AIR#17. Describing LGBTQ Archival Materials

 


 The DSGS Annual Meeting is here! Do you want to learn about the latest on LGBTQIA2S+ achival materials description? Join us at the 38th Annual Meeting of the Diverse Sexuality and Gender Section (SAA-DSGS) on Monday, May, 4th, 2026 from 1pm to 2.30pm (Central).

Following a brief report on the Section’s activities, we will hear from three young professionals on the topic Queer Complexities. Describing LGBTQ Archival Materials, by Gabrielle Garcia, Ron Martin-Dent and Isaac Fellman. Today, with violence against LGBTQ+ communities on the rise, documenting and preserving their stories and narratives is crucial. How we describe LGBTQ+ archival materials is essential in document management workflows to ensure their accessibility and dissemination. LGBTQ+ community archives are vital spaces for collecting, preserving, and sharing evidence of queer life and culture. At the same time, these archives face singular operational challenges. Whether it’s navigating institutional transitions, upgrading internal systems, enhancing collection metadata, or finding the right language to describe multifaceted materials, archivists navigate these complex situations to make queer and trans history accessible for all users. Join us as we introduce three LGBTQ+ community archives and discuss some of the recent challenges they have faced. We will end with a discussion of how archives can integrate the Homosaurus linked data vocabulary to aid in the description and discovery of LGBTQ+ archival materials.

Gabriella Garcia (they/he/she) currently serves as the Head Archivist of Lambda Archives of San Diego. They have a background in community, university, and private archives, in addition to arts organizations and museums. She presently serves on the Implementation Board of Homosaurus and is a former board member of the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network (LGBTQ-RAN) that celebrates 25 years of history. He is passionate about critical and reparative description, LGBTQ histories, and building intentional and reciprocal relationships between archives and their communities.



Ron Martin-Dent (he/him) currently serves as the Archives and Special Collections Librarian at Fort Hays State University (FHSU-SC&UA). He previously served as a contract archivist for the Shoulders to Stand On LGBTQ+ community archive at the Rochester Public Library. His research interests include community archives, book arts, and local LGBTQ+ histories. He is a member of a project team led by Dr. Bridget Whearty (Binghamton University-SUNY) to create the open-education resource Always Here: a Queer+Trans Global Medieval Sourcebook.

Isaac Fellman (he/him) is the Assistant Director at the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA). He has worked in archives since 2016 and in LGBTQ archives since 2019. His interests include the use of historical terms to describe LGBTQ people in archives, privacy in online archives, and archives as a caring profession.

We look forward to see you all there. Please register to attend the meeting. Let’s queer the archives through the archival description!

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