A Collections Assessment Regarding Black History in the Michigan Historical Collections, Bentley Historical Library

Abstract

While “assessment” has received renewed attention in the Library and Information Science (LIS) field over the last decade, there is a lack of standardized procedures for how to conduct a collections assessment in an archival setting, particularly when the goal is to understand collection content or “aboutness.” The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-19 pandemic have brought new urgency to archival collecting goals and methods. The purpose of the present study is to take stock as systematically as possible of existing holdings related to Black history in the Michigan Historical Collections (MHC) at the Bentley Historical Library. It is a pilot study intended to test a collections assessment method and to assess coverage in order to inform future fieldwork. My basic questions were: how much material related to Black history is in the MHC, and what is that material about? What time periods and what places does it cover? Since it would be impossible to examine the thousands of collections in the MHC directly to answer these questions, I used archival surrogates. A MARC record export was produced using the subject heading “African Americans—Michigan” as a filter. I analyzed that export in conjunction with other access tools created by Bentley archivists (an unpublished guide to African-American resources and a selective sample of finding aids). I was able to identify meaningful patterns in the subject sample, especially regarding the chronological and geographical distribution of collections. Evaluating size was more difficult because of disparate units of measure, but an overall trend was clear. Determining subject areas was even more challenging, in part because of variations in the amount and type of description across collections. These findings suggest that the current attention to reparative description in archives also provides an opportunity to think about how metadata can shape future collections assessments.