Archival Science (2019) 19:331–348

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09306-y

ORIGINAL PAPER

Archival interventions and the language we use

Kirsten Wright1 

Published online: 15 May 2019

© Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Abstract
This article discusses issues around the display and use of historical language now
considered offensive. Taking as a starting point the non-neutrality of archives, archi-
val systems and documentation, it considers the role of archivists in upholding and
reproducing dominant power structures through archival description. It also exam-
ines the implications of the uncritical reproduction of historical language in archi-
val description, catalogues and finding aids. It considers the balancing act between
reproducing this language and potentially causing offence and distress, and not pro-
viding full and accurate information if it is not displayed. While much has been writ-
ten previously about these issues, there are fewer links to practical actions which
may be taken to mitigate these issues. Therefore, a case study is presented using
the Language Policy developed by the Find & Connect web resource in Australia,
to consider how archives and archivists can be more transparent in their archival
description practices. It discusses the development and content of the policy, impli-
cations for work on the web resource, and public reception to the policy.

Keywords  Archival description · Historical language · Archival policy · Archives ·

Transparency in documentation

It is now accepted that language does not neutrally transmit ideas and concepts, but
instead actively shapes our world views, and the frameworks and ideas within these.
Like language, archives are not neutral, but are instead, active agents in developing
and perpetuating concepts and reality over time.
And, like archives, these concepts and realities shift and change as societies do.
Concepts and records previously deemed unimportant are now of great importance,
and words which were formerly viewed as innocuous or harmless are now seen as
the reverse. As the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure famously stated, “…language
constitutes our world, it doesn’t just record it or label it” (Barry 2009, p. 42).

* Kirsten Wright
[email protected]
1
eScholarship Research Centre, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

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Language and words also change meaning over time. There are many examples
of words changing their meanings, becoming offensive, becoming inoffensive, and
changing in usage and syntax. In many cases, lists of historical words are a source
of amusement and charm and are perceived as a quaint throwback to a different
time. These changes to language mark shifts in attitudes, cultural norms, and what is
deemed acceptable (or not).
Archivists bear witness to these changes to language through the materials they
hold. Farge (2013, p. 85), writing about her experiences using historical police
reports, describes the contradictory nature of words and their meanings: “words are
windows; they will let you catch a glimpse of one or several contexts. But words can
also be tangled and contradictory. They can articulate inconsistencies whose mean-
ing is far from clear”.
Within an archival setting, these changes in words and meaning are used as a
source of interest. Archivists note the changes, point out the old-fashioned hand-
writing, and use many of these materials in outreach and publicity work. However,
archivists are less likely to view archival description with a similar lens—even if the
issues around language are also present in the catalogues, descriptions and finding
aids produced by archivists—both in the past and currently.
While it is acknowledged that language and power in the archives go hand in
hand (see, for example, Duff and Harris 2002), there is less discussion about what
that means on a practical, day-to-day level for the archivist processing a new collec-
tion, or revising an existing finding aid.

Archives, archivists, and power

Archivists wield ultimate power over the materials in the collections they manage.
First, of course, is the power to decide what is included in the collection and what is
not. What is chosen to be included in an archive has been recognised as an important
site of power for archives and archivists (see, for example, Ketelaar 2002; Cook and
Schwartz 2002; Bastian 2002; Jimerson 2009).
Once material has entered an archive, there are many other ways an archivist con-
trols and has power over it, including how the material is arranged, described and
made available for access. Indeed, some of the core tenets of the archival profession
are sites of unequal power balances and where existing power structures are repro-
duced and amplified. These include the fundamental concepts of original order and
provenance (Cook 1997).
The principle of original order states that records (in archives) must be kept in the
order that they were created and used in. If an archivist finds records in an appar-
ently random order but believes they can ascertain what the “original” or “correct”
order is, they may reorganise the material to fit this. The reason for doing this is
that this original order provides us with important contextual information about how
the records were used and how they were linked together giving the user informa-
tion they would not get if the records were arranged differently. However, there are
assumptions built into this concept which are generally not critically considered
when working with collections.

