My name is Linnea Thorson (she/her), and I hold the Young Canada Works (YCW) Digital Heritage Research Assistantship at Kula: Library Futures Academy, University of Victoria Libraries, situated on the traditional territory of the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Songhees and Xʷsepsəm/Esquimalt) Peoples, with Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples’ relationships to these lands continuing to the present.
I am a second-year student in the combined Master of Archival Studies and Master of Library and Information Studies program at the University of British Columbia iSchool, located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam people. The YCW assistantship is allowing me to test classroom knowledge against the demands of active research, and it has proven consequential beyond professional development alone: it has reframed for me what libraries and archives might become were they to take up human rights work as a constitutive rather than peripheral commitment.
My responsibilities centre on two human-rights-based initiatives, the Sersal project and the Kashmir project. Both fall under the Conflict Aftermath Digital Archive Project (CADAP), a postdoctoral research initiative that develops “ethical digital archival methods and resources to preserve and make publicly accessible at-risk visual material in conflict and post-conflict contexts” (Abram). The preservation of visual material remains the shared object of both projects, but the Sersal project, which works with Yazidi community members in Northern Iraq and across the Yazidi diaspora, extends further: it is collecting oral histories and locating Yazidi cultural heritage currently held in institutional archives across Europe, with a view to making those materials accessible to Yazidi communities.
Questions of public access to personal material are therefore not incidental to either project but organise them, and the governing consideration throughout is the comfort, wellbeing, and above all the safety of the community members whose records are at issue.
The work itself is various. It includes regular consultation with project team members, the digitization, cataloguing, and description of personal collections, assistance with exhibition planning, searches across European institutional holdings for material relating to Yazidi cultural heritage, investigation of copyright and access restrictions, research into data protection law in the European Union, and the preparation of documentation aligned with the relevant legislation and ethics frameworks in advance of fieldwork.
I came to these projects with prior experience in digitization and archival description, acquired through an educational internship at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC. The legal research was entirely new, and unexpectedly absorbing. Studying the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation alongside Germany’s Federal Data Protection Act and German law governing the use of images has clarified for me why frameworks of this kind matter: they encode, at regional, national, and supranational scales, a set of prior commitments to informed consent and to heightened protection for data subjects whose exposure carries elevated risk.
What the assistantship has given me, then, is not only a set of transferable skills but a revised sense of the directions available to the field. Working on these two projects has shown me how human rights work can be sustained through collaboration among academic libraries, institutional archives and special collections, researchers, and community-led initiatives, and how an academic library might function as an active participant in research rather than a repository holding its outputs.
I am conscious that the arrangement raises questions I am not yet equipped to answer, particularly around how institutional stewardship is to be reconciled with community authority over materials of this sensitivity, and around what obligations follow once testimony has been gathered and an archive built. Those questions seem to me the substance of the work rather than an obstacle to it.
Work Cited
Abram, Lisa. “Preserving Cultural Heritage in Times of War.” 21 Nov. 2024, University of Victoria, https://news.uvic.ca/2024/preserving-cultural-heritage-in-times-of-war/.