[MUSIC PLAYING]
So a concept that I think has been really influential in the archives field in the past couple of years is radical empathy. And there was a really great article a few years ago called "From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics, Radical Empathy in the Archives." A guiding question from that article is, is the descriptive language I am using respectful to the larger communities of people invested in this record? So the article proposes practicing an ethics of care in archives work.
It develops a framework that binds archivists to records creators, subjects of the materials, the users of the materials, and the wider community. These are all relationships of care that archivists can practice. And the empathy is radical if it guides the work of archives regardless of the interaction.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You are listening to WREK Atlanta, and this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett in a full studio with Fred Rascoe, Marlee Givens, a guest to be named later, Alex McGee, and Cody, once again. Are you ever going to, like, start your life, dude?
I start my life every Friday at noon here at WREK Atlanta.
[LAUGHTER]
Nicely done. It's almost like we rehearsed it. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you are here for, we hope you dig it.
Our show today is called "The Power of Good Description." It's another episode of our new series, The Stories That Archives Tell. And dare I say, it's a pretty good story too.
We'll be talking with Alex Brinson, one of Georgia Tech Library's ACRL diversity residents whose capstone project helped bring this story to light.
Our songs today are about searching without being sure what we'll find, the importance of understanding and remembering our past, and learning new things to improve for the better. Finding our stories in archives takes diligent, detail-oriented work, and it's still, even with all that, sometimes tricky finding what we need. Making sure that our archives are described with inclusivity in mind will make finding and understanding our past much less tricky.
So let's start with "It's Tricky" by Run-DMC right here on Lost in the Stacks. [RUN-DMC, "IT'S TRICKY"] This speech is my recital I think it's very vital to rock
You just heard "It's Tricky" by Run-DMC. Our show today is "The Power of Good Description," and we are joined in the studio by Alex Brinson, and ACRL diversity resident at the Georgia Tech Library.
And Alex Brinson worked with you, Alex McGee, in your role as Georgia Tech's University archivist.
That is right.
We just have all kinds of Alexes.
So many Alexes. We are the ultimate Alexes, is I think what someone said this week.
The ultimate Alexes.
[LAUGHTER]
So Alex, we'll just start with a discussion of how we got here.
Mm-hmm.
So the story of desegregation at Georgia Tech is obviously one that has been complicated. The oft go-to narrative was that Georgia Tech was the first public university in the South to desegregate without a court order, and that is something that Georgia Tech is very proud to own.
Yeah.
And obviously, what we found out, why don't you talk about Sam and her grandfather's story?
Right. So Sam Bolton at the time was a first year, and she brought to Alex and the rest of archives' attention that her grandfather in 1953 had applied to Georgia Tech and been denied based on the fact that he was Black.
He'd received a letter kind of offering him this deal that the Board of Regents was trying to get going, that if he was accepted to an engineering program outside of the state of Georgia, then they would cover his out-of-state fees, kind of as an incentive to get him to just move on. So she brought that to our attention, and then Alex McGee found the letter. And then I, knowing I wanted to work on reparative description, came in later and worked with the collection.
Yeah. And so when she rightfully came to, she met with our dean, Leslie Sharp and myself, and asked a very fair question of, do you guys have anything on my grandfather attempting to apply to Georgia Tech? I went in search in our archives to see. Surely, we have something. I knew we had similar letters from women attempting to apply to Georgia Tech around the same time. Women eventually were successful. So I was like, surely we have these. And I know exactly where they should be.
They should be in the president's papers where these letters from women are. They were not. What I did find was a very oddly named collection called the Board of Regents Records, which most people would probably be like, sure. Sounds fine. The university archivist of Georgia Tech, though, would say, we are not the keepers of the Board of Regents Records. Those are going to be at the state archives. That is not a Georgia Tech-affiliated thing.