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The first is that there is only one “correct” order and that this needs to be dis-
covered and used. It does not take into account the use, reuse, and reordering of
records over time and discounts that records have multiple purposes and mean-
ings (that can be derived through multiple “original orders”). As Lyons (2009)
notes, “The principle of original order is the principle of a frozen order”.
Additionally, in keeping the records in their original order, archivists are repro-
ducing the power structures of the time they were created—the power structures
of oppressors and bureaucracies. In requesting and using these records, people
are required to understand, interact with, and use these structures without any
acknowledgement that this difficult or problematic (and in some cases traumatic).
The principle of provenance states that records should be arranged and
described in accordance with the “authority, agent or function” responsible for
their creation and accumulation. Records from one provenance must not be mixed
or interfiled with records from another provenance. As Gilliland (2017) discusses,
this reinforces not just existing structures, but also the power of the agency or
state. The “ordinary individual” is once again subsumed into the power apparatus
of the state (or institution).
Many people, including Gilliland (2017), Drake (2016), and Bailey (2013),
have noted how the idea of provenance assumes there is one “correct” provenance
for every record, which again can be divined by the archivist in the process of
describing and arranging the records. Hurley (2005) articulated the notion of
“parallel provenance”; and when considering non-Western knowledge systems
and the rights and moral ownership of subjects of the records, it is clear that there
are many provenances and many contexts in which the records can be viewed.
It is easy to forget that these tenets of original order and provenance are them-
selves products of particular recordkeeping systems and archives in a specific
time and place (see, for example Bailey 2013). These systems were developed to
solve specific issues, and to serve the needs of particular Western bureaucratic
(paper) regimes. As Drake (2016) states, “provenance…is…a relic of the colonial
and imperial era in which it emerged”. Therefore, the fundamental tenets of the
archival profession are steeped in colonialism, imperialism and oppression.
Stanley (2016, p. 8) discusses:
…the state does not see its own violence. We are quick to vilify violent
criminals, especially when they are young. We are increasingly ready to
recognise and deal with family violence and neglect. But we are slower to
recognise state violence…wrapping it up in the language of rescue, welfare,
treatment or discipline, we somehow give this violence legitimacy.
I suggest the same is true for archives—although our language is that of original
order, series and provenance. This is an uncomfortable thought, one which dis-
rupts the narrative of archives and libraries as organisations working for the good
of both individuals and society at large (Ettarh 2018; de Jesus 2014; Sentance
2018a).
There is violence in the records and the power structures imbued within
them—but there is also power and dominance in decisions made in determining

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what is included in an archive, and how it is described and made available. There
is also the inherent violencing in silencing—through silences and gaps in the
records—but also through silences in archival description and listing practices
(Caswell 2014).
As archivists, we must be aware of the affective power of archives—and that
archives are always informed by the decisions and power of the people working in
them and controlling them, and by traces, gaps, trauma and loss (Farge 2013, pp.
54–55).

Archives and language

Archivists have power over how material in the archives is named and described
and, therefore, how it is accessed and used (and by whom). While this has been
discussed previously (see, for example, Nesmith 2002; Duff and Harris 2002; Yakel
2003; Brilmyer 2018; Sentance 2017), it is important to remember just how much
power and control the archivist has in this arena. Indeed, as Nesmith (2002, p. 36)
notes, “even the names archivists and others choose to give a record privileges its
meaning”. Over time, these names and titles become fixed; they are seen as an inte-
gral part to the record’s meaning and order, rather than it being acknowledged that
this naming was added by an archivist at a specific period in time.
Likewise, the bias and views of the archivist are rarely made explicit within cat-
alogues or finding aids. As Duff and Harris (2002, p. 276) state, “archivists can-
not describe records in an unbiased, neutral, or objective way”. This is because, of
course, archivists are within society and culture, and embedded within the language
they are using, but this is rarely acknowledged or made explicit. Cook and Schwartz
(2002, p. 123) call for explanations of the archivist’s decision-making process and
context around that process: “for all aspects of the archival performance…the archi-
vist should explain in writing why choices were made as they were, using what cri-
teria, based on what concepts of value or significance, employing what methodolo-
gies, and reflecting what personal values of the archivist”.
For archivists, the question becomes how to represent the potentially upsetting,
affective and offensive history and language contained within the records without
obfuscating or hiding this language; and without alienating, offending or traumatis-
ing users of the records. However, historical the material is that they hold, archives
are for current users, and must be useful to current users. Continued, unquestioned
use of historical language runs the risk of making users feel unsafe or unwelcome,
and also may inadvertently hide material, or not make it clear what is held. It also
may lead users to believe that the archive (and the archivist) is in agreement with
that language, and the concepts encapsulated in those words.
Brilmyer (2018, p. 113) highlights the ongoing paradox and power of this lan-
guage: “A person documented as ‘whether a lunatic or idiot,’ not only becomes
permanently labelled as such, but also, the use of these words in archival records
creates a public standard of acceptance of the categorisation and fear of particular
people”. This has parallels to Wilson and Golding’s discussion of the way the words
and labels in Care Leaver case files followed them around far more effectively than

