Decisions, Decisions: Pronouns, Privacy, Cat Ashes

Each step along the way to acquiring and making accessible the papers and records of women and men, living and dead, and organizations that speak to gender and sexualities presents interesting challenges.  Whose papers to seek and whose to steer elsewhere, when are there just too many strings attached, balancing donor requests for restrictions with scholars’ requests for open access, weighing the privacy rights of unwitting third parties, which pronouns, subject headings, and naming conventions to use, bringing order out of chaos when collections arrive in unsorted heaps, what to save and what to return (mammograms? cat ashes?), questions of copyright and digitization, overzealous executors guarding the gate like Cerberus, are issues with which we wrestle every day.   Working with the papers of Shere Hite and Andrea Dworkin, Coyote and The International Foundation for Gender Education, J. Ari Kane-DeMaios and Mark Ethan Smith and many more has taught all of us at the Schlesinger Library that every collection includes challenges and demands that decisions be made.