And so I was like, OK, let's look at these boxes and see what's in there. And basically, what was in-- it was three boxes, and what was in there, it was literally correspondence from the Board of Regents that had been separated out from the president's papers. So someone thought they were maybe doing a good thing, but [LAUGHS] obviously complicating things quite a bit.
I was just curious, who was the president at that time?
And what year?
So there were several. So it's across, I want to say, three or four presidents.
Yeah, it starts in the 1930s when the Board of Regents came into existence in Georgia.
Yeah, so it was quite a few. And it was-- the way they organized it was they just labeled folders, Board of Regents, like, 1960 to 1963. So it didn't really tell you what was going on in the papers. It was just kind of a general time range.
So not very helpful description if you were looking for something.
Does it feel like it was buried? I mean, did it seem like this was on purpose to separate it out to keep it from being seen? Or can you not even try to make that judgment just from the way something is filed?
I will let Alex answer, too, but I definitely-- I don't want to assign bad vibes to someone doing this work, but I think it's really telling that women were successful, and Georgia Tech looked good in responding to these letters from women. And those are easily findable.
The way they are described is literally about coeducation, how we advocated to get women into Georgia Tech, and the not so positive-looking stuff with Black applicants is buried, in a way, its description that obfuscates what it is.
And I think, even if it wasn't conscious, I mean-- maybe it wasn't a conscious decision, but it just shows the carelessness of those topics and how they've been handled in the past.
And just to be clear, a lot of archival description is based on how the records come in. So someone prior to the Georgia Tech archives named these folders Board of Regents Records, right?
Potentially.
OK. Yeah, who knows? Unfortunately, the bummer thing is these existed long before the archives did. And so the record-keeping about how they ended up here is less thorough. So it's really more just our best inferences based on how things ended up with other collections. And I mean, this is what we would call an artificial collection, how it was separated out. CHARLIE BENNETT: So can you describe what's actually in the folder? When you open the folder and discover this stuff, what are you seeing?
The majority of it was correspondence or letters back and forth between board of regents and presidents of Georgia Tech or just other officials. So it was a lot of reading, which that makes me also think maybe-- whoever organized it maybe just didn't read the letters too, was like, oh, it's Board of Regents, like, all goes here. So it took reading each individual letter to pull out the topics and see what was going on there. And it was some really interesting stuff.
So I think it was beneficial. CHARLIE BENNETT: We're switching mics. Alex. I'm just going to steal this from you. So tell me more about what struck you. How did it become interesting as you started reading through this folder? Right. So, obviously, how we got here was the desegregation story, but there was more there. As I was going through, I was finding topics on students during World War II here at Georgia Tech, the Loyalty Oath Act that all state employees have to sign.
There's some interesting stuff there with folks that were coming over from other countries to work here at Georgia Tech and how they had to swear allegiance to America and things like that. And then there were textbook challenges, like, history textbooks that people didn't like and complained to the Board of Regents about. And-- CHARLIE BENNETT: What's that line? What's that line from True Detective? "Time is a flat circle." Yeah, like--
[LAUGHTER]
It just keeps repeating. So those were some of the big topics that stuck out to me and made it interesting.
So if I can get this straight, you went looking for material about this one student's grandfather;s story and then found a bunch of stuff that felt like maybe it should be more clear what it was and where it was.
And that would be interesting to folks because we had an open house, I think, at one point, and people were really interested in looking at that correspondence because just-- it being described better drew people's eye and attention, too.
And is this the core of reparative description? Like, you're repairing the description, repairing the relationship between the metadata and the items.
And a lot of reparative description is also focused on just the way we ethically would describe things, like not using harmful language. This wasn't really a case where there was necessarily harmful language attached. It was harmful in the sense that it wasn't accessible, but there wasn't any language that I necessarily needed to change based on how we would currently describe things. CHARLIE BENNETT: All right, we're going to get more into that. This is Lost in the Stacks.
We'll be back to talk more about the power of good description after a music set.