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their actions did: “these notations, once made, were almost never unmade” (Wilson
and Golding 2016, p. 95). Unproblematised reproduction of this language in finding
aids and other archival resources implies that the archives and record holders are
also accepting of this language.
There is also the issue of the systems archivists use to catalogue and document
their collections. Systems are rarely completely fit for purpose, and in many cases
may not have been chosen by staff in the archives. As Brilmyer (2018) notes, cur-
rent archival systems do not generally enable the level of complexity in descrip-
tion required to provide a holistic view of the record (including power structures,
assumptions about what is “self-evident”, and information about the records’ prove-
nance, creation and custody over time). More complex archival systems are required
so that these multiple relationships can be represented.
Moreover, as Arroyo-Ramirez (2016) discusses, assumptions and defaults built
into a system may mean that information integral to the record cannot be used within
a system. Arroyo-Ramirez highlights this in relation to characters in languages other
than English and how meaning is lost or changed when these characters cannot be
added to a system, or are removed during a data “cleaning” process. Therefore, what
is present in a system may not be an authentic or accurate representation of archival
material at all. And there are larger issues with algorithms and defaults built deep
into systems which sustain hegemony, discrimination, and bias (see, for example,
Noble 2018).
It is therefore acknowledged that the archives’ uncritical reproduction of histori-
cal language is problematic and may cause offense and alienation to potential users.
This is particularly the case where the users of the archives are also subjects of the
records within the archives—they are potentially “captives of the archives” (Four-
mile 1988). In addition, as multiple authors have mentioned, for Care Leavers, the
impact of having to navigate both archives and the organisations that were respon-
sible for their ‘care’ in childhood can be fraught (see, for example, Frings-Hessami
2018; Swain and Musgrove 2012; Wilson and Golding 2016).
For those unused to doing archival research, archives can be difficult spaces to
navigate. The buildings are often imposing, with quiet reading rooms not set up
to deal with emotional reactions (Ketelaar 2002). Both the physical space and the
online description are potentially offputting and confusing. Unproblematised or
uncritical reproduction of degrading and offensive language within catalogues
or finding aids potentially adds to a user’s sense of alienation and that they do not
belong.

Archival (re)description

Much of the work around the use of language within archives to date has come
from Indigenous archivists and activists—such as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services (ATSILRN
2005). First published in 1995 and updated in 2005, it is a key resource in thinking
through issues regarding Indigenous representation in, and access to, archival and
library materials in Australia. While written specifically for dealing with materials

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involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and knowledge, I suggest that
many of the concepts and principles have broader applicability.
Building on the ATSILRN Protocols, the Protocols for Native American Archival
Materials (First Archivists Circle 2006), finally endorsed by the Society of Ameri-
can Archivists at its 2018 meeting, provide a number of culturally responsive recom-
mendations for implementation in archives and libraries, in conjunction with Native
American communities.
Both protocol documents heavily stress the need to include affected communi-
ties in discussions and decisions made about material held in libraries and archives,
to enable meaningful and ongoing consultation and collaboration. This means
acknowledging Indigenous rights to access and own material held in libraries and
archives; making materials accessible in culturally appropriate ways; and consult-
ing about how material is best arranged and described. Both the ATSILRN pro-
tocols and the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials also discuss the
importance of providing as much context as possible, to both assist with access and
retrieval and so that the context behind the records’ creation and use can be better
understood. This extends to the language used to catalogue and describe records—
and the need to explain the words used in the records too.
There are several projects about including Indigenous language and knowledge
into settler-colonial catalogues. In Canada, Project Naming at Library and Archives
Canada works with Indigenous communities to identify people in photos held by
LAC and provide more information about who they are and where the photographs
were taken (Library and Archives Canada 2018). A similar project in Australia is
Storylines, run out of the State Library of Western Australia (State Library of West-
ern Australia 2018), which also works with Indigenous communities to identify
people, and displays the outcomes in a specialised catalogue and viewing system.
The National Library of New Zealand maintains the Maori Subject Headings, which
provides standardised terms and subject headings for use in cataloguing library and
archival materials (National Library of New Zealand 2018). And in 2015, the Rijks-
museum in the Netherlands had a project called “Adjustment of Colonial Terminol-
ogy”, which aimed to remove now-offensive terms from artwork titles and descrip-
tions (Veselinovic 2015).
There is also discussion and work around naming and language when dealing
with historical materials about people with disabilities and mental illness. For exam-
ple, Meghan Rinn from the Barnum Museum in Connecticut, USA, examined the
issues with nineteenth century depictions of disabilities and consideration of asso-
ciated metadata within the PT Barnum Digital Collection (Rinn 2018). The team
at the Adamson Collection Trust, part of the Wellcome Collection in the UK, held
workshops to establish how artworks produced as part of therapy by patients in
asylums should be described and made available, discussing issues around owner-
ship, naming of creators, and terminology used to describe the works (O’Flynn et al.
2018).
These ideas also bleed into feminist archival theory, notably Caswell and Cifor’s
(2016) concept of radical empathy, both for archives and archivists themselves,
and users and consumers of archives. While the broad idea of radical empathy has
been taken up by the archival community, it is important to remember that ideas

