Words matter: supporting a community archive through inclusive cataloging

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 was 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 of recent Asian refugees to California. 

Through this grant funded project, we were able to secure the help of a subject expert to aid in the identification and description of the digitized artifacts. In this presentation, we will discuss how we employed culturally aware and inclusive metadata practices to describe this collection, ensuring that descriptions demonstrated respect and care for the peoples and cultures represented. This included adhering to a multilingual approach to describing these digitized objects, creating descriptions and providing subject access in native and translated terms, and providing contextual information when necessary.

Sacramento State is an Asian American, Native American and Pacific Islander-Serving Institution (AANAPISI), with 10% of our students coming from Southeast Asian communities. Furthermore, our region has the largest population of HMong people in the United States, Sacramento having the second largest population in the state. We hope the steps we have taken will support the scholarship of all our researchers and help to contextualize these materials in a non-Western framework.