And you can file this set under Z693.3.S625I53 [YAZMIN LACEY, "SIGN AND SIGNAL"] Could this be a symbol A sign for I?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
That was "Whole Wide World" by Wreckless Eric and before that "Sign and Signal" by Yazmin Lacey. Those are songs about searching for something that may or may not be there.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called "The Power of Good Description." Is there going to be Huey Lewis later in the show? That's all I can think of when I read that title. We are talking with our own Alex McGee, university archivist, and Alex Brinson, who is kind of our own, also, but just not a member of the show team, an ACRL diversity resident at the Georgia Tech Library.
OK, Alex B, so you have always been interested in reparative description, that you came to us with that kind of in your head. And did this just light you up when you saw?
Yeah, it was perfect. Like, I couldn't have come up with a better project. So I'm really grateful that it kind of was timed well.
And you have to do a project as part of your residency. Is there something that you have to do to complete this whole two-year thing?
The idea is to have a capstone, more so-- less like, oh, you're going to be graded on it, but more as something to take away from this experience to show for your two years at Georgia Tech. CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, yeah, so this is your book you're starting.
[LAUGHTER]
So we were talking about folders and records and looking for stuff. And when we were off air, you showed me a picture of what we were actually considering here, which was a bunch of gray boxes. Can you all do something about that? They're all just gray.
We like our archives.
Some are darker gray.
Our archive's light gray. That's what it's called.
Yeah. Hollister. And--
Hollinger.
Hollinger. CHARLIE BENNETT: Hollinger, excuse me. Yeah. What is Hollister? Clothing brand, right? Like Abercrombie's nemesis.
That's a different archive.
I thought they were together. CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, I'm pathetic. All right, so you had these boxes to consider, and you had to read all of them, all the stuff that was in them. Most of them to be able to place them where they should-- like, group the materials. Well, I did have to read the correspondence. Yeah.
So then what was the work that you did? What were you actually doing to these documents, and what do you have to take notes on? What was the process?
So the way I decided to do it, because I wanted to document the changes that I was making, I made a spreadsheet and kind of copied down the way that they were described before. And then I would put side by side how I thought they should be described.
And so as I was going, I was reading the materials, grouping them together where I thought they should fit assigning them to the president that they corresponded with, because I knew that eventually we would move them to the president's papers that they applied to. So I was assigning my own descriptions but also kind of stacking them up against what was there before. But what was there before was just Board of Regents 1960 to 1963, not much.
A big problem with the description was that it was minimal.
Yes.
Right? Not even misguided or--
No. CHARLIE BENNETT: --obscurest, just not there. Not offensive in any way, just not helpful.
Was it maybe described that way out of expediency? There was all this material, and let's just write something on it and put it on a shelf.
It's possible, but it was three boxes. And after processing other collections that are 20 boxes and being able to give it a little bit better description, I think there was more they could have done making--
So there was probably some negligence.
It's speculation, but maybe.
Right.
I mean, do we know, were they described in 1960 to 1963? Like, the original description. Yeah, what you were working based on, was that 50 years old or was it--
I am not sure. Do we know when they were.
I don't think we know, because, again, as I mentioned earlier, we just inherited these at some point. But I think my suspicion is just that they got separated out from similar-- literally, the same records about women at Georgia Tech, same time period, why are those still with the president's papers and these-- so.
That's true.
So you got a spreadsheet.
Yes. I still have it.
And what do you have to do after that? I mean, I think I might be getting us into the weeds, but I'm really interested in what you did with each piece of this descriptive project? ALEX BRINSON: Literally going through and erasing the original title. That's why I documented it-- Oh my gosh.
--because I had to have documentation of what it was originally. But erasing--
And you made an eraser movement when you said that, like--
Erasing the literal title on the folder--
Holy cow.
--writing my title, dating it. And then also, because sometimes-- since they were organized by date, they weren't necessarily organized by topic. So then having to move things around so the topics were kind of grouped together as opposed to just by date.
