Abstract
The Southeast Asia Community Resource Center (SEACRC) Collection at Sacramento State was compiled over a 20-year period by the Southeast Asia Community Resource Center in Rancho Cordova, California, as a project of the Refugee Educators’ Network. The main goals of the SEACRC were to provide educational support for Southeast Asian refugee children, and to supply educators with accurate information about the people and cultures of Southeast Asia.
The collection, donated to Sacramento State in 2006, contains cultural items from Armenian, Cambodian (Khmer), Chinese, HMong, Karen, Khmu, Korean, Lahu, Lao, Mien, Russian, Thai, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese peoples. In 2021, a grant project was initiated to digitize over 200 artifacts from the collection – including artwork, handicrafts, toys and dolls, musical instruments, clothing, jewelry, and photographs – which document and bring to life the everyday experiences and culture of recent Southeast Asian refugees in California. Through this grant funded project, the library secured the help of a subject expert to aid in the description of the digitized artifacts. This work included identifying locations, cultural customs, traditional dress, the significance of textile patterns, as well as the meaning and use of artifacts.
In this case study, we will discuss how this digitization project allowed us the opportunity to engage in culturally aware and inclusive metadata practices ensuring that our descriptions demonstrated respect and care for the peoples and cultures represented. As this is a non-English language collection, this included adhering to a multilingual approach to describing these digitized artifacts, creating descriptions and providing subject access in native and translated terms, and providing contextual information when necessary. This undertaking provided insight into the unique challenges of describing collections in a non-Western framework, at times breaking away from traditional cataloging models and best practices, and sparked many interesting conversations about how to truly support discovery and access for all our users.
This collection originally developed as a way to support refugees who were forced to leave their cultures and lifestyles behind; by digitizing and sharing this collection more widely, in a way that is meaningful and inclusive of the cultures it represents, we are able to embrace and advance the mission and value of this collection. Projects like these further help to unite communities that have been displaced to geographically disparate places, creating a collective community online through digital platforms. By engaging in cultural awareness and inclusive cataloging practices to provide access and make discoverable this collection, we hope to support the scholarship and creative work of all our researchers, as well as community members discovering, re-discovering, and redefining their cultural identities.