this material. We were just saying, oh, we've got more blackface minstrel see stuff than we did before, which is not necessarily the message or intent that we had. So at Houghton, we ended up with a new omnibus finding aid. So we had new acquisitions as accruals to our finding aid so that we would not be dependent on catalog or judgment for description or on the creation of a strict set of descriptive rules. This was something that was unique for us because it meant items that we would normally catalog as a single item, like a published script or playbook, were now just added to the playbook section, I mean series of the finding aid. And that was sort of challenging for some folks to get their heads around, but focusing on our users and really thinking about the idea of what makes sense to librarians and archivists and what makes sense to people who do not work in our field. And then as for this Houghton implementation, what it required was a heavy lift in technical services. So merging these collections and maintaining the digital object links required a colleague of mine, Betscope, to develop a new processing plan and submit that to the curators and across the board so we could reorganize this material intellectually. We did not reorganize it physically on our shelves as those are closed stacks. And if something has a space, there's no need to try to move it around, it was what I think we all know about limited space and stacks. But it did require a heavy technical services lift, I would say maybe a week out of her time to really focus on this material. There was a separate implementation at John Hay Library at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island that went in a somewhat different direction. This implementation had a student focus. I was contacted by colleagues at Brown who had seen my publication of my recommendations, which I shared out because I had heard from many colleagues that this particular subject area was of difficulty for them. And they said that they had a student, an undergraduate student, who had written her semester capstone project on their blackface minstrelsy materials and had a lot of questions that they didn't know how to answer, but they wanted to provide the student an opportunity to work with librarians and with a graduate student to do some collections research and to reorganize how this material was made accessible. So they had a different context than we did. They have a very large sheet music collection as to do a lot of universities and they digitized a lot of their sheet music. But they also had a individual collection site that was specifically designed around this blackface minstrelsy material. So this became not a heavy technical services lift really, but a summer semester project, which was the development of a new collection site that required or provided a research opportunity for the undergraduate student and accurately described the collection and provided more historical content from a graduate student musicology at the university and was a really great opportunity for student-led scholarship. So they were part of a team of library staff and me as a consultant researching and providing contextual data to refresh the description and also to talk about the complications of working with this material as a group and as part of the intellectual journey, not necessarily just as part of the sort of back-end work that students may not know about. So the project takeaways, let me see, for that we really wanted to focus especially with this challenging material on description for discovery. So we had to challenge our colleagues to provide information that removes sort of the fig leaf of just saying I don't know and not necessarily taking the personal work to dig into the emotional reasonings behind I don't know, but really thinking about how can we challenge colleagues to take material seriously if it's material that we're choosing to steward, which can be difficult because often the people that have to do cataloging or processing of collections are not the people that make the decisions about what we steward or collect. We wanted to focus on users and not on librarian-centric knowledge, so bypassing internal descriptive standards to focus on discovery, using accurate language to describe the material because something that came up both on our technical lift at Houghton and on our student-led lift at Brown was the idea of content warnings and we had decided for this material, pardon me, for this material that the best way to describe it was with enough clarity that a content warning would seem unnecessary. So for example, instead of saying this collection may contain sensitive materials that may be upsetting due to racism or things like that, we chose to begin the description with a definition of blackface minstrelsy that took away any sort of question about what was or was not in here. So something like blackface minstrelsy was a popular performing art style which predominantly white performers painted their faces black and performed humor that was based around making fun of African-Americans. If you could read that and you don't think that that's racist or that that might have sensitive material, then that is something that we cannot fix as archivists and librarians but also that kind of choosing to be clear enough in our description that we did not need to again sort of assuage our own emotions by just putting warnings and then really trusting outside experts. So that goes back to this idea of more of what we did at Brown and also at Houghton. At Houghton, when I finished writing my initial descriptions, I sent them out to a couple of scholars I had been acquainted with and asked them if they had scholars of blackface minstrelsy and black performance. If they had time to quickly review these materials, I tried to reach out to scholars that I know had done research at Houghton so it felt more like a feedback interview than just asking for their time because we all know nobody has time to do work for free but luckily these scholars did and it really helped because it not only helped us with the accuracy of the information we provided but also was good feedback because they are the users. So the second case story I'm going to talk about is digitizing and discovering African-American history in collections and I could have put in parentheses sort of perceived predominantly white collections but that's much too long of a