This presentation highlights historical and contemporary photographs in the Marriott Library's Digital Library showing churches and other religious structures in Salt Lake City. These photos reflect the history and diversity of religion in Salt Lake, and also the way in which historical buildings have been re-purposed, whether for secular uses or as homes of new religious communities.
The presenters were faced with the task of creating best practices for ethically describing items and collections where information regarding marginalized groups, in this case Native Americans, was never recorded. The metadata of the Utah American Indian Digital Archive was analyzed via OpenRefine to highlight instances of this "archival silence" within the collection. This presentation aims to discuss the process as well as the larger problem of archival silence and how best to mitigate it.