And did you feel this freedom? Like, were you in control of these documents or did you kind of have to check in to make sure?
I asked Alex McGee a lot because it felt like I wasn't supposed to be--
Yeah, that's the feeling I would have--
--doing this.
--erasing stuff on a folder.
Yeah.
I think that's the interesting part of reparative description, inclusive description, is it is-- you're changing something someone did at some point. And we had a lot of conversations about what was going to be the most useful to a researcher, to someone wanting to use these records, and was it going to be topic? Was it going to be by the names of the people?
And so those were very fruitful discussions, I think, for Alex, as someone new to this work, to be thinking about literally, what will be the impact of my decisions today?
Yeah.
But this is still a project, and you had to reflect on it and create something afterward.
Yeah.
So what was the next phase after you'd done all your erasing and writing and labeling?
So we created-- well, like I said, I put the materials into the president's papers where it made sense, updated what we call finding aid, which describes where materials live, how they're related to other materials in the collection.
And then I got started on a webcourse that kind of told the story of doing this project with the goal of teaching an outside person with general knowledge about archives what inclusive description or reparative description is and how it affects the way we understand history.
And will that be public?
It is public.
It's already?
Yes, it is public. It was published in April. Alex McGee and I have written about it a few times. So yeah, anyone can look at it now.
Excellent.
Why don't you tell them what it's called?
Oh, yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
Ooh, do I know that? The exact title?
Is it "Uncovering--"
It changed a few times. But we wrote a piece about it called "Hidden History."
Yeah, if you Google Georgia Tech "Hidden History," you'll get a splashy story that Alex and I wrote that got published last week.
Have you gotten good feedback from current Georgia Tech-- you know, these are going into the president's papers, so the current Georgia Tech president and administration, are they eager to see these stories told and be out there?
Yeah, so we actually met with the vice president of Institute Communications about this, and they were very receptive that we were doing this work. We have edited timelines around Black history at Georgia Tech.
They are going to be updating their tour scripts because they are recognizing, I think, that this narrative about Georgia Tech, the first public university in the South to desegregate without a court order, there's much more to this story, and we need to be telling a more fuller version of it.
The whole story.
The whole story. And we now have records in the archives that document that or people know that we have them and they can find them.
And the webcourse is titled Uncovering Hidden Narratives.
You're listening to Lost in the Stacks, and we will talk more about hidden narratives, archives, and inclusive description on the left side of the hour.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[SCATTING]
Hi, I'm Wendy Hagenmaier, and I'm passionate about digital archives and relation and how research and memory organizations can step even more into their collective power. I'm also a Lost in the Stacks alum and forever fan. Speaking of which, you are listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta.
Hi, Wendy. Today's show is a reminder that archives are not neutral and that archivists have a great deal of power when deciding what to keep and how to describe it and, I guess, sometimes where to hide it. The Philadelphia-based Archives for Black Lives has played a significant role in fostering a conversation about these non-neutral, powerful actions for records regarding Black lives. Their recommendations for archival practice begin like this.
Archivists appraise, collect, preserve, organize, and provide access to archives in adherence to international standards and a professional code of ethics. Because we have the privilege of choosing what goes into the historical record, we also bear the responsibility to safeguard accurate representations of contemporaneous events. We believe archives exist to hold power to account, to speak truth to power.
Because records serve as evidence for factual claims, it is the archivists' responsibility, as stewards of records, to stand against their exploitation or abuse. And you can read the full statement and learn more about their antiracist description resources at archivesforblack lives.wordpress.com.
And you can file this set under LC2781.S27.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
That was "The Things We Did and Didn't Do" by The Magnetic Fields. And before that, we heard "Don't Forget" by Cory Henry. Songs about the importance of remembering our past.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And this is Lost in the Stacks, and our show today is called "The Power of Good Description." We are talking with our own Alex McGee, university archivist, who's sort of a host and sort of an interview subject today, and Alex Brinson, an ACRL diversity resident with the Georgia Tech Library. I think we should talk more about reparative description maybe in the abstract, move away from these actual documents.
