Revising Archival Descriptions

The Revising Archival Descriptions work was part of the Welsh Governments Anti-Racist Action Plan-funded programme, aimed at supporting cultural organisations to look at ways they could make a positive impact in this area. 

Using a testbed project that was developed between the University of Leeds Brotherton Library and The National Archives as a basis, the Welsh project worked with a number of partners from across local government and higher education to compare archive catalogue descriptions with an agreed list of offensive and biased terms. Those terms covered a range of factors such as racist, misogynist and ableist language.  By undertaking this work across multiple archive services, it was hoped the research will foster discussion and recognition that collaboration serves both archive service and service users interests. In sharing the methodology and results it is hoped that other services will undertake their own review of the language within the finding aids.

The project has demonstrated the value of collaboration and co-ordination with other archive services across Wales to review the findings from the research. Adopting similar approaches to address the issue of offensive terminology will benefit all service users.

There is more work to do, and Archives and Records Council Wales will be working with members to look at ways in which this work can be taken forward and expanded.

For more details on this project, please contact Vicky Jones: vicky.jones@llgc.org.uk