Reparative Archival Description Working Group (RAD)

The Reparative Archival Description Working Group (RAD); previously the Reparative Archival Description Task Force) is charged by the Archival and Manuscript Description Committee (AMDECO) with creating draft recommendations regarding principles and practices for reparative archival description work. Reparative archival description aims to remediate or contextualize potentially outdated or harmful language used in archival description and to create archival description that is accurate, inclusive, and community-centered. 

In its pilot project, RAD created reparative archival description recommendations and tested those recommendations by remediating Yale Library finding aids and catalog records on Japanese American incarceration during World War II.  

RAD’s long term goals include developing guidelines for repositories about finding, remediating, and documenting instances of outdated or harmful language in archival description; improving access to Yale’s archival collections, by removing or contextualizing outdated or harmful language in archival description and access points; making archival description more transparent to researchers by documenting changes to description; developing public-facing documentation that details the scope and aim of the working group; exploring avenues for researchers to report archival description that contains outdated or harmful language, and fostering an institutional commitment to reparative description and providing support for implementation across the library.

For more information on RAD's work, see the RAD LibGuide.