Menacing the Archival Standards: Lessons to be Learned From Community Archiving Practices

Description

Community-based archives often begin with no formal training in archival standards, just a passion for preserving their history. Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive (LMQBA) in Edinburgh, Scotland is one such case. Volunteers, largely from non-archival backgrounds, have chosen to develop a unique cataloguing system based on their own experiences, research into archival practices, and queering the archive. The catalogue was made public in late 2023, but the vocabulary continues to evolve as new volunteers join and queer terminologies grow and change. So, does the fast-changing nature of vocabulary within community-based projects (like LMQBA) reveal an opportunity for wider archival practices to learn and grow? Expanding vocabularies, within archival catalogues and beyond, is vital to ensure visibility and to serve the marginalised communities involved. Widely-used controlled vocabularies such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings are frequently criticised for reflecting the biases of the bodies which created them. When heritage collections are cared for by their own communities, the way they are stored and presented differs from industry norms. At LMQBA, lack of formal knowledge enables freedom and creativity, allowing us to create more inclusive vocabularies for our queer and trans volunteers and users. Queerness’s rejection of stability and formality makes it incompatible with standardised vocabularies. Community-based projects’ ability to adapt to their communities’ needs reveals gaps in standardised archival vocabularies. Through our work developing Lavender Menace’s digital catalogue, we restructure our collections in response to the needs of the community, for example through the capacity to change shelf titles. In conclusion, the adaptability of community archives’ approaches provides a fresh perspective which could benefit larger and less-specialised institutions.

Period	12 Mar 2026 → 14 Mar 2026
Event title	Queer Bibliography
Event type	Conference