title. So we're talking about reviewing sort of ignored collections so before we had the minstrelsy collection that we were all very very aware of and now we're going to talk more about this project at Houghton to identify and digitize African-American history materials in a collection that was not perceived to have had African-American history materials by our own acquisition staff. So collections discussions around EDI in special collections often focus on new acquisitions to make up for a history of not collecting and also sort of this idea that maybe new acquisitions will be more positive than sort of whatever negative history we had in the past but there are often more diverse stories in our collections than stewards are aware of so for this I'm going to do a similar sort of organizational structure with the project background how we planned it the identification of our materials how we made it accessible and then some takeaways. Something I heard over and over at Houghton initially was that we just didn't have a lot of African-American history materials because we've never really collected in that area alone but we also never did a collection review so it's difficult to say what you have or don't have when you don't take the time or not able to take the time to do an actual collection survey with a very targeted focus knowing that materials may not have been described or have been perceived as fitting a particular story. So the project goals for this were to identify and create new access points for our materials to digitize materials and create a collection site for them and to provide tools for future description of these materials and discovery. So the takeaways from this or the stats around this one for completion were that we digitized over a thousand items including entire archival collections hundreds of bound pamphlets books manuscripts and broadsides we also cataloged over 200 items that had been our collection for at least some of them 150 years and primarily bound pamphlets that were purchased new in the mid 19th century and donated to the university and then over four entire archival collections that had edited and updated language in their description that we did as part of this workflow as opposed to some other workflows we have that have different structures so kind of quicker editing on the go. To give a little breakdown of this over 2000 items I broke down some of the formats so we provided new access points for these materials by having the local team create a data set that broke down sort of formats and genres with a controlled vocabulary that was created by the team that is not necessarily tied to our cataloging site standards but invited our librarians at Houghton that worked on this project to think like digital humanists and to think of our collection as sort of a data set that they could help define so predominantly institutional papers government papers the papers of organizations but also quite a lot of pamphlets personal papers broadsides and publications which we call we covered most fiction and non-fiction bound published books. So for the project accomplishments this took over a year during the height well I don't know how the stats work but during the period of the pandemic where most of our colleagues were working from home which is not necessarily the case now but it provided us with a proven example for reviewing our own hidden collections so it really answered and turned on its head the perception that we hadn't collected these in this area especially since what we discovered with a lot of these bound pamphlets was that not only had they been collected at the time they were created but they had been collected by some of our more prestigious Harvard alumni who at the time were abolitionists or at a minimum sort of liberal sympathizers towards the idea of African-American citizenship. It also provided which I'll talk about a little bit more examples for us to allow students to take interpretive roles both giving students authority which we felt very happy to do after the process that I'll explain in a little bit and also allowing us to step away from the excuse that we didn't have any subject area expertise on staff and also providing examples for public focused educational engagement really challenging our library as a private institution to think about how creating access online means that we can open our materials up to different groups that maybe cannot access our library either for practical or for more sort of intellectual emotional reasons so to give those things a little more detail with our colleagues working remotely from dominantly we were able to design collaboration between on-site workers and remote workers to catalog these hundreds of materials sitting on shelves I came back to work much earlier than many colleagues because of some of the projects that I managed and their responsiveness to remote scholars and I took a lot of time to go through our materials identify uncatalog materials and take photos on my phone of the title page and back of title page and last page and cover of pamphlets and set them up in an organizational structure on a shared drive that one of our catalogers who was working at home could then access and create sort of bare minimum stub records because a lot of these materials were already published they were not necessarily the only known example of it so we could have a copy cataloger really go through that work which became a great project for her and also sort of gave us an example of how we could expand our search for materials we had that needed to be cataloging without thinking that limited cataloger time needed to be spent for creating new records across the board it also invited us which is very difficult for a place like Harvard I don't know what the equivalents are elsewhere but you know the most prestigious thinking of your institutions to know our own limits we invited for the interpretive material on the website student historians to create interpretive essays that would be illustrated by digitized materials from our collection on different chronological errors represented in the collections and then one student wrote a little more thematically but we created a professional competitive process for students to apply to write interpretive essays in collaboration with staff for a reasonable but I think healthy payment but we mirrored their writing process on writing processes that people on