Dig DC is your web portal for selected digitized and born-digital items from The People's Archive at DC Public Library. It is built on the digital asset management system Islandora. The People’s Archive is the DC Public Library’s local history center and has been collecting materials that document the social, cultural, and political life of the District since 1905. There are three major collections, Washingtoniana, Black Studies, and The Peabody Room.
Dig DC is made possible with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
About the Collections
The Washingtoniana collection documents the history and culture of the entire District of Columbia. This is the original collection started in 1905 and contains resources from the 18th century to the present including maps; personal and organization records; periodicals; photographs; oral histories; and born-digital materials like AV recordings, datasets, and digital images. Part of Washingtoniana, the D.C. Community Archives were founded in 1980 and include archival collections documenting the social, political, and cultural history of D.C.
The Black Studies collection was established in 1972 with the opening of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. This collection consists of material related to the African American experience with an emphasis on civil rights and social justice within the United States. Black Studies is primarily a book collection.
The Peabody Room was created in 1935 when the independent Peabody Library of Georgetown merged with the DC Public Library. The collection covers only the Georgetown neighborhood and includes many of the same types of materials as Washingtoniana.
About Harmful Language and Content in Dig DC
As an archive whose name reflects our wish to accurately and respectfully present the stories of people and communities, The People’s Archive welcomes your feedback. If you encounter language in The People's Archive digital collections, finding aids, catalog records, or elsewhere that you find offensive or harmful, please email us at peoples.archive@dc.gov or call The People's Archive reference desk at 202-727-1213. Please also contact us if you have questions or suggestions about this statement.
The People’s Archive staff seeks to use respectful and inclusive language to describe our historical resources. We acknowledge that language, social norms, and library best practices change, and that language that was once considered acceptable may no longer be appropriate. We recognize that some language was harmful then and is harmful today. We also acknowledge that these descriptions reflect power imbalances between library professionals and the people represented in the materials. When we discover unacceptable descriptions, we will update them by removing language that could be harmful to users or is offensive to the people being described. This work is ongoing.
The People’s Archive staff are taking the following steps to address harmful language and content in our collections:
- Favoring descriptors used by the communities and individuals represented in The People’s Archive’s collections. When creating new descriptions and updating old descriptions, we seek to use language that communities and individuals use to describe themselves. The People’s Archive uses the Library of Congress Subjects and Thesauri for subject headings found in Dig DC and our online catalog. However, we believe some subject headings are outdated and offensive. The People’s Archive no longer uses the following Library of Congress Subject Headings:
- Blacks (replacement subject heading: Black persons)
- Homeless persons (replacement subject heading: People experiencing homelessness)
- Illegal aliens (replacement subject heading: Undocumented immigrants)
- Indians of North America (replacement subject heading: Indigenous peoples of North America)
- Latin Americans (replacement subject heading: Latino/Latina/Latinx)
- Sexual minorities or subject headings that use gay as a descriptor for the entire LGTBQIA+ community rather than just for gay men (replacement subject heading: LGBTQIA+ persons)
- Slaves (replacement subject heading: Enslaved persons)
- Creating a context for outdated and offensive language. While the People’s Archive staff strives to utilize anti-harm language in our descriptions, there may be times that the original item itself uses language that is harmful or outdated. In these circumstances, we will preserve this language only in order to maintain accuracy or to document the social context of a time period. Offensive or harmful terms may be indicated within descriptions with quotation marks or notes to distinguish between historical descriptions and contemporary practices of the People’s Archive. Some situations where outdated or offensive language might occur are:
- Organization names that include outdated terms (for example: National Council of Negro Women)
- An individual who self-identifies by a term no longer preferred by people within that group.
- Language from a published work such as a periodical, pamphlet, zine, or book.
- Creating content warnings for resources that contain offensive or harmful language or images. Some resources in The People’s Archive collections may contain offensive language, imagery, or content. In the interest of preserving historical integrity, we are not removing these resources from our collections, but we will provide a note in the resource’s description. This may be a note in the description of a digital collection, the description of a digital item, or in the finding aid that you would read before requesting a collection in person. We do this so users may decide for themselves if they wish to view an item with potentially harmful content.
- Meeting regularly to evaluate descriptions. This statement was written in 2021 by Demetrius Curington, Library Associate; Julie Burns, Library Associate; Laura Farley, Digital Curation Librarian; Maya Thompson, Library Associate; Philip Espe, Library Associate; Robert LaRose, Librarian; and Siobhan Hagan, Memory Lab Network Project Manager. We are a group of racially diverse, cisgender women and men, comprising a combination of straight and queer identities, and working at a public institution. We recognize that we cannot speak for everyone in every group, so we encourage community feedback for this document.
We would like to acknowledge and thank our library colleagues who have been shared their work, thereby giving us the opportunity to learn. This statement was adapted from those of Drexel University Library and Center for the History of Medicine, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University. It was last updated on 2022-03-08.
If you have questions or suggestions about this statement please email us at peoples.archive@dc.gov or call The People's Archive reference desk at 202-727-1213.