SUBSCRIBE
SUBSCRIBE
EXPLORE +
  • About infoDOCKET
  • Academic Libraries on LJ
  • Research on LJ
  • News on LJ
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Libraries
    • Academic Libraries
    • Government Libraries
    • National Libraries
    • Public Libraries
  • Companies (Publishers/Vendors)
    • EBSCO
    • Elsevier
    • Ex Libris
    • Frontiers
    • Gale
    • PLOS
    • Scholastic
  • New Resources
    • Dashboards
    • Data Files
    • Digital Collections
    • Digital Preservation
    • Interactive Tools
    • Maps
    • Other
    • Podcasts
    • Productivity
  • New Research
    • Conference Presentations
    • Journal Articles
    • Lecture
    • New Issue
    • Reports
  • Topics
    • Archives & Special Collections
    • Associations & Organizations
    • Awards
    • Funding
    • Interviews
    • Jobs
    • Management & Leadership
    • News
    • Patrons & Users
    • Preservation
    • Profiles
    • Publishing
    • Roundup
    • Scholarly Communications
      • Open Access

June 6, 2022 by Gary Price

UNC University Libraries Publishes Guide to Conscious Editing for Finding Aids and Catalog Records

June 6, 2022 by Gary Price

From UNC Libraries:

The University Libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has released its Guide to Conscious Editing at Wilson Special Collections Library.

The guide compiles practices that staff at the Wilson Special Collections Library have refined as they update, edit and create new archival finding aids. Finding aids are documents that describe the contents of archival collections. They help researchers identify materials of potential interest.

“Conscious editing is an ethos of care that we are using when we write about materials in the Library,” said archivist Dawne Lucas, who contributed to and helped finalize the guide. “It’s a way to be inclusive and make sure that collections are available and approachable to everyone – not just established scholars, but also students, genealogists and members of the community.”

Specialists at UNC-Chapel Hill have been building, organizing and describing archival collections for more than a century. Lucas said finding aids written in the past sometimes contain language that may be offensive or demeaning, or that can mislead researchers.

“Some of that language might be blatant racial slurs, or language that would today be considered insulting to groups of people,” said Lucas. “It might be an omission of information. For example, we have finding aids that went on at length about the accomplishments of a white family, but never acknowledged the people they enslaved.”

Updating this kind of language is “respectful, mindful and empowering,” said Maria R. Estorino, now interim vice provost for University libraries, in a 2021 story about conscious editing. It also ensures that researchers will have a better chance of finding information about individuals and groups whose voices have been historically marginalized, such Black communities, Indigenous people and some women.

Knowing that other archives and libraries frequently grapple with similar issues, the specialists at Wilson Library decided to share their work for others to learn from. “This was an effort to put forward our recommendations for best practices,” said Lucas.

Through 15 articles and more than 150 pages, the guide details the description decisions that archival and library specialists at UNC-Chapel Hill have made. It provides the rationale and context for each, along with before-and-after examples of legacy descriptions and edited language. It also indicates how the University Libraries is beginning to apply conscious editing principles to catalog records for books and other published materials.

Among topics that the guide includes are addressing racist language, rectifying misrepresentations of people of color, updating ableist language, centering the experiences of Indigenous peoples and differentiating the identity of a woman from that of her husband.

“As a state institution, we are deeply invested in making our collections available and accessible to everyone, and to being inclusive and accurate in our descriptions,” said Lucas. “We’re trying to do a better job so that people can see that the materials here represent everyone and are available to everyone.

Direct to Full Text: A Guide to Conscious Editing at Wilson Special Collections Library
168 pages; PDF.

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Libraries, News

SHARE:

About Gary Price

Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.

ADVERTISEMENT

Archives

Job Zone

ADVERTISEMENT

Recent Articles on LJ

Proud Boys Disrupt Drag Queen Story Time at San Lorenzo Library

Certified Sustainable | Sustainability

Dartmouth Repatriates Samson Occom Papers to Mohegan Tribe

There Are No Lanes: Rural Libraries Do It ALL | Backtalk

Prince George’s County Memorial Library System Targeted by Anti-LGBTQIA+ Vandalism

ADVERTISEMENT

Related Infodocket Posts

ACLU: "It’s 2022 and Two Books Are on Trial for 'Obscenity'"

From the ACLU: …last month, a Virginia resident initiated obscenity proceedings against two acclaimed books: Gender Queer, a Memoir, by Maia Kobabe, an autobiographical graphic novel that depicts the author’s ...

