Repairing Archival Description: AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department records

Abstract

This presentation was shared at the Fighting for Freedom: Labor and Civil Rights in the American South symposium on April 4, 2024. Increasing access to the AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department records involved many people and milestones over the course of three years. Through a digitization grant partnership between the University of Maryland and Georgia State University, over 100,000 pages were made accessible beyond the reading room. This grant project consisted of selection and preparation for digitization, rights research, creation of digital repository metadata for aggregate harvesting, landing page development, and outreach. In addition, archival description was reviewed and edited as a social justice initiative as part of this grant work. This is otherwise known as “reparative description” - the remediation of language that excludes, silences, harms, or mischaracterizes marginalized people in the finding aid created by archivists to describe archival resources. This session will focus on reparative description by sharing an overview of the process and share examples of edits made in the collection finding aid and view selected digitized documents