Session 2F | Building Competence, Building Trust: Creating Culturally Competent (Re) Description in UTSA Special Collections’ Digital Collections

The concept of “culturally competent‚Äù description has been a very timely discussion point as GLAMs have been grappling with how to approach legacy descriptions that are often insensitive, offensive, or even blatantly racist or hurtful. In 2020, UTSA Special Collections staff dedicated time to exploring our legacy collections and critically evaluating the content and language we found. We will share how we collected knowledge on cultural competency and dismantling white supremacy from archival work, conducted a review of images and descriptions from a large legacy photograph collection, and created a path for reparative (re)descriptions that incorporate community feedback.