Event Calendar
Archival repatriation considers the return of cultural materials and archival records to the indigenous communities who created them. The federal and state laws that surround repatriation can be difficult to understand and operationalize, particularly for under-resourced organizations. This interactive program invites participants to grapple with the legal and moral realities of repatriation while developing an outline for beginning or continuing their repatriation work. Strategies for communicating about your organization’s repatriation efforts will also be discussed.
New York State’s Bureau of Historic Sites manages historic collections from more than 34 diverse sites, the oldest of which started collecting 175 years ago. Current staff must manage a growing collection that today encompasses approximately one million objects. In order to better care for existing collections and align with current standards in the field, the Bureau of Historic Sites welcomed its first Deaccession Curator in early 2024. In this program, Senior Curator Amanda Massie and Deaccession Curator Natalie DeQuarto will discuss methods and challenges associated with deaccessioning while sharing stories from this project.
Speakers: Senior Curator Amanda Massie and Deaccession Curator Natalie DeQuarto, Bureau of Historic Sites
The language we use as a community and a collections sector continually evolves. We use certain language until directly represented people and communities offer better language to describe experiences and materials. In so doing, no term, phrase, or vocabulary is evergreen, and our organizations (and the people who power them) need ways to indicate and invite flexibility in arrangement and description of the collections that will live long after we have left our desks. In our final antiracism program for 2025, we invite participants to think about how we talk about the stuff we steward - keywords, descriptions, harmful language, reparative language, and more. This interactive program creates space to discuss how language has and might change over time, how practitioners in the field handle this now, and what we can do to plan for flexible, relevant description in the future.
This webinar will explore the complex journey of making previously restricted interviews with Love Canal residents accessible to researchers. Hope Dunbar & Saguna Shankar from the University at Buffalo will share their methodical approach to reviewing and redacting these sensitive 1970s testimonials, detailing how they navigated the intersecting challenges of legal requirements, privacy concerns, and ethical stewardship. Participants will learn about the partnership with UB's Department of Environment and Sustainability that informed this process, and discuss curation elements from the upcoming fall campus exhibit "Toxic Archives: Stories from Love Canal." This session offers valuable insights for archival professionals managing collections that contain sensitive personal information while trying to maximize their research value and historical significance.
Speakers: Hope Dunbar & Saguna Shankar, University at Buffalo