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around radical empathy can also be used to reshape and reconceptualise archival
description.
The issue of naming and language has therefore been discussed in the literature,
discussed in various professional settings and discussed within individual archives
and libraries; however, there is no consensus about how organisations may best
grapple with these issues and come to terms with them, or mitigate the harm that
ongoing, unproblematised use of this language may cause.
The case study below presents one mitigation tactic in relation to language: it is
acknowledged that this may not suit all collections or environments, but it hopefully
provides the basis for discussions within other groups.

Find & Connect web resource

The Find & Connect web resource, run by the eScholarship Research Centre, Uni-
versity of Melbourne, is funded by the Australian Department of Social Services
to provide a service for Care Leavers and their support services, to assist with the
records searching and access process. Coming out of the Australian Government’s
Apology to Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants in 2009, the web
resource is part of the broader Find & Connect services which include support
services in each State and Territory that people who were in out of home care as
children can access (including people identifying as Forgotten Australians, Former
Child Migrants, members of the Stolen Generations, Care Leavers). The terminol-
ogy and categories for people who grew up in ‘care’ in Australia is contested, and I
acknowledge that people may identify with these terms, other terms, or none. I use
the term Care Leaver to refer to anyone who spent time in out of home ‘care’ in Aus-
tralia. Likewise, the use of the word ‘care’ in inverted commas is used to acknowl-
edge that not everyone who grew up in an institutional or out-of-home setting was
adequately cared for.
The web resource can be considered post-custodial (see for example, Bastian
2002; Kelleher 2017), in that it does not hold or make available records itself, but
instead points to where records are and which organisations are responsible for
them.
As of April 2019, there are over 16,000 entries covering all states and jurisdic-
tions in Australia, with over 2000 institutions that provided care listed (e.g., orphan-
ages, family group homes, missions, other residential out of home care facilities)
and over 1800 entries for record-related material—individual archival items, records
series and larger archival collections held by a variety of organisations—past and
current providers of out of home care, church archives, government organisations,
social work groups, universities, state and national archives, and libraries. The web
resource also includes information about key events and legislation providing the
historical framework for institutional care. It was initially populated through the
work of state-based historians, who researched the institutions, located records and
added this information to the site (Swain 2014).
Find & Connect, and its predecessor, a Victoria-only site called Pathways, was
developed as a “public knowledge space”, constructed to enable multiple points

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of entry, express complexity, and connections through relationships, and was built
using standards to ensure consistency of description and to facilitate data sharing
(McCarthy and Evans 2012).
In developing material for Find & Connect, a deliberate decision was made to not
elevate or privilege one type of knowledge or information over another. For archi-
vists and historians, official histories are often where research or description starts.
However, it was known that many official histories did not tell the full story of peo-
ple’s time in ‘care’, and there was a need to look for multiple sources to develop
entries for the site. It was explicitly acknowledged that the lived experience of Care
Leavers was important knowledge, to be treated in the same way as other sources of
knowledge and information, such as official reports and records; policy and research;
and the knowledge and experiences of people working in these organisations (Hum-
phreys and Kertesz 2012).
When considering the records documenting the out-of-home ‘care’ system, these
too need further interrogation. In many cases, records are incorrect, recording incor-
rect or inaccurate information about families, children, and in some cases, in basic
identity details (Wilson and Golding 2016; Senate Community Affairs Reference
Committee 2004, pp. 269–270). Many records have used judgemental language to
describe children and their families. As much as possible, Find & Connect tries to
make institutions’ and Care Leavers’ perspectives available side by side, where offi-
cial government accounts are problematised by Care Leaver experiences. Swain has
referred to this as doing “contrapuntal” history, where multiple and often contradic-
tory voices are presented together (Swain 2014; see also Maier 2003).
Much of the work doing contrapuntal history on Find & Connect involves placing
material in the context in which it was from. For example, when writing an entry
about an institution, information from government reports and other official publica-
tions are explicitly marked as such, instead of being recorded by an omniscient nar-
rator as fact or uncontested truth, with no source. Likewise, the testimony from Care
Leavers is also presented with the context to understand why it has been added, and
what relevance it has to the entry.
Indeed, it could be said that the whole aim of Find & Connect can be boiled down
to providing context. The purpose of including entries like legislation and events
is so the full context of the history of child welfare can be known: to help explain
why certain decisions were made within the legislative framework of the time, and
in some cases, why certain words or phrases were used to describe the children in
‘care’ (Find & Connect web resource 2018). The web resource therefore maps the
context of child welfare, the context of relevant records and creates relationships
between all of these things to provide additional knowledge and meaning.
As well as the content developed by Find & Connect staff working on the project,
the web resource also lists archival collections, series, and items. The archival mate-
rial is deliberately described in ways that provide the most amount of information
to our audience. For example, entries about large archival collections will highlight
the parts relevant to child welfare and out of home ‘care’, rather than providing lists
of everything in the collection, as the finding aid produced by the archive holding
the records would do. Likewise, large organisations or government departments are
described in terms of their relevance to child welfare and Care Leavers, rather than

