Say My Name, Say My Name: Addressing Missing Name Information for Women in Yale Special Collections

By Alison Clemens, Jennifer Coggins, Michelle Peralta, and Jessica Tai

*Image above: Cornelia Thayer Baldwin Lane, circa 1921. From the Arthur Bliss Lane Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

In April 2020, the Yale Library’s Reparative Archival Description Working Group launched a task force to identify full name information for women previously identified only by their surnames or husbands’ names in ArchivesSpace agent records. The working group began the project at this time because it was one that staff—then required to work remotely—could readily contribute to from home. 

The ArchivesSpace Agents Reparative Task Force for Women’s Names worked with Metadata Coordinator, Mark Custer, to run a query to identify agent records in ArchivesSpace with “Mrs.” or “Miss” in the name string. This included women who were only identified by their husbands’ names (e.g., “Arnold, Mrs. Edwin G.”), identified only by a surname (e.g. “Abrams, Miss” and “Bicknell, Mrs.”), lumped in with their spouse’s agent record (e.g., “Anderson, Mr. and Mrs. Lee”), or identified by both their and their husbands’ names (e.g., Deming, Anna (Mrs. John)). The script for retrieving agent records with “Mrs.” or “Miss” in the name string is available in our documentation, which is linked below.

Task force members then began attempting to locate full name information for the women using a variety of online sources including Ancestry.com, Findagrave.com, obituaries and marriage announcements in digitized newspapers, Yale’s own additional archival description (e.g., notes in finding aids and catalog records), and the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF). They also collected, when available, information for a brief biographical note in the agent record. 

Once the information was collected and sorted according to the type of updates needed (e.g., name revision; name revision and biographical note; name creation), changes were approved by repository staff stakeholders, implemented in a test environment, reviewed for accuracy, then implemented in Yale’s production instance of ArchivesSpace. In all, 207 agent records were created or updated. We generally retained previous name forms to allow for searchability (see example screenshots below).

Cornelia Thayer Baldwin Lane was previously identified in an ArchivesSpace agent record as “Mrs. Arthur Bliss Lane,” and her full name information was added to the record.

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The public view of Cornelia Thayer Baldwin Lane’s agent record in Archives@Yale, including a brief biographical note.

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When the library implements ArchivesSpace 3.0, the team will make use of the new General Context field to communicate with users about updated records as well as those for which full name information could not be found.

We’d like to thank our Yale Library colleagues Alicia Detelich Boersig and Mark Custer for lending their technical expertise to this project, and our colleagues at Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the National Library of Medicine, Purdue University, New York University, and the University of Tennessee who offered valuable input during the project.

Documentation about the project, including our workflows, scripts used, sources consulted, and a list of records updated, is here: Reparative Archival Description Working Group: ArchivesSpace Agents Reparative Task Force for Women’s Names

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Alison Clemens is Head of Processing in Manuscripts and Archives at the Yale University Library. She has been a member of Yale Library’s Reparative Archival Description Working Group since 2019.

Jennifer Coggins is the Archivist for Collection Development in Manuscripts and Archives at the Yale University Library. She has been a member of Yale Library’s Reparative Archival Description Working Group since 2021.

Michelle Peralta is Resident Archivist for Yale Special Collections in Manuscripts and Archives at the Yale University Library. She has been a member of Yale Library’s Reparative Archival Description Working Group since 2021.

Jessica Tai is Resident Processing Archivist at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. She has been chair of Yale’s Reparative Archival Description Working Group since 2019.