2024 Annual Section Meeting Round-up

If you missed the annual section meeting on July 24, catch-up with the chair’s report slides, minutes, and presenters’ slides from our program on reparative description of institutional records. Full Winter 2024 survey results are also online.

The meeting featured presentations about steps archivists at three museums are taking to implement reparative description practices on institutional records. Though the principles discussed in articles and conference presentations apply to and inform reparative description of institutional records, specific examples and practices are often not included in literature and conference presentations on the topic. The presenters will shared policies, practices, and examples.

Hillary Bober, Archivist, and Zoe Heinsohn, Assistant Archivist at the Dallas Museum of Art, discussed the reparative description activities undertaken in their archive. Beginning with a collection description audit through development of guidelines and iterative application, they shared their research resources, decisions, implementation plans, collection examples, and challenges in their efforts to ensure discovery, transparency, and equity in description for institutional and special collections.

Jenna Stout, Museum Archivist at the Saint Louis Art Museum discussed the process of reappraising and redescribing legacy administrative files predating a formal records management program. This type of large-scale processing initiative can illuminate diverse stories, enhance reference service, and identify collecting gaps in museum institutional recordkeeping.

Allyce Farino, Assistant Archivist for Digital Assets at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, discussed the reparative description actions taken as the Archive migrated their digital collection to a new Digital Asset Management System. The talk focused on the DMNS Anthropology and Archives collections, in particular around the description of Indigenous and First-Nations people.