Event Calendar
In 2025, the DHPSNY community has taken a deep dive into the practices of community archiving and the ways these practices can help us reach and include communities that may otherwise be missing or excluded from our collections. We’ve consistently heard that there are unique challenges in helping researchers and archives users from underrepresented groups feel comfortable in archive and research spaces. This program aims to answer the question: As we collect materials valuable to underrepresented communities, how do we help them feel comfortable and welcome in our institutional spaces? In this program we’ll create dialogue about how we can create an inclusive, welcoming archives experience while following conventional best practices for archives safety and preservation. We’ll hear from practitioners in the field who have overcome challenges and iterated their practices to create ever-welcoming user environments so that the inclusive collections we’ve built can be used by the communities who helped us create those collections.
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Join Julia Fell, Curator of Exhibits and Oral Histories at the Museum at Bethel Woods, for an inside look at the Museum’s evolving internship program. Since 2021, both remote, in-semester internships and in-person summer internships have focused on collecting and processing oral histories related to the 1969 Woodstock Music & Art Fair, the Museum’s primary interpretive topic. Julia will share how the program has been managed, highlight key successes, and reflect on lessons learned along the way.
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