Political and Social Context

http://cfla-fcab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Truth-and-Reconciliation-Committee-Report-and-Recommendations-ISBN1.pdf

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Lougheed, Brett, Ry Moran, and Camille Callison. “Reconciliation through Description: Using Metadata to Realize the Vision of the National Research Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 53, no. 5–6 (July 4, 2015): 596–614. doi:10.1080/01639374.2015.1008718.

This invaluable article written in summer of 2015 describes the state of information generated by the TRC that awaited arrangement and description in the archives at the NCTR. The historical context of the NCTR archives is illuminated, its challenges are enumerated, and resultant solutions are (tentatively) formulated.  

The authors detail the varied types of records gathered by and through the process of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which wound up in seven different databases. Only two of these databases share the same metadata schema, and the rest have widely different levels of description, file types, and levels of description. The authors specifically point out that these databases were designed for the ingestion of over four million records in the course of three years, not to facilitate public access to these records. In looking to their mandate to preserve, reclaim, and promote intergenerational transfer of knowledge they turn to the participatory archiving model. Their ultimate hope for the archive is to contrast eurocentric and indigenous ways of knowing, archival and user generated arrangements, and institutional and indigenous descriptive elements. They demand the need for normalization across the seven different databases, a capacity to perform faceted search, name authorities which face the challenge of different languages and spellings, correct handling of privacy issues, the ability to browse by category, and indigenous authority to classify records. A tall order, one that they hope may be well met by metadata.

Duarte, Marisa Elena, and Miranda Belarde-Lewis. “Imagining: Creating Spaces for Indigenous Ontologies.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 53, no. 5–6 (July 4, 2015): 677–702. doi:10.1080/01639374.2015.1018396.

This  article provides insightful recommendations of how to incorporate indigenous ways of being and knowing into information systems. They ask how indigenous voices might be considered as partners in designing information infrastructure. The method they propose is one of imagining: one which first involves an awareness of the subjugation of indigenous knowledge necessarily employed by colonization. From this awareness, tools and methods of decolonization may be identified, partnerships built, and experimental designs actualized. Several case studies are discussed where individual indigenous nations partnered with information professionals to design information systems. They acknowledge the challenge of incorporating multiple indigenous ontologies into a single system and propose a “universality in specificity” (Duarte and Belarde-Lewis 2015) which allows for multiple and unique perspectives.

McKemmish, Sue, Shannon Faulkhead, and Lynette Russell. “Distrust in the Archive: Reconciling Records.” Archival Science 11, no. 3–4 (November 2011): 211–39. doi:10.1007/s10502-011-9153-2.

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This article discusses specific solutions in the context of reconciliation, and addresses the specific challenge of meeting the needs of multiple indigenous nations, all in the context of a country with a colonialist/settler history. Here I found an indelible but somehow, elsewhere overlooked, explicit discussion on how to build trust between indigenous communities and the archives. It seems that this is both a means and an end to archival description supporting records in a context of reconciliation, and the Trust and Technology project detailed here confirms this. Records, as they are accessed and described traditionally fail to promote trust in indigenous communities. However, partnership with indigenous nations and resultant redesign of metadata and descriptive standards may build this trust. In order to facilitate this, the Trust and Technology project created a set of principles on which to further research, theory, and practice. Archival reconciliation, they claim, may be achieved through the application of these principles to develop systems that, among other things, might enable records to be described from the perspectives of different indigenous communities, as well as non-indigenous users. Concluding with an action agenda for Australian Archives, this paper offers a plethora of possibilities to where information professionals might look for examples as to how to build trust among their own user groups.