Encoding Reparative Description: Promoting Archival Metadata Repair through Visualization and ArchivesSpace

Abstract

Over the past few years, more archives and archivists have been working on enhanced description projects that can address past inequities, erasure, or incorrect representations in description. Stemming from the “ReConnect/ReCollect” project at University of Michigan, which has surveyed the extent and legacy of colonial collections extracted from the Philippines since the late nineteenth century, we report on work to analyze more than two hundred finding aids with the development of Python-based analysis tools. We demonstrate how automation can help to expand the project of reparative description. The poster reports on how archivists, faculty, and students, worked across the University to aggregate finding aid metadata and analyze that descriptive information. We present information about the code that we used, and the work to update and implement computational tools to work with the open-source archives information management application, ArchivesSpace, in order to aid the goals of reparative description workflows in archives.