Descriptive Notes, the blog of the SAA Description Section, has had an exciting end to the SAA year! If you missed any of our posts published in the last few months, including those from our newly-launched Project Management series, check them out below:
In "Reimagine Descriptive Workflows: A Project Summary," Merrilee Proffitt gives an overview of the OCLC Reimagine Descriptive Workflows project and provides a summary of the project report "A Community-Informed Agenda for Reparative and Inclusive Descriptive Practice."
In "Creating a Community-Centric Controlled Vocabulary," Gretchen Neidhardt and Kate Flynn discuss the addition of local controlled vocabulary tags within the Chicago Collections Consortium online finding aids portal to aid users in the search for cultural- and community-specific collections.
In "From Grassroots to SAA External Standard: Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia Anti-Racist Description Resources," Kelly Bolding and Faith Charlton, on behalf of A4BLiP, discuss the endorsement of the Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia Anti-Racist Description Resources as an external standard by SAA.
In "YIVO's Landsmanshaftn Resource Project: Describing Town Names in a Jewish History Archive," Hallel Yadin discusses the creation of a unique finding aid at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research that is designed to allow researchers to find genealogical records spread across multiple collections and under variant spellings.
In "Archival Imagination: Considering the Subjects in the DuBois S. Morris Papers," Amy C. Vo writes about the visual materials, particularly lantern slides, present in a missionary's collection held at Princeton University Library, reflecting on feelings of personal connections, historical imagination, and the gaps in description.
In "Checking All the (Archival) Boxes: Managing Processing Projects at the Special Collections Research Center," Cathy Dorin-Black outlines how the North Carolina State University Libraries Special Collections Research Center uses Trello, Google Suite, and other tools to track and assign processing projects among their archival staff and students.
In "Care Through Coding and Project Management," Corey Schmidt outlines how he builds against future stresses in his management of the University of Georgia Libraries' ArchivesSpace installation.
In "In Praise of Inventories," Matthew Richardson discusses the benefits of creating inventories to aid in both processing and access of items at the Texas Medical Center Library's McGovern Historical Center.
In "Spinning Plates at McCormick Library: Processing Project Management," Natalia Gutierrez-Jones and Benn Joseph outline the multi-stage workflow and digital tools used to manage the Northwestern University McCormick Library's archival processing projects.
In "Creating Cohesion: Processing Manuals as Tools for Project Management," Renae Rapp discusses the drafting of a new processing manual at the City College of New York Archives and Special Collections, which will give guidance to processors with different levels of experience and provide cohesive description across legacy and new collections.
As part of Descriptive Notes' rolling Conference Dispatches series, Hallel Yadin recently recapped her experience at the Archives as Data summer institute, sharing tools and resources that may be helpful to archivists working with born-digital material or assisting with digital humanities projects ("A Conference Dispatch from the Archives as Data Institute"). Back in March, Max Goldberg recapped an online presentation from the Archival History Section in which scholars Riley Linebaugh and James Lowry discussed postcolonial custody of records in Kenya and other former British colonies while reflecting on the legacy of Sir Hilary Jenkinson ("'Archival History and Colonial Afterlives': SAA Archival History Section Recap").
The Description Section steering committee published an introduction to the section's inclusive description resource page ("Introduction to the SAA Description Section Portal: Inclusive Description").
The Encoded Archival Standards Section also provided an update on new attributes and elements to Encoded Archival Context for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF) ("Updates to EAC-CPF 2.0: A Webinar Recap").
Descriptive Notes welcomes submissions on a rolling basis for all issues related to archival description. Please consider writing for us in the new SAA year! See more here: https://saadescription.wordpress.com/guidelines/
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Katherine Madison
Lead Editor, Descriptive Notes
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