Anthony Cheney Guzman, the founder of the Olga Iglesias Project, will join the AI Advisors Discussion Group to discuss his consideration of a “double erasure problem” that arises when under-represented minority communities and agents are not represented in archival description or authority records, based on a blogpost published earlier this summer in the Society of American Archivists Description Section’s blog, Descriptive Notes. Anthony will join us for a virtual presentation and conversation on Wednesday, November 4^th from 11AM-12 PM. Please see his attached speaker brief for more information about Anthony’s work and planned talk.

Authority infrastructure decides who can be found. When an agent has no authority record, every reconciliation passes over them, and the archive that documents them most richly cannot make them visible to anyone else. That gap is not evenly distributed. It concentrates in the heritage of marginalized communities, where the historical record was thin to begin with, and the authority layer (or lack thereof) built on it reproduced that silence as missing headings, or as headings with nothing behind them.

The "Double Erasure Problem," a blogpost by Anthony Cheney Guzman published in the Society of American Archivists Description Section blog Descriptive Notes in August, argued that the gap compounds at scale - communities under-described in the record are absent from what Al learns from them. This talk brings it down to live examples from a single performing arts archive, where an archivist or cataloger can act. One archive - the Olga Iglesias Collection at the Digital Library of the Caribbean, hosted at the University of Florida, documenting mid-century Puerto Rican classical music heritage - yields four ways an agent can be named in a finding aid and still not exist in the authority file. Al-assisted processing can surface each one for repair.

To learn more about the AI Advisors' Discussion Group, please go to our AI Advisor wiki.