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providing comprehensive overviews of everything they were responsible for (see, for
example, O’Neill 2014).
Additionally, in recognition of the importance of photographs to Care Leavers,
photographs of institutions, buildings, and where appropriate, children, are included
in large numbers, along with digitised archival documents. As with the archival
material, the original photographs and documents are not held by Find & Connect,
but instead by a wide variety of institutions who gave permission to Find & Connect
to use these on the site.
In line with the principles on which the Web resource was based, digitised docu-
ments and photographs had previously been described in line with archival descrip-
tive standards. This meant that the documents and photographs were entered using
the original titles recorded in the archives’ and libraries’ catalogues—using the lan-
guage present in the catalogues or finding aids to populate the Find & Connect ‘title’
field. No context was provided around the ‘title’ field, the origins of these titles, or
that they were from other institutions’ catalogues. This practice of using original
titles with no context or commentary changed in 2017.

Language, distance, time, and space

In 2017, the Find & Connect team started to have discussions around issues of lan-
guage, representation and archival description. After feedback from multiple users
of the site including Care Leavers, we were concerned that we were inadvertently
alienating some of our audience through the way material was described and pre-
sented; and that users were not finding the information they needed as a result. We
discussed how archival information could be best presented and contextualised for
our audiences, and acknowledged that the way archival material had been described
on Find & Connect was in many ways at odds with the way information about insti-
tutions and homes had been added.
Because of the history of institutional care in Australia, there were several over-
lapping groupings, descriptors and vocabularies used in relation to people who were
in ‘care’ and their families. This language included descriptions of Indigenous peo-
ple and children with disabilities and mental illness and showed attitudes towards
unwed mothers, poor people, and children, who, through no fault of their own,
became entangled within the child welfare system.
The first issue we discussed was that much of the language used in the records
in relation to the groups described above is now considered outdated and offensive.
They are not terms in current use today; or they are recognised as a slur or insult
if they are used. Several authors have discussed the affective nature of records and
archives, and within this context, the ongoing power and effect the records can have
on the people within them (see for example, Wilson and Golding 2016; O’Neill
et al. 2012; Brilmyer 2018; Cifor and Gilliland 2016).
Second, because of how the material is presented on Find & Connect, it was not
clear that these titles had not been added or imposed by project staff. To populate
the ‘title’ field, staff would use the title listed in the catalogue from the organisation
or archive where the record was held. The title field is given prominence on the site,

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displayed in a larger font and at the top of the entry. No explanation or commen-
tary about where the words in the title were from was provided. Feedback emails
received at the Web resource indicated that many users were angry and insulted by
the language displayed, and believed it had been added by Find & Connect staff (see
Swain 2014, pp. 47–48 for a discussion of feedback emails).
This issue led to a discussion within the Web resource team about where and how
Find & Connect exists in relation to the material listed on the site. Archival material
is listed because it is of relevance to our audience, and comes from a vast variety
of organisations. While Find & Connect can advocate for best practice and work
with organisations to improve their archival listing practices, Find & Connect is not
responsible and has no control over how archival material is catalogued, digitised
and made available by the organisations who hold it.
For many people, Find & Connect is the first site they access when beginning the
search for records of their childhoods. It may not be immediately apparent to those
people entering the site that it is meant to be archival, or that it is based on archival
descriptive principles. Additionally, it is likely that many people using Find & Con-
nect for the first time have not previously experienced archives or undertaken archi-
val research (Jones and O’Neill 2014; Valderhaug 2011).
Through the use of analytics and usability testing we were aware that many
people enter a specific page as a result of doing a web search, rather than through
accessing the homepage first (see Jones and O’Neill 2014, pp. 118–119 for a discus-
sion of usability testing methodology). In many cases, the search will be the name
of an institution they or their family members were in, and they will be taken to the
entry about that institution as the first result. This means that first-time users often
bypass the homepage of Find & Connect, which provides more contextual informa-
tion and links to explanations about what the site is and how to use it.
Acknowledging the broad audience of Find & Connect, and the diverse and dispa-
rate access to education that many Care Leavers had, means issues such as lower lit-
eracy and lack of computer expertise need to be addressed through the site’s design
and usability as well as content (Jones and O’Neill 2014). The site was deliberately
designed to look and act like a broad knowledge space, rather than specifically (or
traditionally) archival (McCarthy et al. 2014).
However, for the display of archival materials and language, it also means that
users do not get the same contextual “cues” they would from a standard archives
or library catalogue, that indicate they are receiving search results likely to include
historical material (and associated language). It is therefore unsurprising that many
of our audience—who may also be unfamiliar with archival research—believed that
the language displayed was the language used by the people who had developed the
site.
Finally, and much more pragmatically, the use of historical language may also
mean people do not find what they are searching for, or do not get expected search
results, as they will search using current terms rather than outdated historical terms.
In many cases, the language used in the archival documents will not have been used
in that way for well over 50 years. It may not occur to users to utilise this vocabulary
while searching. This vocabulary includes the pseudo-scientific method of labelling,
categorising—and therefore controlling through laws and policies—Aboriginal and

