New Inclusive Cataloguing Blogs
The Diversity Allies have published two guest blogs in the Inclusive Cataloguing series.
The first blog is by Simon Wilson, Archives Consultant and looks at revising archival descriptions. Simon has been supporting the Revising Archival Description project for Archives Council Wales. This project is the latest in a series of initiatives across the archive sector to consider how the words and terms which appear within our finding aids do serve as a barrier to some users.
The second blog is by Chris Olver, Project Archivist, Documenting HIV/AIDS epidemic in United Kingdom, West Sussex Records Office. It looks at inclusive cataloguing in HIV/AIDS archive collections. As part of his role for the ‘Documenting the HIV/AIDS epidemic: a survey of HIV/AIDS archives in United Kingdom’ project, Chris has been collecting catalogue descriptions of records relating to HIV/AIDS. The survey has collected information from over 140 archive services, and in total has found well over 2000 separate entries of records relating to HIV/AIDS epidemic across the country. Most of the information that archive services provide on the history of HIV epidemic has been descriptive. However, much of the terminology that has been used has tended to reflect the original language of the documents or has used medical or scientific language whilst talking about the epidemic. While these descriptions are not necessarily inaccurate, the use of such language might appear alienating or potentially offensive to people affected by HIV. In this blog post, he identifies some of the problematic language in cataloguing data which I have found and where possible.
Previous Inclusive Cataloguing blogs can be viewed here.
You can find all Diversity Allies blogs on the new Diversity Allies blog page here.