“We Were Called Low-Grades” : Current Archival Approaches to the Digitization and Dissemination of Eugenics Collections

Abstract: This thesis examines the current methodological approaches to digital access and dissemination of eugenics archives. It looks in-depth at four institutions from around the world which provide some means of digital access to a specific eugenics collection that they control: the Wellcome Collection within the Wellcome Library in London, the Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement founded in part by the Cold Springs Laboratory in New York, the Canadian Eugenics Archive, and the State Institute for Race Biology at the Uppsala University Library Special Collections in Sweden. The complexity of archival methodology and thought has evolved over the course of the past few decades, with more and more institutions recognizing the historical bias of their collections and many working towards combating these biases to bridge knowledge gaps and provide more detailed and nuanced understanding of their materials. With the development of the internet, and the pressure for heritage institutions to turn towards more digital methods of dissemination of their collections, there has been fierce debate as to good practices towards implementing these digital means of access and dissemination. Collections which contain historically problematic materials, such as eugenics collections, can make digitization and digital methodologies particularly difficult. This thesis serves as a groundwork for the development of good institutional methodologies in terms of digitization of eugenics-related materials by comparing the available methodologies employed by four institutions holding materials which were particularly significant during the period of legally applied eugenics on their respective populations.