Statement Regarding Harmful Content:

Archives and Special Collections staff at JHU have a responsibility to the people and communities who create, use, and are represented in the collections in our care. Part of this responsibility is to describe materials in a culturally responsive and respectful manner, and to repair our description when it contains inappropriate language. We are committed to a reparative description project to review finding aids and catalog records, remediate these collections, and update our descriptive policies with guidelines to reflect this praxis.

Users may encounter language that is inaccurate, outdated, and even offensive or harmful in our finding aids, such as language that is racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, or demeans the humanity of the people we describe. Some of this description may have been written by archives staff, or it may reflect language that the creators of the records used themselves. In other cases, this language is intentionally retained to honestly and accurately reflect prejudice found in our collections, even as we recognize that encountering harmful or offensive language can be difficult or painful.  

We are committed to correcting and contextualizing these records as we identify them, and we invite you to contact us at specialcollections@lists.jhu.edu if you encounter harmful language in our finding aids or collections.

For access to our digital collections, please visit:

• JScholarship (institutional repository)
• The Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection (collection)
• The Johns Hopkins University Data Archive (data repository)