A few years have passed since we shared progress on our Culturally Competent Description (CCD) Action Campaign on this blog. In the last blog post fully devoted to CCD, we discussed adding cultural competency to the RAC processing manual and creating an internal Description Concern Form for staff to identify files or collections that need reparative description in addition to other types of issues (inaccurate information, empty folders, etc.). Now that we are five years into this work, the challenge has been maintaining momentum on long-term projects, starting new projects, ensuring that new staff members feel connected to CCD, and balancing CCD with other processing projects. We have tried to mitigate these challenges by working with staff members across the institution and RAC interns, working on archival Description Concern form submissions by staff, and integrating CCD into our day-to-day processing projects as needed.
Description Concern form submissions
The Description Concern form has been invaluable for the Processing team in finding opportunities for reparative description. While the Processing team takes ownership of the CCD campaign, we currently do not have the capacity to audit all of our collections for description that needs updating. Other teams, particularly members of the Access team, are more likely to come across problematic description and have been incredibly helpful in filling out the form as needed. Since we implemented the Description Concern form in 2022, we have completed 69 tasks.
Subject Term Evaluation Project
Beginning in summer 2022 through fall 2024, with the assistance of RAC interns Binta Diarra and Laura Sanchez, we worked to reevaluate problematic subject terms applied at the collection- and file-level. We compiled a list of problematic subject terms and then provided guidance to the interns who researched and identified alternatives. We provided the interns with a list of resources, including information about bias in Library of Congress Subject Headings, articles documenting inclusive description case studies involving subjects, the Homosaurus international linked data vocabulary of LGBTQ terms, and style guides for writing about people with disabilities. After the interns’ work was complete, the processing team reviewed and discussed the potential changes. To make the changes, we either edited the subject name to retain existing links, deleted and replaced a subject name, merged a subject record into a more appropriate subject, or added additional subject records to complement a subject that may be problematic or not wholly representative. We still have more work to do, but it was rewarding to check off this initial list of subjects that was a goal for us from the establishment of our CCD work.
Married Women’s Names Project
Beginning in January 2025, we started working with Tyler Perry on the Access team on a project to identify women who are not named within the RAC’s archival description or are only identified by their husbands’ names. We created an initial list of 246 instances based on searching for “Mrs.” and “wife” in our collections. Tyler looks for women’s names in the collection and other sources to see if we can find their first names and then update the file titles or notes as needed. This project is ongoing but having this project front-of-mind has been helpful in current processing projects. As we process collections, we find the woman’s name as part of the processing workflow.
Outreach
Since that 2022 blog post, we have had two opportunities to reflect on the CCD Education Campaign and Action Campaigns. We wrote a chapter in From Interrogation to Integration: Centering Social Justice in Special Collections, Archives, and Preservation published in 2025 by ACRL. We also presented a Works in Progress Webinar called Developing and maintaining culturally conscious descriptive practices at the Rockefeller Archive Center for OCLC in January 2025.