The Revising Archival Descriptions work was part of the Welsh Government Anti-Racist Action Plan-funded programme helping cultural organisations to look at ways they could make a positive impact in this area. Using a testbed project that was developed between the University of Leeds Brotherton Library and The National Archives as a basis, the Welsh project worked with a number of partners from across local government and higher education to compare archive catalogue descriptions with an agreed list of offensive and biased terms. Those terms covered a range of factors such as racist, misogynist and ableist language. Due to the timescales involved, this project was only able to start this process and could not include decisions about what should happen following the identification of terms. The final report outlines the process followed, and provides the (anonymised) headline results.
There is more to do and Archives and Records Council Wales will be working with members to look at ways in which this work can be taken forward and expanded.
For more details on this project, please contact Vicky Jones: vicky.jones@llgc.org.uk