Northern Illinois University’s Statement on Offensive, Sensitive, Difficult, or Harmful Materials

We seek to understand and improve the experiences of people who access and interact with harmful content within our collections, web pages or records that describe materials in our collections. You can help us with this process by emailing the library to:

• Report harmful content in our collections or collection descriptions
• Ask questions about why we make harmful content accessible or use harmful language in our collection descriptions
• Describe your experience in using harmful content in our collections or collection descriptions

Once we receive your email, we will review the material and respond with the appropriate actions. These might include labeling the material with relevant content warnings, placing a time-limited embargo on the material, or no action at all.

NIU Libraries and Collections strive to collect and preserve materials representing a complete historical record through purchases and donations. In addition to materials owned by NIU, we make materials available from thousands of libraries, special collections, and archives around the world. The collections, built over decades, reflect the biases of the times, as well as the biases of the donors at the time they were acquired. These materials may also include records created by, or depicting, marginalized groups of people.

There are millions of items in the collections of NIU Libraries, and the social awareness of potential harm changes with surprising speed. It is impossible to repeatedly evaluate all items in the collections. However, librarians and archivists make every effort to evaluate materials as they are made available and revisit these items as issues arise. This is where patron commentary and shared experiences are most important.

Content notices may be applied to graphic descriptions, visual depictions, or in-depth live discussion of sensitive material, such as:

• Violence, death
• War
• Abuse (torture, sexual abuse, child abuse, animal abuse)
• Medical issues (medical procedures, blood, bodily waste)
• Self-harming behavior (suicide, self-inflicted injuries)
• Eating-disordered behavior or body shaming
• Drug and alcohol addiction
• Sexual activity (including consensual sexual activity), pornographic content
• Hate speech or strong abusive language
• Discrimination (sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia)
• Stereotypes (about gender, race, national origin, age, or other status characteristics)

To enable searching of material by subject, NIU often uses standardized vocabulary lists such as Library of Congress Subject Headings to systematize searches in our catalogs. Some of these terms are outdated and could be harmful or insensitive. Some descriptions lack authorized terms to accurately capture the experiences of marginalized people and communities, or people from non-Western countries. In addition, Librarians and archivists often re-use language provided by creators or former owners of the material. This can provide important context, but can also reflect biases and prejudices, using language that was accepted at the time but fail to address the complexities of globalization, colonization, and alienated populations. In certain cases, the language, content and/or images that accompany the items and the items themselves may include offensive content, language and descriptions that were considered acceptable at the time, reveal the societal or personal bias of the times, or may have been accepted at the time of accession as the language of the donor or owner.

NIU Libraries now try to balance the use of historical terms which provide context, but which are also accurate and respectful. This is an ongoing process of:

• Working directly with misrepresented and underrepresented communities to improve the ways they are represented.
• Informing users about the presence and origin of harmful content.
• Revising descriptions and standardized sets of descriptive terms, such as Library of Congress Subject Headings, supplementing description with humanizing and identity or person-first terms, or creating new standardized terms to describe materials.
• Researching the problem, listening to users, experimenting with solutions, and sharing our findings with each other.

We retain harmful or offensive content and language for historical accuracy or to document the issues, social context, and attitudes of the material’s creators. Some situations where this might occur include publication titles, names of organizations which contain outdated terms, and an individual’s use of self-identifying terms that are not widely favored by people within that group.