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Subsidize membership for some grassroots organizations, community archives, tribal archives, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs).
The questions of how this would be supported or sustainable was raised in the meeting. This decision would be made at the board level but these subsidized memberships would might be able to be offered within of our already existing member infrastructure and would to not cause undo stress on the community, program team and budget.
Community colleges are also under represented in archives and could be another potential type of organization to subsidize membership for.
It was noted that these kinds of memberships should be offered “without strings”
Subsidize or offer assistance with self-hosted or hosted ArchivesSpace installations for some grassroots organizations, community archives, tribal archives, HBCUs and HSIs.
It was noted in the meeting that the technological barrier for many small archives is as difficult to surmount as the need to understand archival practice/theory.
Explore an alternative business/hosting model where Lone Arrangers/low budget shops can use a cloud-based centralized database to create and host their finding aids. Maybe a free version which can enable up to 5 finding aids to be uploaded, and incrementally pay for use/storage? This way, they can focus on content and not nuts-and-bolts of maintaining the database.
- Other ideas discussed in the meeting include consortial memberships
Consider consortial membership to allow less resourced institutions to share financial and infrastructure commitments
Develop a training toolkit for grassroots organizations, community archives, and tribal archives that want to use ArchivesSpace, or those that want to help them do so.
Community generated training or documentation for smaller organizations or grass roots organizations created by larger organizations or those organizations with more resources for training and development.
Create a community wide incentive to create training for archivists so that they can help communities when help is needed. Kind of like a rapid response research team.
Regularly spotlight the work our members do in their communities. We could start with a monthly feature in our updates and on our blog/Twitter channels.
Work with organizations and groups that help others understand ethical collecting and archival description to identify best practices for using (or not using) ArchivesSpace and related barriers in the application.
Remove barriers to accessing User Documentation and provide greater diversity in the examples used in documentation.
Archival organizations continue to struggle with limited staffing, resource and money. Community lead -led initiatives to encourage antiracism and inclusion work will go a long way to advance the community’s work in general and help spur the work of individual community members. ArchivesSpace is one tool used by archivists and could partner with other archival organizations and tools that are undertaking similar work within the archival community to help the wider community.
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Convene a working group to examine unconscious bias and barriers to entry in the ArchivesSpace application, particularly related to language and privacy.
Convene a working group to develop a thesaurus or glossary and create examples of antiracist descriptive practice.
Develop a scaffolding or infrastructure to allow for redescription work or antiracist description work to be easier within ArchivesSpace
Make it easier to generate reports and exports that would facilitate redescription work.
Explicitly acknowledge in the application that there is inherent bias in the application and make it clear which who can access records and fields in ArchivesSpace and how.
Allow for versioning of all record types in ArchivesSpace to document the changes made when doing redescription work and way to provide the context for why the change was made. Context is important.
Create a mechanism to provide trigger or content warnings at both the resource and archival object level.
Provide a mechanism to allow users to submit a correction/edit to a finding aid or annotate finding aids. (Page 6 from this guide: https://archivesforblacklives.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/ardr_final.pdf )
Allow for right-to-left (RTL) scripts, ideally bi-directional text.
Eliminate coding terminology that echoes racist language such as "master" and "blacklist/whitelist".
Enable the use of Traditional Knowledge (TK) labels on indigenous cultural heritage materials. https://localcontexts.org/tk-labels/
Explore ways to better support integration with Mukurtu (https://mukurtu.org/) for those organizations using both Mukurtu and ArchivesSpace or needing to exchange data with other organizations that use one or the other.
Provide mechanisms to better support non-LCSH authority term imports.
Add fields for variant terms and a function that allows us to make the variant term the local display term when the LCSH term is deemed harmful. Something similar to the agent module working being done in ArchivesSpace.
Consider expanding the subjects module.
Provide guidance on which fields to use for disclaimers on material containing racist, sexist, and offensive language or content.
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