For library and archives professionals interested in doing similar work, we encourage you to read more on race and racism in archival collection descriptions. The list of resources below is intended as a starting point, and is not comprehensive.

• Society of American Archivists Inclusive Description Resources List

• Archives for Black Lives (A4BLiP) and Antracoli, Alexis A., Annalise Berdini, Kelly Bolding, Faith Charlton, Amanda Ferrara, Valencia Johnson, and Katy Rawdon. “Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia: Anti-Racist Description Resources.” October 2020.

• Guidelines for Addressing Bias in Archival Description and Catalog Records, Orbis Cascade Alliance, Unique and Local Content Program

• Maturity Model for Reparative Description ~ for more about this model and the larger trends of this study, see the article “Instituting a Framework for Reparative Description,” published in Archival Science (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-024-09435-z).

• Best Practices for Queer Metadata supported by the Queer Metadata Collective, which builds on the work done by the Trans Metadata Collective which produced the Metadata Best Practices for Trans and Gender Diverse Resources.

• DEIA Instructional Resource: RBMS’s Instruction and Outreach Committee’s Outreach Toolkit Subcommittee’s Ethically Teaching Primary Sources that Reflect Histories of Violence, Hate, and Oppression

• Dominique Luster, “Archives Have the Power to Boost Marginalized Voices,” TEDxPittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, June 2018

• Sam Winn, “The Hubris of Neutrality in Archives,” Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference, Newark, NJ, April 2017

• Michelle Caswell, “Teaching to Dismantle White Supremacy in Archives,” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 87, no. 3, July 2017. 

• Protocols for Native American Archives

• A Progressive's Style Guide

• Curated Resources on Diversity, Inclusion, Accessibility and Equity for Libraries

• Caswell, Michelle, and Marika Cifor. 2016. “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives,” Archivaria 81 (May), 23-43.

• Japanese American Citizens League, “Power of Words Handbook: A Guide to Language about Japanese Americans in World War II,” revised December 2020.

• Guiding Principles for Reparative Description at NARA

• Reimagine Descriptive Workflows: A Community-informed Agenda for Reparative and Inclusive Descriptive Practice by Rachel L. Frick and Merrilee Proffitt, OCLC Research April 2022

• The Cataloging Lab, List of statements on bias in library and archives description

• Oregon Public Broadcasting, "Dozens of Pacific Northwest places have a slur in their name. People are coming up with replacement names"

• National Archives and Records Administration, Reparative Description Preferred Terms

• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries, Wilson Special Collections Library, A Guide to Conscious Editing at Wilson Special Collections Library

• South Carolina Department of Archives and History, African American Genealogical Research

SCARC staff engaged in collection description practices are accountable to the American Library Association Code of Ethics, Association of College & Research Libraries / Rare Books and Manuscripts Section Code of Ethics for Special Collections Librarians, and the Society of American Archivists Code of Ethics.

We gratefully acknowledge the anti-racist work undertaken by our colleagues and peers at archival repositories and heritage institutions across the United States and internationally. We drew inspiration from, and are especially indebted to, the DPLA Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection Harmful Language Statement. In some cases language, from the statements of a number of repositories listed in the List of Statements on Bias in Library and Archives Description, including:

• Emory University Rose Library, "Harmful Language in Finding Aids"

• Drexel University Libraries, "Statement on Harmful Content in Archival Collections"

• Stanford Special Collections and University Archives, "Statement on Potentially Harmful Language in Cataloging and Archival Description"

• Newberry Library, "Statement on Potentially Offensive Materials and Descriptions"

• Chicago History Museum, "Critical Cataloging"

• Brown University Library, "African American History at Brown University: Terminology"

• Morgan Library & Museum, "Statement on Critical Cataloging at the Morgan Library & Museum"

• Presbyterian Historical Society, "Digital Collection Offensive Language Policy"

• Library and Archives Canada, "Historical Language Advisory"

• Oregon Historical Society "Our Collections"