The Archiving Reproductive Health project at the Digital Repository of Ireland has published two new publications. These are a factsheet about the Anonymisation Protocol used in cataloguing the In Her Shoes collection, and a report describing research into the use of controlled vocabularies in preparing collection metadata.
The Anonymisation Protocol outlines the approaches taken by the project to anonymise some material in the In Her Shoes: Women of the Eighth collection, and the reasons for certain anonymisation and redaction decisions being taken.
The Vocabulary Report summarises the research carried out by digital archivists working on the Archiving Reproductive Health project in developing suitable vocabularies for use in cataloguing digital collections on the topics of reproductive health and reproductive justice.
Both collections use the In Her Shoes: Women of the Eighth collection as a case study.
The ‘In Her Shoes: Women of the Eighth’ Facebook was set up during the 2018 referendum to remove the constitutional ban on abortion in Ireland. On the page, women shared their experiences of being denied access to abortion care in Ireland, both in recent years and in the 1980s and 1990s. It was an important factor in informing voters about the reality of life under the Eighth Amendment, and contributed to the decisive Yes vote which opened up access to abortion services in Ireland.
DRI and In Her Shoes opened discussions about preserving the stories in 2018, and an initial export of the data from the Facebook page was carried out that year.
The work picked up again with the start of the Archiving Reproductive Health project, and staff were hired specifically to work with the In Her Shoes data and develop a strategy for archiving it in the long term.
In 2022, ARH carried out a new and comprehensive export of the data from the In Her Shoes page. The next challenge involved analysing these stories and identifying where anonymisation may be required for data protection and privacy.
The Anonymisation factsheet describes this challenge, explores initial approaches that were adopted and later modified, and explains the considerations taken by the team in adopting these approaches.
The Vocabulary report analyses the controlled vocabularies available for use in metadata creation – their suitability for use in atypical datasets such as In Her Shoes, and how they can be modified for most effective use.
ARH are making these documents freely available to download, in the hope that they may be of use to archivists and other information professionals, social science researchers and people working with personal data in their research datasets.
The Anonymisation Protocol can be downloaded from the Repository at https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.8910zn364
The Vocabulary Report can be downloaded at https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.s752m6304-4
