Please excuse cross-postings.
Please join the Society of American Archivists' (SAA) Crisis, Disaster, and Tragedy Response Working Group (CDTRWG) for their first in a series of public talks in 2023:
Archiving disaster support group records: a guide for professionals and support groups
Kostas Arvanitis, University of Manchester
Anne Eyre, Centre for Collective Trauma
Jen Kavanagh, Independent curator and oral historian
Wednesday 1st March 2023 (10am-11am CT / 4-5pm GMT)
RSVP: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUpdOqtrD4iE9DE5keWg3UnZijHXnpqxceG
Summary
Individuals affected by disaster often instinctively collect information and artefacts about the tragedy they have experienced. Some bereaved family members and survivors also join with others affected by the same or similar incidents go on to form support groups which in turn generate and organisational documents and records. These may include, for example, newspaper articles, video accounts, media reports, photographs, memorial or anniversary services sheets, campaign records and/or correspondence with politicians and others.
It is not unusual for individuals and support groups to continue to collect and retain such materials over time about the tragedy and connected events over time. The materials often hold huge personal and emotional, significance to their owners. The archives that develop can also become 'sacred' in the sense of holding huge personal and emotional, significance to their owners. They are often carefully gathered and stored and treated with special respect.
All these records and archives help to tell different stories – personal, organisational and societal. They can also be of social, historical, cultural and political interest, not only for those first owning and retaining them, but also to cultural, heritage and civic organisations interested in acquiring them. Such organisations face often a number of challenges, including building trust with the support group, defining the scope of a possible archive, and developing a sensitive practice of engaging with the group throughout the process.
In this talk Kostas Arvanitis, Anne Eyre and Jen Kavanagh will talk about a guide for archiving disaster support group records, which is designed for professionals and support groups. The guide is the outcome of a relevant project, which was funded by the University of Manchester, UK. From January to August 2022, a team of collective trauma and heritage consultants and academic researchers worked with members of the September 11 UK Families Support Group (S11UKFSG) in understanding and articulating the motivations, aims, value, use and challenges of the formation of an archive of S11UKFSG's work.
CDTRWG maintains and updates SAA's Documenting in Times of Crisis: A Resource Kit; develops and provides immediate and ongoing resources and response assistance to archivists, allied cultural heritage professionals, and their communities in times of tragedies, disasters, or other crises; and builds partnerships with organizations focused on relief efforts and cultural stewardship and preservation. As part of that partnership building, we are conducting a series of public talks in 2023 to hear about related work.
The recording of this talk will be made available after the event on the Working Group's webpages.
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Kara McClurken
Director, Preservation Services
University of Virginia Libraries
She/Her/Hers
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