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Torres Strait Islander people by the perceived levels of Indigenous blood, leading
to designations of “octoroon”, “quadroon” and “half-caste” (McCorquodale 1986).
It is also reflected in the names of institutions providing out of home ‘care’: Minda
Home for Weak-Minded Children (Parry 2014), Belmont Crippled Children’s Home
(George and George 2014).
While this is primarily a practical issue—we want people to find what they need
based on their search—issues of power and the reproduction of powerful systems
play out here too. As Rinn (2018) discusses, continued use of outdated language also
runs the risk of describing people and events in outdated and discredited terms—and
the ideas and power structures which go along with these. Describing and reproduc-
ing these words, ideas and structures gives them legitimacy over time. It also forces
users to engage with terms and ideas which are offensive, insulting, and potentially
traumatic.
As others have highlighted in relation to other aspects of archival description
(for example Duff and Harris 2002; Brilmyer 2018), reproducing the same unequal
power structures which existed at the time of records creation and forcing the indi-
viduals who have experience of this power imbalance first-hand to then interact with
the same structures and systems, is problematic. This is perhaps particularly the case
when considering a group like Care Leavers, whose childhoods were in many ways
characterised by a great power imbalance imposed by the state or religious groups.
It is also important to consider that the myth of archival neutrality also means
that archivists not only reproduce power structures of the past, but the dominant cul-
ture of the present. This also comes about through deliberate inaction and a lack
of willingness to make changes, not just through damaging actions. As Sentance
(2018a) states, “Inaction by memory institutions is not neutral, it is supporting cur-
rent oppressive structures”. It is also the case that archives (and museums and librar-
ies) were established as part of the settler-colonial state, and thus reinforcing this
paradigm is built deep within these structures (Sentance 2018b; de Jesus 2014).
Issues of language and power and how archival material is to be displayed is per-
haps a more pressing issue now than ever before: events including inquiries and the
Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2017a) plus
the recently established National Redress Scheme (Department of Social Services
2018) have once again highlighted the issue of people who spent their childhoods in
out of home care, and we have more people than ever searching the site and looking
for records.
Because of these issues, in 2017 it was determined that the way the Find & Con-
nect web resource would title archival material and use historical language would
change.

Our policy

We decided that a starting place for addressing these issues was to develop a policy
around the use and display of historical language on the web resource. It was inter-
esting to discover that, although anecdotally, we knew of other organisations that

