C.F.W. Coker Award: Digital Transgender Archive

The Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) is the recipient of the 2017 C.F.W. Coker Award from the Society of American Archivists (SAA). The award, established in 1984, recognizes finding aids, finding aid systems, innovative development in archival description, or descriptive tools that enable archivists to produce more effective finding aids. To merit consideration for the award, nominees must set national standards, represent a model for archives description, or otherwise have a substantial impact on national descriptive practice.

DTA is an international collaboration among more than twenty colleges, universities, nonprofits, and private collections that provides a central hub to access digitized historic materials, born-digital records, and archival finding aids related to trans history. Project director K.J. Rawson wanted to create a resource that would allow researchers to overcome the systematic challenges present in researching trans history, such as the geographic dispersion of historic materials, evolving and diverse language used to describe trans history, and the lack of availability of online primary sources. The aggregated digital content along with contextual learning resources provide a platform usable for diverse audiences and increases the discoverability and accessibility of historic materials from a traditionally underrepresented part of history.

As one of its nominators noted, “With transgender history frequently under-represented in both archival collections and online resources, the Digital Transgender Archive is a strong and visible commitment to innovative archival description.”