RECORDS OF REFUGE: SUPPORTING REFUGEE COMMUNITIES’ ARCHIVAL NEEDS: The Records of Refuge project serves refugees, public librarians, archivists, records managers, community memory workers, and other individuals working with refugee communities through an investigation of best practices and protocols in the use and care of vital records upon entry into life in the United States and the creation and long-term preservation of refugees’ personal digital archives. 

OUR REFUGEE STORIES ARCHIVE: Started as a shared idea from Ana Roeschley and Sharif Jamal, ORSA is envisioned as a community-based archival resource open to all refugees in the United States. Now in its early conceptual stages, we are partnering with UNT’s Digital Libraries and Department of Information Science to create digital collections for and by refugees, as well as openly available resources on best practices for archiving personal records for personal use. 

CAMPUS ARCHIVES IN THE SHADOW OF CAMPUS SEXUAL ASSAULT: There is no clear guidance or standards for US campus archivists on how to best describe records that contain information on sexual violence. While there are well-established standards for archival description, decisions for how to best describe sensitive material are mostly left for individual archival institutions to decide. The lack of agreed-upon professional guidelines could make description decisions difficult in an environment like a college campus where attention on the topic may be taboo. However, as many campus archives’ mission statements unequivocally state, college and university archives are repositories of campus history and wider societal issues. This puts campus archives and archivists directly in the center of responsibility to document histories that are part of enduring difficult realities. Through a systematic investigation of US campus archival finding aids, this study explores how the problem of sexual violence is represented in campus archives’ holdings. Findings indicate that while campus archives do collect records on sexual violence, records related to the topic may belong to collections that are not associated with campus history, records on campus sexual assault are not always consistently described in campus archives, and discoverability of relevant records can be problematic. Study results suggest that further research on the topic and development of resources on best practices are needed to support campus archivists in this work.
 
ARCHIVALL – MSI: Currently, little is known about the resources available to MSI institutions to preserve the unique cultural artifacts of the populations that they serve. The objective of this NEH-funded project is comprehensively examine the landscape of MSI archives and special collections, using a combination of qualitative, quantitative and document-based research methods to better understand what resources are available to these departments, what resources they need and the current status of digitization efforts.