AI Can’t Take My Descriptive Expertise
Brenda Gunn discusses the development of the UVA Archival AI Protocol and its implications for descriptive practice.
Descriptive Notes
Blog of the SAA Description Section
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Latest posts
The Double Erasure Problem
Anthony Cheney Guzmán discusses a potential double erasure problem when materials relating to historically marginalized communities are not described and accessible for AI scraping.
Are the chatbots coming for our collections? Or, reflections on navigating AI for archival description and online access
Elizabeth Lhost discusses the challenges of working in digital collections with increasing AI scraping, from her perspective as the Program Manager for the Modern Endangered Archives Program at UCLA.
Read the Notes: Promoting Equity and Transparency in the WPI Digital Archives
Dana Anderson and Samantha Rowe discuss their efforts to conscientiously describe digitized AV materials at the Wildenstein Plattner Institute.
Standards in Practice: Findings from a Community Survey on Encoded Archival Standards
Cory Nimer of the Technical Subcommittee on Encoded Archival Standards shares an update about a recent community survey focused on archival engagement with the encoded standards.
AI & Description: A Critical Perspective
Camila Zorrilla-Tessler questions the appropriateness of using artificial intelligence to produce archival description.
Outside the Black Box: AI Shedding Light for AV Cataloging
Owen King, Caroline Mango, Raananah Sarid-Segal, and Miranda Villesvik discuss the processing of audio-visual materials with the assistance of an AI tool, surfacing data useful for discovery and amplifying the labor of human archivists.
Six degrees of separation: using linked data to create layered archival description
Elizabeth (Eli) M. Peters discusses the processing of the Liturgy and Life collection at Boston College, and the unique approach using agent records linked at the item level to create additional avenues for discovery.
Re-engaging the Space: A Conversation with Lexy deGraffenreid
The Description Section Steering Committee recaps the February 2026 conversation with Lexy deGraffenreid about her article "Engaging the Space Between Minimal Processing and Inclusive Description to Create More Sustainable and Ethical Workflow."
Incorporating Crowd-Sourced Community Feedback Into Descriptive Metadata of Digitized Photographs
The Jay Kay Klein collection, part of the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), is notable for its rich, photographic documentation of mid-20th century science fiction fandom in the United States. UCR librarians have undertaken a series of projects to make accessible and describe the approximately 60,000 photographs in this collection.…