Archives In Rainbow

 On Monday, May, 5th, our colleagues of the SAA Privacy and Confidentiality Section (SAA-PCS) hosted a panel discussion titled Protecting the Privacy of Trans People in Archives . For an hour and a half, we enjoyed the explanations and insights of three archivists who are experts on this topic. While archivists have long followed ethical best practices for protecting individual privacy, the profession lacks specific guidelines that address the unique and complex privacy vulnerabilities of trans individuals. The panel discussion was focused on offering and sharing insights and practices to help address this situation. The first one was Lara Wilson . She is Director of Special Collections and University Archivist at the University of Victoria (UVic), British Columbia. UVic has the world's first Chair in Transgender Studies, launched in 2016.   Lara began by reading a letter of solidarity and collaboration from the President of the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA) regard...

 March is Women's History Month. Archives In Rainbow (AIR) closes March celebrating the Mazer Lesbian Archives. In this way AIR concludes a triptych consisting of three posts dedicated to feminist, lesbian and women archives after celebrating the 50 years of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in AIR#06, and the 90th anniversary of Audre Lorde and her archival legacy in AIR#07. The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives was founded in 1981 in Oakland, California, by Lynn Fonfa, Claire Potter, Cherrie Cox and others as the West Coast Lesbian Collections (WCLC). In 1985 the archives moved to West Hollywood, Southern California, in collaboration with activist and researcher Jean Conger and Connexxus Women's Center / Centro de Mujeres of West Hollyood. The WCLC was settled at the home of June L. Mazer and her partner Nancy "Bunny" MacCulloch, members of the South California Women for Understanding (SCWU), in Altadena, California. After Mazer passed away prematurely in 1987, the WCLC to...

To close the celebration of Black History Month we would like to dedicate AIR#07 post to the life and work of Audre Lorde. Audre Geraldine Lorde (Harlem, NYC, Feb. 18, 1934 - Saint Croix, US Virgin Islands, Nov. 17, 1992) was a self-described "Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet", but she went far beyond as a philosopher, writer, librarian, professor, a person with disabilites and an activist. Her life was a succession of stages through philosophical knowledge and political activity that led her to become a ineludible reference in American culture and philosophy during the second half of the 20th century. The archival legacy of Lorde is spread through different institutions. The majority of Lorde's documents is at the Spelman College Archives in Atlanta, as stated by the writer before prematurely passing away in 1992. As per the finding aid , the collection includes books, correspondence, poetry, prose, periodical contributions, manuscripts, diari...

The Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA) in New York are celebrating 50 years since their foundation in 1974. The institution is one of the oldest LGBTQIA+ archives in the country and even in the world. But they are more than an archive about the Lesbian community. They have become a global reference in the documentation of Lesbian women lives and experiences; a museum; and a center of activism and intersectional solidarity and sisterhood that gather women of different ages and origins but with the same objective: to recover and to be inspired by the lives of the women that love and desire other women. We can consider LHA as the first LGBTQIA+ archives with the explicit aim of documenting the reality of the community, especially from the past, but not exclusively. The initiative arises from the evidence of the passivity, if not negligence, of institutional archives when it comes to document and to preserve the memory of Lesbian women. It is the first time that an archive dedicated to th...