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Introducing our Keynote Speaker:

It was the summer of 2013 when Edward Snowden’s revelations were published detailing US government mass surveillance. Around the same time, the nascent Black Lives Matter movement began after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, and quickly began to sound the alarm against both interpersonal and police-involved racist violence against Black people.

During this time, Alison Macrina was working as a librarian at a public library. Already a lifelong activist for political and social justice causes, she began to make connections between what Snowden revealed about government spying, and what Black Lives Matter activists were illuminating about racist targeting. Alison had been motivated to become a librarian in part because of the librarian-activists who had years before opposed the USAPATRIOT Act at a time when public dissent was marginalized. These librarians had rightly recognized that broad surveillance powers were not only undemocratic and unconstitutional, but would serve to further target already vulnerable members of our society, such as people of color, Muslims, and immigrants. What Snowden had revealed brought forth the worst of what these librarians anticipated could come from the Patriot Act. Alison wanted to continue this legacy of radical librarianship, connect with other values-driven librarians, and bring practical information to the public about how to protect privacy, intellectual freedom, and information access.

Alison began by teaching classes and installing privacy software on patron computers at her public library. She connected with Kade Crockford and Jessie Rossman of the ACLU of Massachusetts, and together they began offering trainings for other librarians in the region. There was a high amount of interest in this work, and it quickly snowballed. Alison began making connections with more people and organizations in the privacy space, including April Glaser and others at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as technologists at the Tor Project. Media attention for Alison’s work soon followed, and at the end of 2014, she was awarded funding from the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge for Libraries to take her work across the United States. Thus, Library Freedom Project was born.

Since then, Library Freedom Project has trained thousands of library workers on the practical application of our values using a social justice lens. At LFP we refer to these values as “information democracy” – meaning that people should be able to access the information that they need safely and freely without barriers. Meeting library workers around the country, Alison realized that there was an opportunity to build deeper community around this work. In 2018, she launched Library Freedom Institute, an intensive training program for library workers to gain skills on protecting and promoting information democracy. Participants in Library Freedom Institute would learn together in a supportive environment, and then invited to continue building together as part of the LFP community. Alison ran different versions of LFI from 2018 through 2022.

Today that LFP community is thriving, with nearly 150 members across the US, and some in Canada and Mexico. Our community collaborates together on resources, programming, policy and more. We host meetings and support one another in making this work happen in our library communities. We continue to build through our newly launched LFP regional hubs – spaces for library workers to connect, learn, have generative conversations, and help to build the library world that we all want. 

[biography taken from Library Freedom Project Values page]

Presentation & Discussion Lead by Victoria Pilato

As a digital collections librarian working with cultural heritage materials, intellectual property is always integral to my workflow. This has meant navigating U.S. copyright law, Indigenous community rights, privacy concerns, and moral rights. Tools like Creative Commons licensing, rights statements, and carefully crafted terms of use pages allowed librarians to confidently approach fair use and open access. However, the rapid rise of large language models (LLMs) has altered this landscape. 

In this presentation, I will explore how the emergence of LLMs has complicated the ethical and legal dimensions of digital collection building, particularly for oral history projects. As an example, I am using my current and ongoing oral history digital project for Stony Brook University and the Climate Knowledge Collective, titled Feminists Shifting Paradigms for Environmental Social Justice—a collection documenting climate justice efforts in the Global South—a project focusing on interviewing people in the Global South about their initiatives that help save their communities from climate-related disasters. 

While some argue that open access inherently permits broad reuse, using cultural heritage collections to train AI represents a new and ethically fraught level of replication. The big question remains—is LLM training for AI really going to stop us from building digital collections of cultural heritage? I will discuss the need for updated practices. Key considerations include ensuring informed consent for narrators, revising donor agreements, and assessing transcription tools for data use policies.

Digital Commonwealth Repository Systems Update by Eben English

The annual Repository Systems Update provides an overview of new collections and features added to DigitalCommonwealth.org over the past year. This talk will cover usage statistics and technology trends (and analyze what they mean for digital collection development efforts), as well as a review of the previous year's most popular content. It will also feature a behind-the-scenes look at the work of the Boston Public Library's Digital Services team, including major digitization projects and the ongoing development of the open-source digital asset management system supporting access and preservation of vital historical materials.