Let's go back to what you said about-- you were thinking about it when you got here, Alex. What does it mean to you, and what's the reason that we should be paying attention to it?
I think it really came-- reparative description as a concept came to me in 2020 when I was reading and seeing all of the work that archivists and librarians were doing now that there was more attention being placed on these topics. And to me-- it related to me because I was doing digitization work at the time. I was working archives adjacent where I was taking the documents for archivists and scanning them so that they'd be more accessible. And so I was doing description work on that stuff.
And so that was really interesting to me because I was always thinking really hard about how I was writing about these materials.
And when you say "these topics," are these historical things that we are reevaluating our sense of now?
So the project that comes to mind for me and what I talked about a lot when I came to Georgia Tech was I was working on this project about Black suffrage, their movements, and I was scanning a lot of those documents, so thinking about how I wanted to describe them. And so that's what kind of brought-- that's the historical context that I was thinking about mostly.
But then I came to find Homosaurus and like all of the-- Archives for Black Lives, like all of those organizations that are trying to do better with the description that we-- oh, sorry-- that we use.
I have a long running joke on Lost in Stacks that archivists are troublemakers. It has a lot to do with the idea of being able to use records to frame change or truth to power. But there's the reverse of that. The flip side of archivists can be the status quo, and they can very carefully construct the status quo out of absences or particular records. I'm going to throw that to you, Alex M, to talk about.
Yeah, I mean, I think the phrase we hear that archivists tell each other a lot is archives are not neutral. And there's also various concepts of we're not going to change things, original order. And so if you have someone that's very beholden to the idea of original order, they're saying, if this came to me like this, I'm not going to do anything different. If it has fine enough titles, I'm going to leave them exactly as they are. But that can do harm sometimes.
And so there is this, I think, reminder in our profession, we are not neutral. And certainly some of the stuff we've heard earlier is that we have power in making decisions. And I think you either own that, which I hope you do if you're an archivist. Certainly that is something that I very much internalize, and I, with Alex, have worked very hard to instill that in the work that she's done with us.
But yeah, I mean, I think we make decisions that years from now will manifest in whether or not someone can find something or tell a certain story a certain way, and that is weighty, you know?
Do you have a sense of the enormity of the task before you here at Georgia Tech? Because I'm just picturing like the Indiana Jones warehouse of boxes and boxes, and I'm picturing like hundreds of boxes where it just says, "Regents papers," or something like that, that there might be hidden stories in there.
Totally, totally. I mean, in my brief career, I have come across collections where there was someone that was a hidden figure. And her work was-- she passed away. Her stuff was buried in an attic, and people bought her house. And she basically single handedly maintained a very specific language of computer code that Apple operating systems rely on. And very well known men had basically taken credit for her work in her absence. And she was a very private person to begin with.
And her death did not help make sure that she got that credit. But it was really meaningful to me to not only get her collection-- the people that bought her house and found her stuff donated it to us. I processed her collection. And there's weight to having her collection, and it's at MIT Distinctive Collections. And there's a citation now, and people can find that and know that she did this.
It makes me wonder what's being hidden now.
Alex B, we are almost out of time, but you mentioned something about an exhibit or a physical place on campus that people can go to see what's going on here.
So as of Wednesday, we've installed this physical representation of high level the story of Robert Chesebro and how we found this information in the Board of Regents records. And if anyone's ever been to the archives reading room here, we have these display cases. So there's this physical representation in the display case with a QR code so that someone could easily access the course and take it if they'd like.
This is Lost in the Stacks. And today we've been talking about the impact of archival description with Alex Brinson, an ACRL diversity resident with the Georgia Tech Library, and Alex McGee, university archivist for Georgia Tech.