13
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were undertaking similar work, we could not find any examples of policies or formal
position statements about this issue.
We considered that this may be because of the distance Find & Connect has from
the material it lists—it is another step removed from the archival material, and as
previously discussed, explicitly works to provide a website which has information
useful for Care Leavers. We wondered if this distance may mean the web resource
has more flexibility around making changes of this nature, compared to the institu-
tions who hold the records.
Our policy (Find & Connect web resource 2017) highlights that much of the lan-
guage historically used to describe people who were in care is considered offensive,
derogatory and inappropriate today.
The policy also states that it is not our intention to censor or sugar-coat the his-
tory of ‘care’. As many inquiries and the recent Royal Commission have demon-
strated (see, for example, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997;
Senate Community Affairs Reference Committee 2001, 2004; Royal Commission
into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse 2017a), many children’s experi-
ence of out of home care was characterised by abuse, emotional neglect and lack
of access to education, among other issues. Additionally, as the Royal Commission
recently demonstrated, the abuse and neglect within institutional care was a struc-
tural hallmark of the system, rather than being perpetrated by a “few bad apples”
(see, for example Salter 2018; Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to
Child Sexual Abuse 2017b, pp. 28–29). It is not our intention to shy away from this,
or to present everything in a neutral, non-affective light.
The policy also recognises the importance of keeping the original titles available
for multiple reasons: importantly, the title or caption forms part of the key identity
information for that object—the title is necessary to ensure the archival documents
and images can be located within the archive, library or other collection they are
from. This is particularly important for Find & Connect as its primary purpose is to
link to other organisations and sites, rather than holding any material itself.
Keeping the original titles available is also important precisely because it does
demonstrate the language (and thus, the policy or underlying opinions) of the time.
As discussed above, the Find & Connect web resource exists primarily to provide
context, and these historical policies and underlying attitudes are an important part
of this context. As the policy recognises, the institutional care system in Australia
was “based on policies and practices that were based on racist ideologies, moralistic
ideas about women, children and families, and eugenicist views of people with disa-
bilities or mental illness” (Find & Connect web resource 2017). This is an important
part of the histories we provide, thus the need to retain the original titles.
The outcome was that the full titles, as well as other identifying metadata like call
numbers or reference numbers, were moved into a field called “Archival reference”.
This enables this information to be better contextualised as part of the information
required to retrieve or verify an item from the organisation where it is held. Provid-
ing this additional context also makes it clearer that these titles are attached to the
archival material as part of its historical context, rather than being added or imposed
by Find & Connect staff working today.

13
Archival Science (2019) 19:331–348 343

In some cases, language we would now consider offensive was used to name
Homes or institutions providing out of home care. In these cases, our policy states
that we are not removing or changing these. This is how the places were known,
and how they will be searched for—and again goes back to revealing the attitudes
and policies of the time. To provide further context around this, the web resource
also has a Content Warning (Find & Connect web resource 2016) which is avail-
able via a link on any page. This content warning talks generally about content on
the site potentially being confronting or disturbing for people, but there is a sec-
tion specifically about language and how and why original language is sometimes
reproduced. We also have a page listing abbreviations and terms used on records,
for people to use in conjunction with the records they receive (Find & Connect
web resource 2018).
With around 5000 entries to go through, moving the relevant information into
the “Archival reference” field is still ongoing, and is being done in tandem with
additional work to consolidate the material listed on Find & Connect.
As Find & Connect staff work through the multiple entries, it has been inter-
esting to observe that many of these so-called “original” titles are actually not
original, when compared with the archival document. Many titles have been
imposed by organisational staff over the years, although this is rarely noted or
explicitly stated. This calls into question the archival profession’s apparent adher-
ence to maintaining original order and original language: it is stated to be a key
principle, however we have found many examples where this is clearly not the
case, but where there is no transparency about who added the descriptive infor-
mation, or at what time. This also again reinforces the point about neutrality: In
adding new titles with no attribution or context, the dominant culture is again
subtly reinforced.
As Brilmyer (2018, p. 96) observes, being transparent about the decisions made
behind the record—how it came to be in a collection, why it was digitised and by
whom, who decided to describe it in a particular way: much of the information not
currently publicly provided—can be extremely useful for users to better understand
the hows, whys, and whos of a record and a collection.
Additionally, the imposing of titles by archives staff also leads to questions about
how their biases and the contexts they were working in were also used to silence and
marginalise the people in the records. This is particularly the case for minorities and
people with no agency such as children within the child welfare system. As Cas-
well (2014) has discussed, there are clearly silences within records and archives—in
many cases directly linked to the bureaucratic, colonial, or totalitarian regimes in
control of the archives and the records within them. There are also the silences cre-
ated through archival description and listing practices. With the archival profession’s
traditional adherence to ideas of neutrality based on “just” describing what is “in”
the records, this exercise has shown us that this clearly is not the case; and that the
interventions of the archivist must be much more explicit and clear.
We were also conscious about the role of archival description in continuing to
reproduce the power structures and systems of the past, and that by passively using
the language of these systems we were continuing to reproduce systems that had
caused great injustice and harm. The policy enabled us to explicitly make the