staff myself included had done for different types of digital storytelling medium I think I mirrored quite closely the Adam Matthews essays format for when I have published for them so the students could both have a professional sort of writing experience that allowed them to add to their CVs but also we were able to pull both undergrads through postdoctoral students who had so much subject area expertise in different time periods that we just didn't have and then also to be able to invite educational professionals to create a middle grade primary resource learning unit in collaboration with this local consultant to respond to regional needs there are so many things we learned from working with that consultant that I hope will influence work moving forward about the educational system in the area surrounding Harvard and particularly the school system for children that are not in the most well resourced or supported schools what they may or may not be learning at school what are requirements for learning so we can provide things that can help fill in those gaps publicly and for free so that teachers can potentially use those in their classrooms there are a lot of project takeaways from this and a lot more that could be said about this project but these are the ones that I think are most broad across the board again going back to challenging colleagues something that came in this project from the initial stages working with a project team at Houghton Library was focusing on education I already had some experience and knowledge doing this type of work but it was really important to me to decentralize that knowledge so we also had ongoing discussions with that project team recommended readings we had a private chat channel where they could talk to each other about decisions they were making in description or questions they had about materials articles were shared back and forth and now I would say the colleagues that are there that did that work would both be fantastic because one of them had left the position but two of the colleagues that remained would be fantastic for reference on these materials for identifying these materials that weren't part of this project because of their focus and dedication and those my colleagues are Micah Hoggart and Christine Jacobson and then looking beyond our catalog so imagining access for different users with different needs the data set we and we developed internally we also then put on the site for researchers who wanted to do more specific types of searching so for example that data set had geographic note fields and specific date fields so that if a user wanted to sort of organize things by location they could do so so you know for example the majority of the materials were from the United States but there were a good deal of abolitionist materials from um England Wales and Scotland and so if people only wanted to look at to those they could find them and some of our more unique materials so we wanted to sort of open that up to advanced researchers and at the same time include those sort of interpretive essays for researchers who maybe don't know what to do and present it with 2 000 digital objects we also wanted to try transparency so something that came up a lot was the idea of like well we may have these materials but we don't have as many materials that are written by African Americans and that was true the majority of the materials in this collection are not the creative work of black people but they are part of black history because they are pieces that contribute to the understanding the political citizenship rights the you know arguments going around about black people so it's all part and parcel of this picture but it was also important for us to be able to be transparent and to have section on the site about why that is and the choices that our university made to have that be the case in the present and then really again going back to what we said in the first one again trusting those outside experts reaching out to the experts and letting them lead with authority not sort of putting our vision and that was especially true with the student writings it was one of the questions they had because they were all very professional was what voice we wanted them to use and having read their writing samples and saw that they all had very different styles we wanted them to speak with their own voices and part of the reason for that was a acknowledgement from the get go that we were not going to nor was it really our job to provide a comprehensive understanding of black history throughout all time but also to let them shine as writers and hopefully to open up the possibility for future contributions in other areas that can have their own voices so thank you all for attending and for listening if you need to if you would like to reach out or if you need to but if you want to reach out you can email me at Dorothy Judith Berry at gmail.com and I look forward to hearing your questions and learning more thanks Dorothy thank you so much I feel you should hear us all clapping in the background you're going to have to imagine that kind of virtual applause but it was lovely seeing the chat come through and also kind of healthy a lot of questions to get us started so I'd like to say just a thank you to begin with just for an absolutely fantastic start to this program I mean I absolutely love the kind of creativity and expansiveness of your approach to getting the many voices including those student historians into the frame to both challenge how we approach materials but also broaden the voices we hear and the perspectives that we would normally hear through existing cataloging techniques and also the way in which you speak so openly about the need to break down what may seem like an overwhelming task and it being overwhelming therefore we just never get started never do something and instead you've given us some practical tactical and also strategic kind of entry points to conversation through those excellent case studies and if you can see the chat you will see a myriad of hands coming together to say thank you for which which many and indeed while you're talking a kind of can we make sure we can see this afterwards we want to carry on learning from what we're hearing so I'm going to um there will be other questions that come in I want to start with three question areas if I may I'm going to first explore a bit about use and impact of the work in terms