The Toolkit: Content Statements

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The Toolkit brings together resources for creating, managing, and sharing digital collections to address common concerns we often hear, like this one:

Should my institution include a content warning or statement on our digital collection website?

What is a content statement?

A content statement is a message on your digital collection website or within your collection metadata that alerts users to materials they may find offensive or harmful. The goal of a content statement is NOT to deter users but to prepare your audience, especially younger learners and their educators, for content they might encounter.

Why include a content statement now?

History is complicated and the historic record full of uncomfortable topics including violence, death, disease, war, acts of aggression and oppression, inequity, racism, sexism, ableism, ageism and more. Some historical material may represent opinions or values that are no longer (or never were) consistent with our contemporary ones. Recent social action around the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements has increased public awareness of potentially harmful content hiding in digital collections and elsewhere online. Historical materials housed in archives, libraries and museums, previously accessible only in-person, are now publicly available and widely shared online through various digital collections and platforms.  Without mediation or interpretation, this content might be taken out of context or worse, inflict irreparable harm on unsuspecting users.

Why include a content statement? It’s a reflection of your organization and its values. Think about what it might say (or not say) about your organization’s identity and ideology – your work, your staff, and the community you serve.

What is considered “harmful”?

For sure, “harmful” is subjective depending on your audience. Content that offends you may not even register for another user. A good place to start? Get to know your own digital collections – especially content digitized before you joined your organization’s digital work. Think about your community and users, and how they might feel bumping into this content out of context. Put yourself in their shoes. In a Toolkit post earlier this year, we talked about harmful content in the context of digitized yearbook projects: Yearbooks, especially older volumes, depict cultural appropriation or re-creation of violent or demeaning events for entertainment, for example black-faced minstrel shows, Native American dress and dancing, hazing activities, slave auctions as fund-raising events, “scalp the Indians” as a sports cheer, hobo parades, and others. This is just one example of potentially harmful content. Consider both the content (images) and its descriptive information. An image may seem innocuous, but its metadata may prove otherwise. Think about why certain language was used to describe your content.

How do you write a content statement?

Get to know your collections and make sure you are aware of any potentially harmful content. Gather key stakeholders – your staff, administration, volunteers, students, educators and other community members invested in your digital work – and invite them to co-create the statement. Here are a few questions to kick start the discussion:

  1. What content exists in the collections that might be considered harmful?
  2. What do you (as an organization or community) want users to know about this content? How much detail should you share up front? What historical context would be most useful for users?
  3. What content statement language would best represent your organization’s values and work.
  4. Talk about your organization and its responsibility to the collections, community and preserving the historical record.  
  5. Likewise, talk about why a local history organization would curate and share digital materials with potential to cause trauma. Think about your mission to collect, share and preserve the historical record.
  6. Think about whether your content statement should exist at the institution, collection or item level.
  7. Be sure to include a mechanism (i.e. email address or web form) and instructions for how users might contact you about harmful content they encounter in your collections.

You don’t need to start from scratch! Review content statements drafted by other libraries, archives, and museums. Here are a few examples:

Once you’ve crafted and shared your content statement, you’re not done. Revisit this statement incrementally and evolve the language to reflect societal changes.

How will you address collection feedback or requests to remove content?

Before you publicly share your content statement, be sure your organization has a plan or policy in place for addressing user feedback or requests to remove content. Options might include:

  • removing the content permanently
  • leaving it online but not indexing it (rendering it undiscoverable by search engines)
  • removing the image but leaving the metadata as a record
  • leaving it “as is” but enhancing the harmful content statement in the metadata or on the collection website.

You might also share these options as part of your harmful content statement.

Don’t forget to update your organization’s other policy documents (i.e. collection development policy, digital projects metadata workflows, etc.) to reflect decision points related to harmful content.

Beyond content statements…

  • Flag historical materials that contain offensive or harmful language or images before it lands online. Think about modifying your archives workflows to document harmful content during the appraisal/selection, acquisition, processing, and/or digitization processes.
  • Update old collection descriptions using accurate but respectful language. Retain harmful language only when it provides historic value.
  • In general, whether describing content at the collection or item level, favor language used by the communities and individuals in your collections and using people-first language, for example describing “a person with diabetes” rather than “a diabetic”. If possible, ask community members represented in your collections how they would describe the content. Invite them to participate in the process.

Here are some resources that can help:

Want more practical advice about creating and caring for digital collections? Read more from The Toolkit!