Hello, all—

We’ve been having a discussion in our library about how to find and redact personally identifying information in the special collections we digitize. Our archives are relatively contemporary, so many of our holdings contain social security numbers or credit card numbers.

Basically: we don’t want to, through the items we digitize, FURTHER contribute to surveillance culture.

We’re aware of DocNow’s excellent guidance at the ethical level:

https://news.docnow.io/documenting-the-now-ethics-white-paper-43477929ea3e

Documenting the Now Ethics White Paper - news.docnow.io news.docnow.io Through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation the Documenting the Now project has had the opportunity to explore the ethical issues that arise from archiving social media, with specific focus on social media content created by participants in the recent wave of African-American activism in response to police shootings.

But has anyone developed model policies around this? Maybe your library has already written an implementation policy that follows DocNow ethics? Apologies if this group already has and I missed it on the wiki!

We are of course checking within SAA and other communities for models, too, but I thought folks in this group would also have great ideas.

Best,

Amanda

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Amanda Rust (she/hers)

Associate Director for Services, Digital Scholarship Group

English & Digital Humanities Librarian

Northeastern University Library

[log in to unmask] / 617-373-8548

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