"A Harvest of Death": Finding the Dead in Digital Archives by Dan Everton

[No human remains or the deceased will be depicted in the presentation] 

This presentation is an extension of my research from "Skeletons in the (Digital) Closet,"  where I analyzed batch samples of metadata of items that had dead people in the Digital  Commonwealth repository. I have extended my research to other archives such as the Library of  Congress, newspaper databases, Trans-Atlantic slave voyage manifests, and, of course, social  media. Victims of crime, war casualties, skeletons, anatomy. These are just a few of the most common subject headings and keywords attached to collection items that depict the deceased. In terms of classification, the person(s) humanity, if at all, is acknowledged as “dead persons.” Like in death, they too are sometimes shrouded by a content warning screen. But as my research continues into the nature and treatment of these materials, the gap between their personhood from the context grows wider. For example, the title of my presentation comes from the title of a negative print copy of the battlefield of Gettysburg, where they are only acknowledged as war casualties in the metadata and not the dead young people that they are. While I cannot come up with concrete reasons, the data suggests a sort of purposeful  “objectivity” or distancing from the person in the collection item. This may come from a larger societal resistance to death, but as we grow in awareness about reparative work in archives, there  is also a need to face death. While I may have suggestions on how to address these issues, this presentation is more of a call to encourage discussion rather than a how-to. The conversation of how we care for and  steward the dead in our collections needs to be expanded to include a broader, more diverse audience from multiple disciplines. This presentation would serve as a beginning point to openly have these discussions, rather than keeping it to the pages in academic papers.

Daniel W. Everton – better known as Dan – is a New Bedford-based artist, historian, and archaeologist. After bouncing from job to job, he pursued academia to follow a passion for history and social justice. He began his academic career at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth with a BA in History and a minor in Black Studies. While attending, he studied colonization’s impact on material culture and worked at the Archives & Special Collections to photograph artifacts in the Congressman Barney Frank and Schooner Ernestina-Morrissey Collections.

He holds a Master’s in Public Humanities MA from Brown University where he focused on Ancient History, NAGPRA, repatriation, and ethics in cultural heritage institutions. As part of his graduate education, Dan attended a field school at the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy to better understand the methodology and caretaking of ancient peoples’ remains. He also worked as an Archival and Curatorial Assistant for the Unfinished Conversations series which focuses on the afterlives of slavery. He is finishing a Master’s in Library and Information Science from Dominican University to continue his passion for ethics and care of collections in museums and archives. Your guess is as good as his if he will get a third master’s, but it’s likely to happen.

His work and research have been shown in New Bedford Art Museum/ArtWorks!, The Library Company of Philadelphia, RISD Museum, Brown University, the Archaeological Institute of America, New England Archivists, the Collective for Radical Death Studies, and most recently in the exhibit In Slavery’s Wake at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive: Developing Reparative Archives by Joy Zanghi and Lydia Beal

The Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive (BNDA) is an open-source repository dedicated  to identifying, classifying, and providing documentation about anti-Black killings in the  mid-twentieth century South from 1930-1954. The BDNA is the most comprehensive digital  record of racial homicides collected to date and is home to more than 21,000 digital files  that include death certificates, press clippings, law enforcement records, reports from civil  rights groups, state and federal court records, and images. Through the preservation of this  history, the BNDA seeks to render it visible and accessible, disarm claims of ignorance and  ensure accountability, honor the lives and legacies of those lost, and support demands for  repair. 

The BNDA is the culmination of several years of research conducted by the Civil Rights & Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) at Northeastern University School of Law. Founded by legal scholar Margaret Burnham in 2007, we are committed to reconciling the  lethal consequence of Jim Crow Era violence through record recovery and data collection.  While the enduring pattern of racial terror we document cannot be undone, preserving this  history offers a preliminary mode for truth. CRRJ is pioneering the first comprehensive  record of 20th-century anti-Black violence through the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive,  which is grounded in policies and practices that prioritize the victims' lives and legacies. In  turn, the BNDA offers family members and researchers a vital resource for remedial justice  and understanding, contributing directly to efforts for redress and accountability. 

The Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive, by furthering the CRRJ’s mission of restorative  justice, demonstrates how digital projects and archival records can honor families and  communities who have endured racial violence through ethical policies of access and  outreach. The work of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive team is centered on record keeping as accountability for past racial violence and its ongoing effects today. 

This presentation will identify how the BNDA continues to develop and implement  policies that seek to uphold the humanity of the victims within the Archive by establishing  hierarchies for sourcing project metadata. The presentation will highlight the unique Data  Dictionary of data fields created for the Archive, and how these fields have been designed  to mitigate dehumanization and reproduction of harm while building a database that  contains harmful materials. Our presentation will explore the complexities of developing  responsible access while maintaining the privacy of the victims and their descendants in  the Archive, with a case study into a take-down request received in January 2024. Through case studies, we will showcase our current access policies within the Archive which have  been informed by key tenants of restorative justice, particularly the practice in which the  justice process belongs to those afflicted. Finally, we will explore the ways in which the  BNDA has been used for educational programming for High School and college level  students and how it can be a model for Archives as tools for reparative justice.