Archivists Jennifer Coggins and Monika Lehman

Archivists Jennifer Coggins and Monika Lehman—with fellow members of the Reparative Archival Description (RAD) Working Group—work to improve the quality, accuracy, and accessibility of the library’s archival records.

As co-chairs of RAD, they and the seven other members identify harmful or outdated language in the library’s vast repository of finding aids—the tools that describe the contents and organization of a collection. RAD’s goal is to update, contextualize, and improve the accuracy of the object descriptions in the finding aids, which scholars rely upon while conducting their research.

“I really see our work as a sort of everyday maintenance work,” Jennifer said, “part of the ongoing care of these collections that we are charged with stewarding. We are building on the work that our predecessors have done at the library, maybe rethinking the way that something was described, noticing something that was missing that we can add, thinking about how best to serve users today when they encounter descriptions of collections.”

Recommendations and collaborations

RAD members work together to make recommendations or changes to repair the obsolete or offensive language or provide explanatory context. “We’ve recently done a women’s names project, working in the collections at the Beinecke Library and in Manuscripts and Archives,” Monika explained. “We found instances in agent records and archive spaces where women were only referred to as ‘Mrs.’ and their husbands’ last names. RAD members did some research and then added the women’s first names.” With these changes, users are able to more easily identify the women represented in these collections and discover materials about or created by them.

Their projects are often prompted by a library user or library colleague who reaches out about language found in a finding aid that seems inaccurate or inappropriate. Jennifer said that they often later hear from those individuals, grateful that their concerns were taken seriously and were addressed so quickly.

“Our online presence, including our finding aids, plays a role in whether potential users of the library, potential visitors, feel welcome and feel the library is a place where they belong and should do their research,” Jennifer said.

Outside institutions also express thanks to RAD for sharing its reparative language strategies, which provides a model for them to follow. “We do try to be very transparent about our work and share things that might be useful to other people,” Jennifer said. “It’s always nice to hear that our work is useful even beyond our own library.”

RAD members routinely make recommendations to other repositories throughout the library system, including the Music Library and the Arts Library. They also reach out to other Yale groups regarding remediations and offer training sessions and drop-in-office hours.

Earlier this year, RAD members finished enhancing descriptions of collections central to the work of the Yale and Slavery Research Project. They worked closely with Hope McGrath—research coordinator for Connecticut, New Haven, and Yale history at Beinecke Library—who also plays a role in the research project. The Yale and Slavery Research Project, led by David W. Blight of the Gilder Lehrman Center, has documented the university’s historical ties to slavery, racism, and abolition.

“We are working now with a project that is a spinoff of that project,” Monika said. “We are enhancing the descriptions of about fourteen finding aids that reference the eugenics movement here on Yale’s campus from the 1920s.” The group enlisted the help of an undergraduate student from the Eugenics and Its Afterlives project to add context to the finding aids.

Serving the community

Monika has been at Beinecke Library for eight years, working primarily in the Yale Collection of American Literature. She arranges and describes collections of various types—including those of artists, dancers, writers, theater directors, and actors: the papers of the poet K. S. Ernst, the Living Theatre records, and the family papers of Thornton Wilder, to name a few. As archivist, her job is to make sure researchers can locate materials in the finding aid—the tool that describe the contents and organization of a collection—and that the materials are accessible to them.

Jennifer came to the library in 2019 as the collection development archivist for Manuscripts and Archives. Since the reorganization of Yale Library’s special collections in 2022, she has served as the community engagement archivist for Beinecke Library.

“The community engagement team also just launched the Early Black Yale Students website, in connection with the “Shining Light on Truth” exhibitions at the New Haven Museum and the Schwarzman Center here on campus,” she added. “That’s the culmination of a lot of research and a lot of work by a lot of people. We hope that work will serve as the foundation for a lot more ongoing research.”

As a member of the community engagement team, Jennifer’s role is to “bring the library to the people and the people to the library,” she said. She finds creative ways to connect people and groups beyond the library with the library’s resources, highlighting the connection of those resources to the local New Haven community through instruction sessions, open houses, online projects, and other efforts.

Jennifer also developed and leads Beinecke Library’s New Haven Community Archives Support program. In workshops and consultations, she teaches individuals, families, and organizations how to preserve and share their own archives. She not only provides community members with expertise in preservation, organization, and description, she also connects them with the supplies and tools they need to complete their project.

Learn more about RAD’s many ongoing and future projects.

—Deborah Cannarella