Announcements

Dear Colleagues,

Descriptive Notes, the blog of SAA's Description Section, just celebrated its third anniversary! To celebrate, take a look back at 10 of our most popular posts from our first two years:

Descriptive Notes launched in 2021 with a series on Inclusive Description:

• "Reframing Reparative Description Initiatives through Critical Race Theory and Black Feminism" (April 22, 2021) - Grace Muñoz discusses her work as the Archival Description Audit Scholar at UCLA Library Special Collections, and its place within a larger departmental initiative to enact anti-racist, anti-oppressive description practices.
• "Reexamining Descriptive Language at the University of Minnesota Archives and Special Collections" (April 29, 2021) - Kate Dietrick and Lara Friedman-Shedlov discuss efforts by the Archives and Special Collections Description Group to create institutional workflows for remediating harmful description at the University of Minnesota.

The next series launched by the Descriptive Notes editors focused on remote description projects:

• "Remote Transcription of Legacy Finding Aids at Cornell's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections" (October 5, 2021) - Ben Wrubel discusses efforts to transcribe legacy finding aids while mitigating COVID-related staffing challenges at Cornell University Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.
• "Updating Digital Collections Metadata at the Iowa Women's Archives" (October 19, 2021) - Anna Holland describes a remote project focused on surveying and updating metadata for digital collections at the Iowa Women's Archives.

Two more entries in our Inclusive Description series:

• "How Getty Archivists Support Racial Justice: Inside the ongoing work to reexamine hundreds of records to create better and more equitable archives" (November 15, 2021) - Samantha Ceja, Helen Kim, and Sara McGillivray discuss the efforts of the Anti-Racist Description Working Group at the Getty Research Institute to audit legacy description and create institutional best practices.
• "Say My Name, Say My Name: Addressing Missing Name Information for Women in Yale Special Collections" (March 28, 2022) - Alison Clemens, Jennifer Coggins, Michelle Peralta, and Jessica Tai discuss efforts by the Yale Library ArchivesSpace Agents Reparative Task Force for Women's Names to identify full name information for women previously identified by their surnames or husbands' names.

Descriptive Notes also ran a series on Born-Digital Description:

• "New Community-Driven Resource for Describing Born Digital Materials in Archival Finding Aids" (April 25, 2022) - The members of the DLF's Born Digital Access Working Group discuss their work to compile examples of born digital description in finding aids.

In mid-2022, the editors ran a series on Archival Labor:

• "Impermanent Positions, Permanent Losses: How Contingent Employment Impacts Descriptive Work and Makes Us All a Little Worse Off" (June 8, 2022) - Meg Rinn discusses the results of a study conducted by the Contingent Employment Study Task Force of the New England Archivists (NEA) in early 2022.

Descriptive Notes is happy to partner with archival and library working groups, committees, and sections to publish announcements and updates:

• "Newly Released: Metadata Best Practices for Trans and Gender Diverse Resources" (November 1, 2022) - Bri Watson, K.J. Rawson, and Jackson Huang discuss the formation and goals of the Trans Metadata Collective and outline the highest level recommendations of the TMDC's Metadata Best Practices for Trans and Gender Diverse Resources.

2022 ended (and 2023 began) with a series on Specialized Description, focusing on in-house controlled vocabularies and collection- or repository-unique descriptive challenges:

• "The Uncontrolled Vocabulary: Queer Archiving and the Fluidity of Language" (December 5, 2022) - Bianca Finley Alper, Isaac Fellman, and Megan Needels discuss the creation of an in-house controlled vocabulary at the GLBT Historical Society and confront the difficulties of cataloging an inherently fluid terminology.

Descriptive Notes just wrapped up a series on Accessioning Description, which we launched with a piece from the National Best Practices for Archival Accessioning Working Group ("Slow Burn: Building an Archival Accessioning Standard with Intentionality"). We recently launched a series on Cataloging Description with a piece from Brandeis University Library ("Coming Together: How Metadata Creates Communication between Archivists and Catalogers") and are partnering with TS-EAS to release information about the ongoing updates to EAD (("Shape the Future of EAD: A Call to Action" – Part I and Part II).

Interested in contributing to Descriptive Notes? We accept pitches on a rolling basis for all of our existing series, and on any issues related to archival description. Upcoming series include Cataloging Description and Remote Labor. Read our submission guidelines here - https://saadescription.wordpress.com/guidelines/ - or email our editorial team at saadescription@gmail.com

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Katherine Madison
Lead Editor, Descriptive Notes
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