PLO: 3 Analyze and engage in the changing cultural, educational and social roles and responsibilities of librarians/information professionals and the environments they work in within the global society.
SAA Core Value(s):
- Actively contribute ideas and resources to our field’s body of theoretical and practical scholarship.
- Expand access and usage opportunities for users, and potential users, of archival records.
This thesis paper addresses an inherent power differential between archivists and users which stems from archivists’ control over how collections are described and interpreted. Given the historic bias of archives which lean in favor of the thoughts and opinions of white, wealthy, able bodied, christian, straight, men, there have been quite a few silences in the record as well as unfavorable language used to document folks of marginalized identities. The concepts of fonds and provenance are pillars within the field, which allow archivists to uphold power imbalances based on a principal of “neutrality.” This paper is a critical literature review of the historic fallacy of “neutrality”; the functions of reference, access, and outreach as pillars of identity to the changing archival field, and it also surveys of a host of solutions such as collaborative metadata initiatives, community archives, and the framework of “Cultural Humility” as a means toward justice in archival description. This work features the voices of 20 different scholars within the field and asks archivists to assume the framework of Cultural Humility as they navigate the changing social roles and responsibilities to a diverse user base.
Read Here
MLIS E-Portfolio 