of kind of the materials and the the the the the publishing of a greater quantity of descriptions to provide entry points thank you for a little bit about process I think people are really interested in that kind of question as archivists as curators how do we break the task down how do we get started and then a little bit about strategies so I'm going to come first if I may Dorothy to a question from Patricia Dragon she's asked have you noticed increased usage of the materials or have the collection owners noticed increased use of the material since those descriptions were enhanced and I think there might be kind of a couple of follow-up bits that depending on where you want to take that so what's interesting about the minstrel sea material is that it was high use already so this was that one was sort of more of a thinking and this is harder for to test and of course I'm not there anymore but it would be even harder to use a research on but thinking about the experience of people that were doing that research because what I heard anecdotally from various researchers was that they needed to do this research because it was part of their you know academic process or part of what they needed for writing but it was still made them have negative feelings and I think that that was something that was very difficult to express perhaps the administration this idea that people may access our materials and feel like we do a bad job at it but still think also we did a good job at getting them those materials and there's to a certain extent you know you can't really count for people's feelings and side talk and of course you know we're allowed to talk about institutions and should and say they could do better but so part of the drive for me was the sort of thinking of what are the things that we don't hear from people but that we could do to improve their attitude around access and then going to Brown and hearing the student that was very backed that idea up for me because she uh isn't a undergrad so she would have been I don't know 18 or 19 she was the earliest student and she didn't really know about this as a thing that was popular at all so for her was just like why would we even have this what is going on here and so to me that sort of idea of just pushing that clarity through for someone like a student like that who might just see it and think oh well of course my university is old and racist and I'm just going to keep going kind of providing access that way or changing it so I don't have any user research on that for the digitized materials and that collection we did get a lot more usage um when I left it was our most um access digital collection page and we got really positive feedback as well from both from scholars who were saying you know we're putting this in my syllabus especially for a lot of because we did a high quality scans a lot of things that maybe had been available and sort of the grayscale quick scanning people were saying great I teach about this famous document great I can put it in my class now or things like um a couple of things we digitized more than one version of so I did David Walker's appeal we had three editions or um the Grona saw first black slave narrative published in Britain we had both an English language version and a Welsh language version and so we digitized both of those again thinking that is a very sort of specific idea of if someone's teaching this maybe they want to put this in but then we also got some from high school instructors who were saying this is really accessible to me and there's no paywall so I can tell my students to go access this so those are of course more anecdotal than stats wise but I do think we could say there was an increased use they're great examples and and um I think also you know we're all looking aren't we for what is the impact of what we choose to digitize and and you know and how does that reach to audiences which would be on the academy it's actually fantastic to hear those examples and I wonder if I could just sort of explore a little bit further that question of use and its impact on curriculum because it's such a kind of fascinating conversation you know topic isn't it you know how when we make when we release materials that it can enter into quite a border use so you seeing curriculum change happen around the ability to discover or is that the catalyst for actually doing the work in the first place I think for me it's more the catalyst because I was learning more about different professors at different universities doing this type of work on early black publishing and traveling around and doing all to find the materials to bring to their classes and knowing that we had the possibility to become leading provider in that area which didn't require us at that moment to necessarily buy anything new yeah and I think a lot of times it's that sort of strategy of presentation can be and combined with outreach can be as powerful as bringing in new things yeah I thought that was brilliantly described around it's it's very easy to just using a word that a colleague used on Friday at a simple research symposium get to eyes our collections this is Korean this is Chinese this is something else you know and actually looking for where those intersections are which are always richer deeper and more varied than perhaps in existing practices we kind of allow for and how we reach things and just on the kind of use as well then I'm going to move into process and there's loads of questions it's a question actually from David Prosser who's on the RUK team and he's he's I'm going to it's a really really important question you've hinted at the emotional toll that can be involved in cataloging and accessing challenging in this case racist inflammatory racist and racially inflammatory materials do we as a sector from your experience provides efficient emotional support or space to that emotional journey for those engaging in this work I think that generally we don't I think that support is difficult because it's not something people are really trained to do I think space we could do more of but also even I have been in scenarios where I've seen there be sort of an assumption that well we are not almost allowed to have feelings about this and not necessarily with the racist material but I've seen that with material around sexuality and sexual violence or pornography and you know sort of well of course you just have to process that