CEPC Annual Meeting, 2023.07.13 - Best Practices in Archival Term Positions

The SAA Committee on Ethics and Professional Conduct virtual Annual Meeting featured guest speakers from the Term Labor Best Practices Working Group. Alison Clemens, Kit Messick, and Laura Starratt discussed the development and recommendations of their Best Practices for Archival Term Positions white paper. The Best Practices for Archival Term Positions engages deeply with the ethical tradeoffs inherent in staffing archives through term positions, and provides actionable recommendations for mitigating harm when a term position is unavoidable. Council’s recent approval of a new Archival Worker Labor Taskforce made this an especially timely presentation.

The Committee on Ethics and Professional Conduct 2023 Annual Meeting presentation recording is now available online. 

Guest speakers write:

As explained in the executive summary of the Best Practices for Archival Term Positions, we have to acknowledge that “term positions can be an inevitable aspect of carrying out cultural heritage work,” but, based on personal experiences and research-based data, these positions have detrimental effects on archival employees and sustainable and holistic stewardship of archival collections. Members of the Best Practices for Archival Term Positions working group will discuss the initial creation of the working group and the research and considerations behind the Best Practices for Archival Term Positions as well as its recommendations on how to curb the harmful effects common to term positions. 

In addition, members of the working group will talk about the push for The Practices’ adoption by professional organizations, a CLIR-funded survey and published report, and continued promotion of The Practices to ensure these guidelines are adopted by GLAM professional organizations and actively used by administrators, hiring managers, and supervisors when planning for and employing archival term positions.