COLLECTIONS MANAGEMENT POLICY
This National Indian Boarding School Digital Archive (NIBSDA) Collections Management Policy (CMP) statement provides information on the project's direction, continuity, and predictability; accountability for standards and services; standardization for compliance with any legal and regulatory requirements and ethical expectations, obligations, and rights; and uniformity by establishing consistency in operations; associated workflows that will inform information management policies, procedures, and best practices.
Purpose Statement
To collect, preserve, and make accessible in a public digital repository the historical record of Indian boarding schools in the United States and to engage in consultation with Native communities to uphold Tribal Data Sovereignty around those records.
Collection Scope
NIBSDA includes digital surrogates and associated metadata of format-neutral records of Federal, Tribal, State, or Church operators of boarding school institutions as well as records of private parties and other documents of historical significance related to the U.S. Indian boarding school era. “Indian boarding schools” are defined as educational institutions where American Indian or Alaskan Native students resided away from their families (does not include day school institutions, orphanages, or sanitariums).
Inter-Institutional Partnership and Collections Sharing
A special project of NABS, NIBSDA staff will work with other institutions (Tribal and/or non-Tribal) holding in its possession records relevant to the boarding school era in order to fulfill its objectives of preserving and stewarding the historical record under its collection scope as well as making these materials more accessible to boarding school survivors, their descendants, and researchers.
Digitization
Digitization activities and workflows will vary per project and/or depending on the needs of institutional partners and respective governing bodies policies and directives.
Aggregation
NABS works with institutions who already maintain and develop their own digital archives projects that curate boarding school relevant material. NIBSDA works with these institutions to include these archival collections descriptive metadata (emphasis added) as catalog records ingested into the digital platform. This will ensure that NIBSDA is accounting for all known collections and presenting this catalog as a “clearing house.” Aggregation activities and workflows will vary per project and/or depending on the needs of institutional partners and respective governing bodies’ policies and directives.
Tribal Digital Archives Data Sovereignty Strategies
NABS will conduct Tribal outreach and engagement to determine project workflows and deliverables that ensure that individual Tribal Nations—relevant to said project scope—maintain the authority to determine which, if any, digital copies, surrogates, or representations are subject to publication, distribution, and availability. Per NIBSDA overarching values of responsible stewardship, we want to ensure methods of responsible access inform our procedures to NIBSDA access/restriction protocol. The historic record is often unclear as to which modern Tribal entity should be contacted, NABS strives to curate information featured in NIBSDA in a reflexive manner. If you represent a Tribal Nation and have questions regarding the digital archives, please contact us.