Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty, Director, Smithsonian Libraries and Archives

T-Kay Sangwand, Librarian for Digital Collection Development, UCLA, and Gabriel Solís, Executive Director, Texas After Violence Project

This virtual conference considers the ongoing reassessment of memory and heritage work and heritage ownership, as it is understood by libraries, archives and related organizations, through an examination of the multiple meanings, complexities, and resonances of loss. As an inevitable reality of cultural heritage preservation--saving everything is an impossibility--a nuanced understanding of the fundamental role of loss is an important counterpart to libraries’ work towards preservation, permanence and sustainability.

Once seen as static evidence of the past, heritage is now recognized as the subject of ongoing reinterpretation, maintenance, and negotiation for those living in the present. Collectors are increasingly willing to confront processes of repatriation, reparation and restitution, and other forms of deaccessioning, and vocabularies of ownership are giving way to those of stewardship, custody, and post-custody. At the same time, heightened attention to sustainable practices is also encouraging a reassessment of longstanding assumptions about collection development and preservation, challenging the model of limitless expansion, growth and permanence as a primary measure of success. Cultural memory and heritage workers, too, face many other kinds of loss within and beyond the workplace that impacts their labor, including loss of resources, safety nets, and colleagues. What is heritage and cultural property, and to whom do they belong? Who owns the past, and what does such ownership mean? Is it possible for acts of past injustice to result in cooperative relationship-building for the future? How can a sustained interrogation of collection and heritage loss be productively leveraged to reckon with other kinds of loss in the cultural memory and heritage workspace? We seek to explore these and other related questions during this two-day conference.

The conference is free and open to the public; advance registration is required.

We invite presentation proposals from diverse perspectives on a range of topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• Theft, repatriation, virtual reunification, shared print/collection development
• Deaccessioning, redirections, removals
• Endangered archives, postcustodial archival practice
• Approaches to loss in preservation and conservation
• Human and resource loss in and beyond the workplace
• Other related aspects of practice and research

We encourage proposals from librarians, archivists, curators, conservators, scholars, museum professionals, students, and other stakeholders at any point in their careers, from institutions of all sizes, and including independent researchers.

The conference organizers welcome proposals for presentations in a variety of virtual formats. For questions, please feel free to contact us below.

A modest honorarium is available; University of California affiliates and international presenters are not eligible for the honorarium.

Please submit proposals (400-word maximum) using this form.