13
 344 Archival Science (2019) 19:331–348

distinction between our use of historical language properly contextualised, and the
uncritical, ongoing use of it.
The policy received a variety of reactions. Some people were outraged that we
would dare to change a word and make any commentary about the appropriateness
(or not) of continuing to reproduce this language. Others believed we did not go
far enough—that the offensive language should be explicitly crossed out with a red
strikethrough and contextualised commentary added about why these words should
no longer be used, and the impact they may have on people.
The language policy has enabled us to have a framework around our descriptive
practices and reminded us to be more aware of the language we use in our descrip-
tions on the Find & Connect web resource. It has also explicitly put context at the
forefront of our work and ensures we always provide contextual information about
the sources we are using and why the sources may be using certain language. While
our approach may not be suitable for all organisations, we hope it is a useful starting
point for others grappling with similar issues.
Based on our work in developing and enacting this policy, we have also embarked
on a review of our descriptive practices more broadly. While it has always been the
practice on the Find & Connect web resource to include the voices of those who
grew up in institutions in our descriptions of the Homes alongside organisational
or other official accounts, we recognised that, in some cases, a lack of attribution
about where the information had come from again meant that it appeared that Find
& Connect staff were the ones to hold or at least endorse particular words and views.
We will be working to make it clearer in our descriptions who is saying what—to
further contextualise the information we are providing; and also so we are more con-
scious about not enabling the more powerful voice (that of the institution or organi-
sation) be normalised as the ‘default’ voice above the voices of people with lived
experience.

Metadata and records

I believe it is required of archivists to make more deliberate and conscious choices

about their descriptions, metadata and descriptive standards more broadly. However,
I strongly believe it is not the role of the archivist to redact or otherwise limit access
to records because of concerns about historical viewpoints. For example, in May
2018, it was reported that the Western Australian Registry of Births, Deaths and
Marriages had been redacting any references to someone being Aboriginal (Turner
2018). This is not appropriate.
Many Care Leavers have discussed the impact of redaction and secrecy around
records and the damage and ongoing trauma this has caused. This issue has been
raised in multiple inquires and during submissions to the Royal Commission. In
many cases, the redacted information is precisely the information Care Leavers
are hoping to find in their records, particularly the names of siblings and parents.
The Care Leavers’ Australasia Network (2016, pp. 5–7) has described in detail the
impact and hurt receiving redacted records can cause; and guidelines developed by
the Department of Social Services advocate for applying a principle of “maximum

13
Archival Science (2019) 19:331–348 345

access” to provide as much information as possible to Care Leavers (Department of

Social Services 2015, pp. 20–29).
Instead, what archivists must do is provide context—primarily through descrip-
tive processes, including descriptions of how and why the records were created, how
they came to be in the repository they are now in, decisions made by archivists,
and descriptions of the records themselves. These processes, and other explanatory
material provided, flesh out the records and make clearer the historical and policy
context in which these words were used. But the records themselves must be left as
they are.

Conclusion: language, archives, and power

It important that we think of our archival practices and processes as critical inter-
ventions, as deliberate and conscious acts, rather than a passive set of objective tasks
which must be followed with no thought as to why or how these are done. Addition-
ally, exposing more of the context of what archivists do—how and when decisions
are made (and by who); how collections are processed and described; and resulting
implications for access and use—enables users to understand our processes more,
and be more informed about the collection, and the archives, they are using.
It is also critical that we consider more the power of archivists and how that
power can be wielded, who that power benefits and what the implications for
description and use are. In many cases, the unthinking and uncritical reproduction of
historical language may alienate potential users or cause further distrust, or in some
cases, traumatisation.
While the issues I have discussed are not new to the archival profession, there
are fewer discussions into transitioning into practical actions which can be taken
by individuals and organisations to overcome or mitigate these issues. The practical
actions must be preceded by a determination to relinquish power, and to be more
transparent about archival work and the impact on individuals.
These issues are also paramount to consider when describing new archival mate-
rials today. It is easy to cling to the narrative of practices being bad in the past,
and we can rectify these past practices, in part because they are not happening now.
This does not acknowledge a continuation between past and current practice. We see
this within large-scale systems (including child welfare) as well as within specific
contexts such as archival description. Therefore, in undertaking archival description
today, consideration of actions and contexts must be made explicit from the outset,
as well as consultation with affected communities.
In this way, we can make our traces and work more visible, enabling a more
holistic view of an archive and the collections it holds, and open up the archives to
new users, interpretations, and understandings.

Acknowledgements  The Find & Connect web resource is funded by the Department of Social Services,
Australia. The author would like to thank members of the Find & Connect web resource team, and two
anonymous reviewers, for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. 

13
 346 Archival Science (2019) 19:331–348

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and institutional affiliations.

Kirsten Wright  is the Program Manager, Find & Connect web resource, eScholarship Research Centre,
University of Melbourne. Prior to this, she held a number of roles at Victoria University, including Uni-
versity Archivist, Manager, Records and Archives Services and Freedom of Information Coordinator, and
she also worked at the Public Record Office Victoria. Kirsten holds a BA in history and politics and a
Master of Information Management and Systems, both from Monash University. She is interested in non-
traditional forms of records and archives and has previously published and presented on topics including
tattoos and the archive, ghost signs, and archives and power.

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