University Libraries' Special Collections and University Archives Assistant Professor, Outreach and Public Services Archivist Elspeth Olson has received an honorable mention prize from the Journal of Western Archives for the "Best General Interest Article Award" for the period 2020-2024. Olson’s piece, “Mrs. His Name: Reparative Description as a Tool for Cultural Sensitivity and Discoverability" was published in 2023. It describes a reparative description project to identify the names of married women who had previously been identified only by their husband's names in archives finding aids.
The awards selection committee said, “This article is a useful model for future reparative description projects. We believe it has long-term value to the archival profession.”
To date the article has been cited twice in the research and downloaded nearly 1,200 times.
Mrs. His Name was one of 37 articles published over the last five years entered into the Journal of Western Archives best general interest article award competition.
The awards committee scored articles on:
- evidence in support of the central question/argument,
- sources consulted/utilized in service of the question/argument,
- understanding of the “conversation” (literature) related to the central question/argument,
- originality/creativity of central argument and relevance.
The committee narrowed the field to eight finalists, reevaluated each using the criteria above, then discussed the merits of each article to select the winners.
About Mrs. His Name
Anytime SCUA receives something new for the archives, or a new collection comes into the Libraries, metadata has to be created by Libraries archivists and librarians to ensure the item received is properly described in order for it to be easily findable via search when library users are looking within the collection for information.
Some items, a photograph, for example, may come into SCUA with something written on the back. In this case, what is documented on the back of the photo gets transcribed based on its context, but ultimately experts within SCUA create the necessary metadata needed to properly describe the photo and help make it findable when users are searching the records.
“‘Mrs. John Doe’ was very contextual for a certain period of time when it came to how women were identified,” Olson said. “For a lot of women being named this way was a status symbol. SCUA didn’t want to get rid of this. The department also wanted to be respectful of traditions because it is not appropriate to make assumptions regarding how these women want to be known or how they want to be referred to.
Olson said, based on how SCUA users search for information it was clear users were not searching for women using the ‘Mrs. His Name’ search term style. Olson frequently reviews search term reports generated by the Libraries Metadata, Cataloging and One-Time Acquisitions (MCOTA) department. Olson said this information is very helpful to SCUA staff.
She said, “It gives staff a clear sense of how users are searching for items; specifically what search terms they are using to find the things they need.”
“Users are searching for ‘Eleanor Roosevelt,’ not ‘Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt’ for example,” she said. “If women are only referred to in the record using the Mrs. His Name style, it is very difficult for users to find what they are looking for; ultimately these women get lost in the record and do not turn up when users are searching for them because how they are saved in the record doesn’t match how students and faculty are searching for them when they visit the department to do research.”
Because access to and the sharing of information is paramount to the work of SCUA and the Libraries, the reparative description project was born.
“I worked on this project during COVID,” Olson said. “Lockdown hit six months after I was hired and I needed something to work on that could be done remotely and mostly online. I had plans to do a different job on-site, process three collections, but because things shut down, I pivoted to this job because it could be completed remotely, away from the physical environment of SCUA.”
The project had already been envisioned by Associate Professor, Director, Distinctive Collections Kimberly Anderson before COVID hit because she had experienced the challenge of finding women by their own first and last names when searching the archives.
“Kim had this project in mind because she had experience doing searches for people’s names but had difficulty succeeding in trying to locate and identify people in the historical record. I have also had this experience,” Olson said.
Reparative descriptions, finding aids and updating records
Reparative descriptions is a term coined within the last six or seven years by La’el Watkins-Hughes. The term is used to describe the practice of deciding how to use language to accurately describe the people and history of a specific library collection without perpetuating harm and to accurately inform users. When harmful language is found and it is known that it was created by a library employee, a predecessor for example, it needs to be updated in the records or finding aids.
A finding aid is a combination of a collections’ inventory and notes describing the collection. It has some of the same components as a catalog record - subjects, dates, summaries - but also documents where SCUA got it from, anything SCUA’s done to it (like if things get moved for special storage needs), and how it's arranged. SCUA lists the folder titles and then groups them into subsets by similar type or topic. So, for example, maybe correspondence is all together, or someone's family history is all in one grouping.
“While working on Mrs. His Name, I used many different tools,” Olson said. “I used my Ancestry.com account, familysearches.org, historical newspaper databases in the Washoe County Library System and genealogy resources available through the County Library.”
To start Olson reviewed extant metadata to identify triangulation points.
“I used what was known to find where the women were living, and what time period they lived in,” she said. “Then, using what I had, I’d go into the census records to try and figure out their names that way.”
While using the sources and strategies above. Olson said that most of the women included in the project were identified by using scrapbooks held in SCUA’s archive.
“SCUA has a scrapbook collection containing correspondence, fliers, newspaper columns and more from Reno in the 1930s and 1940s,” Olson said. “These scrapbooks remind me of correspondence I used to get from my grandmother. Much of what is found in these scrapbooks includes clippings and columns outlining and describing the happenings of the day, who was running into who on the streets of Reno, what blooms were growing in different gardens across town, what was being cooked for dinner and more.”
The scrapbooks used to identify the women of Mrs. His name were the work of Gladys Belknap Rowley. Rowley wrote a daily column for the Reno Evening Journal from the 1930s into the 1940s, chronicling the activities and people of Depression and war-era Reno and Sparks. Her columns introduced about 25 percent of the women researched in the Mrs. His Name Project.
“Rowley’s 12 scrapbooks were instrumental to this project,” she said. “It was so important to use multiple sources to try and identify all of these unknown women. Historical newspapers were also very important because they are a verified source.”
When asked if it was hard to identify all of the women, Olson said most were pretty easy to track down, but there were a few that came to haunt her.
“One-third of all the names gave me trouble,” she said. “For these more challenging names, I used actual physical items to try and identify them. Take Jerry Kane for example.
“Jerry eluded me for a good long while. I knew Jerry could be a nickname or the husband’s name, but I just couldn’t confirm it," Olson said. "This name was listed as a donor on two dozen or so single-item collections in SCUA with much of the information coming from Austin, Nev. I could not find any instance of this name in any of the existing metadata available to me. There were no records in any of SCUA’s departmental donor files. However, since there were several collections associated with Jerry when came to SCUA into existence, I was able to look at the old card catalog and pull everything available connected to Jerry.
"In doing this, I pulled everything I could find associated with this name and I wound up finding a piece of mail addressed to ‘Sylvia Kane in San Francisco' tucked into an old business ledger. I now had a real piece of mail with the missing name and an address. With this information in-hand, I used census records and the San Francisco Public Library’s municipal archive, which includes old phone books, to find and identify This is how I found Sylvia Kane."
When the project was complete, nearly 300 women had been identified.
Winning the Journal of Western Archives "Best General Interest Award" for the period 2020-2024
Olson said this project helped her find her research interests while allowing her to lean into the public services and discoverability parts of her job.
“I know that it is not intuitive to search the archive,” she said. “The platforms are very literal and students present overcomplex search strings. I have to teach them to keep it simple when searching. Use two words and always use the filter tools available.”
After reviewing data on how users enter their search terms, Olson knew she was onto something with wanting to complete the Mrs. His Name project.
“I really liked the practical application of this project,” she said. “I can’t say for sure if the changes I made have had impact, but I do know it only takes one Libraries user to find a person in the archive for it to matter. This is the first academic paper I’ve written since graduate school, receiving the award was an incredible boost for me personally. I didn’t even know the Journal of Western Archives did awards. It was very satisfying to see the email from the them in my in-box."
