Collier, Z. (2024). “Rehousing Archivists: Attending to a Livable Future for A Black, Queer Disabled Memory Worker.” Preserving Disability: Disability and the Archival Profession. Eds. Gracen Brilmyer and Lydia Tang. Library Juice Press.
Rehousing Archivists: Attending to a Livable Future for A Black, Queer Disabled Memory Worker.
From the Editors:
“Concluding this book and orienting to the future of the archival profession, Zakiya Collier, in their chapter, “Rehousing Archivists: Attending to a Livable Future for A Black, Queer Disabled Memory Worker,” considers what it means to seek better conditions for disabled memory workers. Weaving together disability studies, Black women’s speculative fiction, and Black studies as well as literature, pop culture, and personal experience, Collier makes a powerful provocation to the future of archives, asking what it means to “make a livable world for a Black, queer invisibly-disabled archivist possible and real.” They critique the ways the profession is often tethered to an office and in-person work and both create debilitating working conditions while also maintaining ableist and inaccessible employment for those most marginalized. An act of refusal and dreaming otherwise, Collier calls to “rehome” archivists, to reimagine archives as we think through issues of legibility, capitalism, labor, accommodations, and possible futures.”
Collier, Z. & Fullwood, S.G. (2024). “Mapping the Legacy of Black Queer Librarianship: From Audre to Zora.” Grabbing Tea: Queer Conversations in Librarianship. Eds. Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz and Sara Howard. Library Juice Press.
Are You Family? Mapping the Legacy of Black Queer Librarianship: From Audre to Zora
From the Editors:
“Venturing into the somatic, we then enter the spirit, or the ancestral journey with Zakiya Collier and Steven G. Fullwood in their chapter “Are You Family? Mapping the Geneaology of Black Queer Library Workers.” This intergenerational conversation of two archivists, who have managed Schomburg collections, traces a lineage of queer chosen family within the profession, including great practitioners like Hurston and Lorde, whom we would never meet, but have inspired us to our core. We ask ourselves where we stand in this lineage, and who it is that we take with us.”
Collier, Z & Adams, S. (2023). “Ethical Expressions of Collective Memory: Re/presenting Central Brooklyn Jazz Oral Histories as Linked Data.” Ethics in Linked Data. Eds. Alexandra Provo, Kathleen Burlingame, and B.M. Watson. Library Juice Press.
Ethical Expressions of Collective Memory: Re/presenting Central Brooklyn Jazz Oral Histories as Linked Data.
From the Editors:
“In Ethical Expressions of Collective Memory: Re/presenting Central Brooklyn Jazz Oral Histories as Linked Data, Zakiya Collier and Sarah Ann Adams begin with the power of names to oppress, empower, claim, and reclaim. Sharing the work from the Linking Lost Jazz Shrines (LLJS) project, the authors foreground ethical considerations in project decision-making, name authority creation, and ontological data modeling. Working from a person-centered theory of archival care, the LLJS team consciously expands notions of the notability of those represented in the Weeksville Lost Jazz Shrines of Brooklyn (WLJSB) oral history collection. Working against the bibliographic paradigms that privilege entities and their publication output, the team models data in a manner that conveys that "all forms of participation in Central Brooklyn's jazz culture are deemed valuable."The chapter is also an invaluable window into some of the processes, philosophies, and ethical decisions guiding one of the most vibrant and significant linked open data projects today, a tremendous rethinking of the processes of cataloging, classification, description and linked data.”
Almeida, Nora and Jen Hoyer. The Social Movement Archive. Litwin Books, 2021.
The Social Movement Archive
In the section in the Introduction titled, Archives can allow the materials they collect to shift their practices, the authors write, “Zakiya Collier explained how her work with counterinstitutional materials within the Schomburg Center has prompted her to create new practices for connecting with the creators of material collected as part of digital archiving projects… She reflected on how archives can connect with movements to ensure that archival language reflects “how the people in this movement would describe things.”
I also offered thoughts on archives, labor, scarcity, and precarity which are included in a later section.