we're all adults here but people have various lived experiences that could make different collections pretty upsetting and if there's not a defined structure for being able to I don't know pass on a project or take more time on a project it makes some people in a pretty vulnerable position to have to say I'm uncomfortable with this which makes can make people feel like they're being unprofessional or like they're not you know doing their job properly so I think space and acknowledgement are really important and then but yeah I would say across the board I think that we don't provide support and space for it and perhaps because that's not a thing anybody gets trained on how to do yeah it's interesting we're going to talk about processing it but we're actually talking about our own process or our emotional process anyways we kind of move through this and I I'd like to think this side of the pandemic we are more human organizations but we know we've got an awfully long way to go but certainly I don't think any of us think we can be successful leaders in the spaces that we run and as we're providing a more humanized experience and so I think that's a really really great question from David and response from Dorothy for all the people who are can help to make this a better journey on the call a great takeaway can I just again just for the process you mentioned that kind of question of kind of content warnings some are called trigger warnings also a hot topic which seems to in the UK context kind of grab the press and excite them beyond any reasonable interest in the the fundamental ethical academic questions that we're looking at you sounded like you were I don't really recommend it or just trying different approaches to that through the I think that for me and I haven't seen them done very well a lot of the time and so for this many of the collections I've worked with I have not leaned towards them but I've also seen some implementations where I think they make a lot of sense and work well so I tend to say I'm not in favor of them unless it's really audience serving and I think that that requires more work than a lot of places put in I saw that some colleagues at the bina key at Yale have a new thing they're coming out with about how they're doing it it's probably I knowing their work it's probably very good and maybe they'll change that you know they might have some examples or thinking of colleagues like in New Zealand and things with certain ways of presenting materials related to Aboriginal people that are responsive to belief systems and cultural norms those are also fantastic I think a lot of times what I have been against is when I see warnings that feel like they are more about the emotions of the describer than the possibilities for the patron so I've seen some that are like this is so upsetting and offensive yeah to paraphrase but that sort of thing I feel like well I don't I don't want to tell someone that they need to be upset but I do want them to know what they're getting into and then you have the plain language the description here while you've got an entry point to try and find out more before you and I think with sort of blackface it's easier because we're all yeah we're generally all in agreement we don't like this anymore there are other things though that I can imagine perhaps you do want to put a content warning for because you don't we're there's not a shared value judgment amazing food for thought Dorothy and I kind of want to keep digging into some of that because I love that kind of bringing in the user experience and how that's shaping practice and with that I'm going to begin to come on to process I've learned a new term in this my thanks to me just getting about David Magier from Princeton University who introduced this term MPLP which you probably know about but you know it was news to me more product less process am I getting that right thank you apparently an archivist term so I've learned something and David asked can you imagine scenarios researchers where the focus on patrons not librarians might actually mean more work to create appropriate levels of discovery to enable their research can focus on patrons in some cases mean the opposite of more product less process absolutely so more product less process as a as a tool to help us get through backlogs is very useful and makes sense in many ways and is not the same or is not useful to me for work that requires more detail and I've had this back and forth people that love MPLP and they will always say well it's not being implemented correctly if you're not doing detail work so I think to me what's difficult is that you end up sometimes with administrators who will say like oh do more of this detail work that is diverse and focuses on users and at the same time keep up the speed and quantity of this more minimal processing and those both cannot live together I yeah that's the difficulty is that I think from that you know person in technical services it feels like what are you at like I can't I don't tell this to people in charge of me because they'll just say great let's do it and I'll still have to do these you know quotas but yeah by its nature doing the work that is more responsive and that takes more research on our part will take more time yeah which is not a reason for not doing it that way just really is part of the debate isn't it and I actually you know picking up on that and kind of there's a few process questions to come to kind of one of the kind of questions is around you know what have been the reactions because that you're moving kind of user focus is a shift perhaps from curatorial choice and I'm you know the question is really kind of what encounters have you had in that space it's just been an open door or has there been you know you're having to storytell advocate make the case as you go through I would say I'm very strategic about these choices um and there are some things that are hard for people to say they don't support regardless of how they feel about it due to the politics that we live under yeah I try to be strategic about those choices you know so I mean I think there are people who have felt that I spent too much time and attention was being spent on some of the things that I have pushed and I in my head I think well I would love it if you would have come along board well I can tell you don't need you from the questions in the comments you've got lots of advocates here