SCRC staff collaborates on article in Archival Outlook

SCRC staff has co-authored an article in the latest issue of the Society for American Archivists’ magazine Archival Outlook that recaps the processing of the collections from the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). 

Taylor Wolford led the authoring of “Protecting animal rights through the Humane Society Records and Gwynn Thayer and Laura Lethers contributed. Lethers was a graduate student employee in the SCRC but now works for the Khayrallah Center.

The article gives an overview of the relationship between the SCRC and the HSUS and how the Society’s extensive collections came to the Libraries in 2019—some 375 linear feet of materials! The authors note how the HSUS materials fit within the Libraries’ animal rights collections and explain how the SCRC organized to process such a wealth of materials.

"The acquisition of the Humane Society of the United States Records has been an incredibly significant addition to our animal protection collections, but the teamwork required to rapidly arrange and describe the collection (archival processing) has been especially notable,” Thayer says. “The SCRC team has benefited from a gifted group of public history graduate students (both current and recently graduated) that continue to significantly contribute to our department's success."

The final section of the article addresses some of the challenges faced in this processing work, including considerations of the legal and ethical issues involved in providing access to sensitive materials and the emotional toll of seeing images of animal cruelty.