File this set under CB69.N4.
[THE VELVET UNDERGROUND, "BEGINNING TO SEE THE LIGHT"]
Well, I'm beginning to see the light Well, I'm beginning--
[SINITTA, "OH BOY YOU'VE GOT A LOT TO LEARN"]
[VOCALIZING]
You've been listening to "Oh Boy," parentheses, "You've Got a Lot to Learn" by Sinitta and before that "Beginning to See the Light" by The Velvet Underground, songs about the desire to learn and change for the better.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Today's Lost in the Stacks is called "The Power of Good Description." In the time we have left, I'd like to hear from the show team and all the other people in the studio about something you've encountered in the world recently that is so cool or maybe important to know that you think it deserves calling attention to it, in the spirit of good description. Marlee, I'd like to start with you.
All right. So in this past year, I've discovered the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, who has written some books about the brain and emotion, and she has dispelled some myths about the brain and some of which I had been clinging to myself. So her main thing is it's the job of the brain to regulate our body systems. And the brain is a predicting machine, and that's how emotions are made, by predicting in the moment based on past experience.
Not a computer, not a pilot.
And there's no such thing as a lizard brain. What about you, Fred?
OK, going in a little different direction, I recently saw a story about trilobite fossils, found in Morocco, preserving all of the soft parts internal to the organism. This is a fossil 500 million years old. A volcanic eruption buried these things immediately, and they were able to extract the block, scan it, and create a 3D model of trilobite detail never seen before. It was pretty fascinating.
Yowza. Alex. Alex B.
I had to make sure. Mine is very silly in comparison to the other two. I discovered the cookie bar at Whole Foods, and I've been really enjoying it. I think everyone should try it out. You get to just put any cookie you want in the bag, and then you pay for the weight based on the weight. It's really great.
Now that I know about that, it's going to be like, Cheers. Everyone's going to know my name.
[LAUGHTER]
Next Alex.
Mine is equally not high brow. I want to alert folks that they're reissuing two seminal albums for me on vinyl later this year. Do with that what you will. Mariah Carey's Heartbreaker will be getting a rainbow double LP reissue in October. And Alanis Morissette's Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, too. Like, what a year. What a time to be alive.
Wow. CHARLIE BENNETT: Cody, how about you?
Another new direction. Atlanta recently had a buskers festival, street performers. And it wasn't just music. Some of it was comedy. Some of it was theatrical. And it made me think that street performers can really tell you the culture and vibe of a city that I wanted to see a buskers hall of fame or a buskers archive and see that updated every year because there's always new buskers.
CHARLIE BENNETT: All right, I'm going to cheat a little bit because this is something from way back, but recently it's been on my mind. I would like there to be better description of the house bands of the studios that were operating in the '70s that were backing whole records by multiple performers-- the Hi Records house band. There needs to be more about them and how super good those records are. And before I start crying, why don't we just start the credits?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by Alex McGee, Charlie Bennett-- that's me-- Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens.
Legal counsel and a Hollinger box of Hollister clothing were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. CHARLIE BENNETT: How did he know?
Special thanks to Alex B for being on the show, to every archivist who has helped better some archival description. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening.
Our web page is library.gatech.e du/lostinthestacks, where you'll find our most recent episode, a link to our podcast feed, and a web form if you want to get in touch with us.
Heading into the July 4 holiday, it's rerun city for the first half of the month. But we'll be back with a new show in, I think, two weeks. I don't know. It might be later.
Eh, it's summer. We'll play it by ear. Time for our last song today. As evidenced by today's interview, we are making strides in inclusive description. But if we want to meet the goal of a completely inclusive archives and library catalog, well, there's still going to be plenty more work to do. So thank goodness Alex B is here to help us along that route. Let's close with "Work To Do" by The Isley Brothers, right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everybody.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[THE ISLEY BROTHERS, "WORK TO DO"]