and loads of takeaways I'm going to dig a little bit on some of those process questions a question from Rebecca Slatcher what methods used for searching a catalog I guess if there is a catalog for hidden materials especially if they do not have cataloging standards attacks or systematic searching or other sure so what I tend to do and I think I detailed this more in a thing called in a case study I wrote for this project called design for diversity design I think for diversity so that was at northeastern there's more detail somebody wants to really dig into that but what I tend to do is create um sort of a bag of search terms on my own based on what I know of what I'm searching so for something like these hidden materials that we were looking for for the digitizing the big digitization project I had a list of historical terms used for black people both offensive and just outdated because I tried to think what might be in the title and what might be in a short description like you're saying like the question is asking assuming no subject headings assuming no other info so things like that um terms that we know are popular use like abolition uh manumission all these sorts of things like that and then from the records I'm finding learning new terms and adding them to the end of the list and then at the same point for that you know there did come a point where I did the thing of very so finding a bunch of things in one call number range and then seeing that entire call number range yeah um like not as much as uh probably lots of places in uh England and Scotland and Wales and the rest of the UK but Harvard is a pretty old old university for America um and so a lot of times the call number ranges and things like that were never created at the library work they were created at a different library 100 years ago so it was not as you know some of it did take that practical work but I like to sort of come up with that strategy and the same for the minstrelsy come up with a list of terms that I know are part of that genre or that topic search those through and then see what else you're finding I mean in many ways this is how we teach our students isn't it you've got to think naturally you you know the contemporary terms are not necessarily going to want to be fine so you've got to be imaginative creative and read through some of the subject backgrounds get a get a sense of what is contemporary at the time uh the people are using so um but um you know it also also means that that serendipity discovery uh uncomfortable things next one to uncomfortable things kind of comes before there's quite a few questions in this kind of area so I'm guessing that some of them will have picked up from what Dorothy's just said some angles on that but there's one from Alice Cleaver which is um at a slight angle so let's see if that prompts anything different um Alice says we're thinking of doing an audit of our collection to determine representation of authors of color do you have any advice about how to approach that kind of audit activity with a new lens on an existing collection so I did a little bit of that not at a full scale um for but I started small and of course I had the narrow focus on African American authors which did get a little extended to other diasporic but what I did for that was call on the work of experts like I keep saying going to outside experts and look at other projects that had existed around um bibliography of early black American writing um there's a project at Kansas University called the Black Books Project and I think they trace every novel published by a black person in the US forever and you're really just going through those names because there's on the one hand there are famous people that it's like at least let us know what things we have of the people someone would obviously come and ask and then there were secondary where it ended up for me in this situation saying oh we've got some pretty rare ones that none of us have heard of but maybe we should start bragging on these maybe these are interesting rare materials that we don't even know but now I'm seeing earliest black something something sci-fi novel or something great and it just was there I'm guessing um I mean we're very aware that in the US uh the large consortia across universities which are often kind of creating uh kind of shared wealth of collections and shared discovery are some of these kind of thematic ways of looking material happening across institutions because you could get such a fantastic dataset from yeah I don't know of it happening at big scale because it's just so much work I don't know who has um who's doing that right now I know that Yale is hiring and Wreckers Yale and Wreckers have a collaboration with this faculty project called the Black Bibliography Project and they're currently hiring special well actually I love this they're hiring an archivist who is a permanent employee but that the first three years will be project on this so the amazing thing of not hiring a contract person but just having a project be the beginning of their permanent job but so they may be looking into that but I don't know of other work that's really at that scale and or or and also to be fair it could be happening in a subject area that I'm not as familiar with yeah well it's also to remind you of how much work there is ahead of us yeah across the piece because this was also the work I did was only at Houghton Harvard has huge other collections indeed I didn't even get to touch well you shared a tremendous amount with us I mean we we're just going to dig into a few more um a couple of um Erika I hope you you feel the your question about African-American primary sources has partly been picked up by Dorothy um already it's a couple of questions on um are there any publications that go into further um further detail about work from process that might be recommended this is asking specifically about the second case but I think it's more broadly people are asking for where do I look to get further information and guidance that I can share with my teams I will say I don't necessarily know I'm going to say look up Dorothy Berry in all your publications yeah I mean if not if that's if anything that's more about like I don't know my laziness then knowing something else that that was my own work although I will say now that I've said that my colleague um what is her last name first name is Sophia but um at LSU Louisiana