“It’s Not the Materials Themselves, It’s the Attitude of the Donors”

The Role of Community Accountability in the Sustainability of Queer Archives

  • Travis L. Wagner
  • Allan A. Martell
  • Shannon M. Oltmann

Abstract

This article reports on findings from semi-structured interviews with 25 archivists and curators who work with LGBTQIA+-related collections and materials about the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Specifically, it reports on how these practitioners define and engage with ethical practices, access-based obligations, and community relations in creating and sustaining their archives. The article focuses on how participants, including practitioners from various community and institutional archives of varying size and scope across the United States, understood community accountability within their work. This emphasis on community accountability necessitated that practitioners reframe archival ethics, reconsider subjective and embodied collection and curation work, and prioritize community well-being over quantitative collection building. In response to these findings, the article identifies theoretical and practical implications for queer archives related to methods of archival production, approaches to community outreach and engagement, and the intersecting impact of these implications and approaches on questions of archival sustainability for queer and other historically marginalized histories.

Author Biographies

Travis L. Wagner

Travis L. Wagner is an assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. Wagner’s research interests include critical information studies, queer archives, and LGBTQIA+ advocacy in sociotechnical systems. Their work investigates how LGBTQIA+ communities create identity in opposition to sociotechnical systems that characterize and limit those identities. Additionally, Wagner studies the unique relationships between obsolete archival mediums and queer counter-historical work across archival contexts. Wagner earned their PhD in information science from the University of South Carolina (USC) and served as a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Archival Futures (CAFe) and the Recovering and Reusing Archival Data (RRAD) lab within the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies. They are the co-creator of the Queer Cola Oral History and Digital Archive.

Allan A. Martell

Allan A. Martell is an assistant professor in the Department of Information and Library Science at Indiana University Bloomington. Martell explores the ways societies negotiate social memories of violence; the role of information curation in shaping such memories; and possible frameworks to promote more critical, nuanced memories. Martell received his PhD in information from the School of Information at the University of Michigan, an MS in digital media from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a BA in social communications from the Central American University (El Salvador). Before joining the faculty at Indiana University, Martell was a postdoctoral researcher at Louisiana State University.

Shannon M. Oltmann

Shannon M. Oltmann is an associate professor in the School of Information Science, College of Communication and Information, at the University of Kentucky. Oltmann’s research focuses on issues of intellectual freedom, censorship, privacy, and information ethics. Her work is mostly qualitative, examining how and why civil liberties such as freedom of speech become curtailed or enhanced. Much of her work has centred on public libraries, but Oltmann has also studied government agencies, art galleries, social media platforms, public court records, and other types of libraries.

The Holocaust through the VHEC Collection, exhibition room view, 2023.
Published
2024-11-01
How to Cite
Wagner, Travis L., Allan A. Martell, and Shannon M. Oltmann. 2024. “‘It’s Not the Materials Themselves, It’s the Attitude of the Donors’: The Role of Community Accountability in the Sustainability of Queer Archives”. Archivaria 98 (November), 136-63. https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13995.
Issue
Archivaria 98 (Fall 2024)
Section
Articles

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