Bianca Pallo

It was quite difficult because you’re dealing with people of so many different backgrounds who have different, there’s a whole different structure for like names and whatnot, whereas, you know, in the West we do like first name, last name, or if we’re arranging things in the files, it’ll be last name comma first name. But that’s not normally the case for other places. So it’s kind of trying to figure out how they wanna be represented. And that was kind of like, I can’t force Western archival concepts onto people if that’s just not gonna work and not gonna respect their identity. So I was trying to make sure that we’re being consistent but respectful. But then it was also very interesting for me to be able to be in contact with partner institutions in so many different countries, because that was really unusual for me. Because in the past, I’ve only worked with different academic institutions with some different departments. Or different museums who also were within the same consortium, things like that. So this was very different for me to say, oh yeah, you know, I’ve got a Zoom at 9 a.m. With Brazil. it’s no big deal. [chuckles] So it was very interesting and it was definitely a moment for me to take a step back and be like, I can’t be so focused on archival standards in a way that’s gonna mess with people’s identities.