A Practical Guidebook to Trauma Informed Archival Practice: Best Practices and Case Studies

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Description

Using case studies and examples, this book helps archivists understand the different ways trauma can present in archival workers, patrons, and donors.

A Practical Guidebook to Trauma Informed Archival Practice: Best Practices and Case Studies looks at trauma in archival work through various user perspectives. Understanding the different types of traumas that can be expressed leads to creating policies and workflows that can help reduce the harm caused by potentially traumatic collections.

The authors focus on ways to reduce and minimize trauma across archival work through highlighting:

- The right and wrong ways to work with grieving donors
- How to identify trauma in archival workers and support staff, volunteers, and students before, during, and after exposure to trauma
- Enumerating the many effects of trauma on the body and the brain and offering short term and long-term solutions

This book is the practical guide to dealing with trauma in archives that will help not only the archivists who work with these difficult collections, but also patrons, donors, and users who interact with them.

Author Bio

Michelle Ganz is the Archives Director for the Dominican Sisters of Peace. She has previously worked in academic, museum, corporate, and private archives. Michelle is deaf, mixed race, queer, and weird which gives her a unique view of archival theory and practice. She has been a mentor for over 13 years, serving on the mentoring committee twice, as well as participating in the cohort mentoring program. Michelle has served in section leadership roles in the Accessibility & Disability Section, the Independent Archivists Section, and the Lone Arrangers Section; she has also served on several section steering committees and appointed task forces. She was part of the working group who first developed the Best Practices for Working with Archives Researchers with Physical Disabilities in 2008. She has served as the SAA representative for ALA Committee on Cataloging and has served on two ARMA International working groups. She has spoken about DEI for most of her career and works to support others who speak on the topic. Michelle regularly speaks to MLIS students in classes, in symposia, and through keynote presentations. Michelle was the recipient of the 2020 Spotlight Award and Subject of a 2020 Council Resolution honoring the Accessibility and Disability Section steering committee. Michelle has spoken on numerous SAA panels, taught workshops and webinars for the SAA, MAC and the SGA and has been published numerous times. She is currently serving on the SAA Council.

Veronica Denison is Assistant Professor and Digital Archivist and Special Collections Librarian at the Adams Library at Rhode Island Colleg. She has been an archivist for nearly 10 years and has spent much of her professional career working with donors with varying needs and collection types.