Cultural Sensitivity in the Archives: Digitizing Controversial Materials, a Balancing Act

What is the role and responsibility of the archives when considering giving access to potentially controversial material? How cultural sensitivity can serve as a framework to balance access to material that may hurt the feeling of individuals or groups? These are some of the questions discussed in this presentation. The presentation will focus on two cases at the University of Connecticut where issues about cultural sensitivity have an impact in the decisions taken to digitize the collections. In specific, I discussed working with sensitive cultural materials which have the potential to hurt, embarrassed or infuriate different type of stakeholders. I argued that creating a balance between giving access to this type of cultural heritage and dealing with any potential negative effect or reaction from users or stakeholders when they find out about these records online is essential. I suggested that using a cultural sensitive framework as part of our archival practices is necessary to prepare archivists to handle such cases in a cultural sensitive way