U.S. Patent Research: USPTO Announces Patent Center to Fully Replace Legacy Public PAIR System This Summer

From the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office: Beginning August 1, 2022, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) Patent Center system—available to the public since 2017—will fully replace the legacy ...

Roundup (June 29, 2022)

CORE: Our Commitment to The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure Elsevier’s Acquisition of Interfolio: Risks and Responses GPO to Discontinue Assigning Library of Congress Classification Numbers in Records for Hearings ...

Nat Geo Report: "The Great Hunt for the World's First LGBTQ Archive"

From National Geographic: In the early 1990s, a Canadian student named Adam Smith opened a dumpster in the basement of his apartment building in Vancouver, Canada, and discovered a stack ...

2022 Google Scholar Metrics Released

From the Google Scholar Blog: Scholar Metrics provide an easy way for authors to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of rec. This release covers articles published in 2017–2021 and ...

New Video Recording From Rare Book School: "Making and Reading Indigenous Archives"

The Rare Book School (U. of Virginia) video embedded below (a National Endowment for the Humanities-Global Book Histories Initiative Lecture by Kelly Wisecup) was recorded on June 15, 2022. From ...

Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to Become a Public-Interest Non-Profit Organization

From a W3C Release: The World Wide Web Consortium is set to pursue 501(c)(3) non-profit status. The launch as a new legal entity in January 2023 preserves the core mission ...

Julie Mosbo Ballestro Appointed University Librarian at Texas A&M University

Full Text of a Texas A&M University Libraries Announcement: We are pleased to announce the appointment of Julie Mosbo Ballestro as University Librarian and Assistant Provost of University Libraries at ...

New Report From EBLIDA: "First European Overview on E-Lending in Public Libraries"

From an EBLIDA (European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations) Post: EBLIDA is laying the foundation for “sustainable copyright” in public libraries through the publication of the “First European ...

New Funding: Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Awarded $850,000 by Mellon Foundation to Support the Advancement of...

From a DPLA Announcement: Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is pleased to announce an $850,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support its effort to advance racial justice in ...

New From COPIM: "WP7 Scoping Report on Archiving and Preserving OA Monographs"

From the Report: Technical methods for effectively archiving complex digital research publications and for creating an integrated collections of content in different formats have not yet been developed. As part ...

Roundup (June 27, 2022)

Coherent Digital Launches South Asia Archive on the Coherent Commons Platform The Longest-Running Queer News Radio Show Is Headed to the Library of Congress (via NPR) University of Cambridge Now ...

ADVERTISEMENT

FOLLOW INFODOCKET ON TWITTER

Tweets by @infodocket

ADVERTISEMENT

This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

Primary Sidebar

  • News
  • Reviews+
  • Technology
  • Programs+
  • Design
  • Leadership
  • People
  • COVID-19
  • Advocacy
  • Opinion
  • INFOdocket
  • Job Zone

Reviews+

  • Booklists
  • Prepub Alert
  • Book Pulse
  • Media
  • Readers' Advisory
  • Self-Published Books
  • Review Submissions
  • Review for LJ

Awards

  • Library of the Year
  • Librarian of the Year
  • Movers & Shakers 2022
  • Paralibrarian of the Year
  • Best Small Library
  • Marketer of the Year
  • All Awards Guidelines
  • Community Impact Prize

Resources

  • LJ Index/Star Libraries
  • Research
  • White Papers / Case Studies

Events & PD

  • Online Courses
  • In-Person Events
  • Virtual Events
  • Webcasts
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Advertise
  • Subscribe
  • Media Inquiries
  • Newsletter Sign Up
  • Submit Features/News
  • Data Privacy
  • Terms of Use
  • Terms of Sale
  • FAQs
  • Careers at MSI


© 2022 Library Journal. All rights reserved.


© 2022 Library Journal. All rights reserved.