Just as it is important to critically interrogate the primary sources that live in digital collections, it is also important to interrogate the digital collections themselves. How were these collections created? Whose voices are missing from them? How does that impact your research and understanding of history? Can we find these voices elsewhere? This 2-part module will allow you to meditate on the presences and absences within collections and consider their impact on your research.
Learning objectives
Approximately 30 minutes per part, 60 minutes total
Internet access
Microsoft Excel
Just like the collections of books you find in libraries and the collections of papers you find in archives, digital collections are created and curated by people. An immense amount of work is involved—which inherently means an immense amount of decision-making. First, librarians and archivists decide what materials should be collected. Then, they describe these materials in the way that they believe will enable you to find and access these materials.
Implicit and explicit bias—on the part of the staff doing this work and the broader institution—can affect all of these decisions, including which communities, voices, and perspectives make it into a digital collection, and which ones do not.
There are a number of reasons why certain histories and communities may be excluded from digital collections, including:
Institutions—like many syllabi, academia, and the culture at large—may prioritize collecting and promoting works and materials by dominant cultures.
Institutions may prioritize collecting materials from people of prominent societal positions, which are often white men due to systemic and historic bias.
Ephemeral materials—like flyers, newspapers, mass-market paperback books, and social media posts—which capture the lived experiences of more communities, are less durable and likely to disintegrate, and thus never make it to digital collections.
Materials used by people from privileged, affluent classes are often prioritized for collection for their aesthetic value (for example, an illuminated manuscript versus a paperback book).
Some communities do not generate as much physical materials that could thereafter be digitized and included in a digital collection, such as transitory or orally-based communities.
Items are catalogued with outdated terms or terms not used by the community.
Items are not described fully or accurately, because the librarian or archivist cataloguing the material is not from that community and thus does not understand the full complexities of the item.
So, if you are looking at a collection and wondering why certain materials or perspectives are missing, first you could ask yourself, are there gaps because the materials aren’t there? Or, are there gaps because they are described poorly and thus you cannot find the materials?
Why do gaps in collections matter? Because if materials from different communities aren’t being preserved, then their perspectives are missing from the historical record. Such absences can also limit the types of research you can do.
Take for example, this very cool collection of Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, which is housed at UCLA Library Special Collections. The collection includes an illuminated psalter, rental records from the 16th century, and an engineer’s sketchbook. All of these items are rich resources for research, but all are created or used by people of authority and position—clergy, landlords, and engineers. What about the perspectives of the people who attended church, rented land, or assisted the engineer in bringing inventions to life? These perspectives are missing from a collection of manuscripts, likely in part because: (1) the materials to create manuscripts were expensive and thus limited to affluent classes, and (2) historical collecting biases favored materials from people in prominent positions.
As the library and archival fields reckon with such biases, some collections are attempting to address this imbalance, featuring voices, communities, and materials that were historically excluded from collections. The International Digital Ephemera Project, for example, features cellphone videos, fragile early 20th-century newspapers, and posters. Many of these materials were used during political movements and represent significant cultural and research value, but due to their ephemeral nature would likely be lost without proactive collection. The International Digital Ephemera Project attempts to capture perspectives that historically were marginalized or lost due to the ephemeral nature of the items documenting them.
So, what can you do after you’ve identified missing perspectives from a collection? There are a few steps you can take in your research to try to find these voices.
Unfortunately, despite taking all of these steps, there will likely be some perspectives you’ll be unable to recover because their records were never maintained and are lost to history. If you are unable to recover these perspectives, it is important to evaluate how that will impact your research. You may need to adjust your research questions, and acknowledge these absences within your final work.
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