State University has a piece called um anti-racist digitization selection criteria and that's about the work they did at their university to select material for digital collect projects ongoing and how they added um sort of a weighing factor that had to do with um diversifying what they digitized or just something that I also mirrored based on that work of sort of um not saying this is the only reason we might digitize something but having these weighing factors and I didn't just do race I sort of opened it up but allowing whoever submitted to sort of provide a justification yeah I mean you have to make choices when you're spending yeah and sometimes it's just preservation is key or this is a very important topic that everybody's researching this year it's an anniversary and it has nothing to do with anything yeah it's just still important but the weighing I'm going to come in with just a couple of final questions I know we're really pushing you for all the information we can get with that's just the kind of excitement that your your talk has generated um there's one about um thanking you um uh Resitza Atanosova uh thanking you for the great case studies um and asking whether there's been what kind of training staff who participate in the budget she's particularly referencing Houghton Houghton Project I guess they're you know any training that's gone in um to help make this a good experience for people so one thing yes so for the project that was the Blackface Ministry I did predominantly on my own on the research and then my colleague Betz Koch who did the technical work because she is an amazing processing archivist I could never do what she does uh we worked very closely together and she had previously worked on this material before there was any sort of descriptive review and so she was on board to that she was both sort of anored to the material in a certain way but also very aware of its shortcomings um and so that was positive we didn't really need a lot extra on that and then for the slavery abolition project with the digitization that we had um readings and then it was like Highto's like I said height of pandemic sort of awareness at least and I realized that actually everyone was much too overwhelmed with just life and work to do readings so I stopped we stopped having to have assigned readings because I just didn't want everyone to feel like they were suffering but then sort of shared more video interviews or relevant material and I think that because I had selected colleagues who I felt like at least were um intellectually sympathetic to this work they also would then sort of be coming in with I read this thing or even just I saw this thread on Twitter about some history aspect that's interesting to me and I did provide them some um readings that were just in a shared folder of if you want to if this is helpful go ahead but really within awareness that this work can be very overwhelming for people and it was a time when we were all at you know different heights of emotional um states and so I didn't want everyone to feel overwhelmed and upset yeah I'll absolutely understand that final question really is from Jeremy Floyd um we're going to run out of time for the question so I'm going to do this one's the last one he'd love to hear your thoughts on the types of projects and the relative benefits I suppose or interaction of types of projects undertaking with student temporary staff I guess peer to peer kind of grassroots kind of bubbling up versus more structural systematic change in descriptive practice and does one thing help or hinder or do they sort of all add to the overall kind of benefit I think that permanent staffing is best and I think that this work needs to be integrated into your permanent staffing like we were saying earlier with sort of minimal processing which someone pointed out the good point said if it's not processed at all then no one can access it so that minimal processing the other types of thing the more complicated detail work but I think that that needs to be integrated into ongoing work and it needs to be part of permanent staffing we can't just bring people in and say okay we want to look at queer collections we'll hire one queer person but only for a year and that's not how any of us think of what we're doing but that lens that leads to people having at the end of the day you know a very unsteady work lines and so we're in many ways promoting that marginalization by continuing that I think for students one thing that we I mentioned a little bit but I was very important to be that our student workers were paid and were treated as student workers because we were using their expertise and they had to submit you know resumes and writing samples to show that they could do this work so I think that there are benefits in having students and temporary workers maybe maybe grad students in library science or something but my preference and my hope is that we would always be moving towards you know permanent jobs unionized jobs steady employment and that this becomes part of everyday work not special things I mentioned were special projects that truly only happened because I was there and I said I will do so much extra work because this is important to me and I have I don't know sometimes too many little mice in the wheels running around in my brain but it should be regular work that is part of the you know ongoing work and maybe it's not all as exciting or great for public presentation but could just be this is our world the same as we put a ton of time into processing certain collections let's say that this collection that is not as sparkly or comes with the donor agreement that gives us a little extra cash is also important because of the material and we're going to dedicate time to it as well that is a fantastic point to end and to thank you on my really do apologize to people I know I've missed some questions in chat in the Q&A but we only had so much time that we could squeeze out a Dorothy for an incredible and I do hope you get to see the sum of the checks it's really fantastic Dorothy I think that's a fantastic call to action to really ask us to be looking for the permanent jobs the integration into into our establishments how this work becomes normalized it becomes familiar and indeed how those skills that you described stop being at the margins but are actually part of the core activity and the core profile of who we are and what we do