Disability Records: Accessing the Inaccessible

By Bailey E. Hoffner

Presented at the Society of Southwest Archivists 2017 Annual Meeting

Presenters: Betty Shankle, University Archivist; Samantha Dodd, Special Collections Archivist; Jeff Downing, Digital Projects Librarian

Before attending Disability Records: Accessing the Inaccessible, my understanding of disability and the history of disability rights in this country was very limited. I did not, for example, know that approximately 54 million people in the U.S. have a disability, making persons with a disability one of the largest minorities (if not the largest) in the country. Nor did I often consider that many disabilities cannot be seen with the naked eye.

My limited knowledge of disability prior to this session anecdotally highlights the need for the work being undertaken by Archivists and Librarians at UT Arlington. They have recently assembled the Texas Disability History Collection, a collection of digitized photographs, papers, and oral histories that serve to illuminate the history of disability rights at UT Arlington and the state of Texas more broadly.

According to Special Collections Archivist, Samantha Dodd, Texas has been at the forefront of disability rights since the late 1960s, when Texas Senate Bill 111 mandated that all public buildings and facilities become accessible. For perspective, Congress did not pass broad disability rights legislation until 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was not passed until 1990.

UT Arlington has maintained an impressive tradition of disability advocacy, from the creation of the Freewheelers wheelchair basketball team (now the Movin’ Mavs) in 1976 to the creation in 2013 of the Disabilities Studies Minor, headed up by Dr. Sarah Rose. For those interested in learning more, the exhibit Building a Barrier-Free Campus, curated by Dr. Rose and Trevor Engel, is a fascinating look at one institution’s trajectory toward accessibility.

While the history of disability rights played an undeniable part in the larger history of UT Arlington (and Texas, and the United States) there was a clear gap in the historical record. Having recognized this gap, archivists and librarians at UT Arlington worked directly with Dr. Rose and members of the disability community to ensure that any aggregated collection would be both widely accessible and respectful of the perspectives of persons with disabilities. The final product “emphasizes the pioneering role played by a racially and ethnically diverse cast of Texan disability rights activists, many of whom attended or have worked at UT Arlington, in fighting for equal access to education, work, union membership, public transit, and sports.”¹

Additionally, University Archivist Betty Shankle and others are currently working to build the Disability History/Archives Consortium: A Portal to Disability History Collections. The hope is that they can create a single access point for anyone interested in the history of disability.

By the time the presentation was over, I had learned a number of important things about disability, not least of which was a crash course in disability sensitivity training (tips from the presentation are included below). I also gained a new perspective of disability as “a crucial element of human diversity”² and a significant and underrepresented piece of the struggle for civil rights in the United States.

Some of the things to consider when interacting with individuals with disabilities:

• • Ask before you help
  • People desire to be independent
  • Treat with respect
  • Be sensitive about physical contact
  • People depend on their arms for balance, consider equipment part of their personal space
  • Think before you speak
  • Speak directly to the person
  • Don’t make assumptions
  • People are the best judge of what they can or cannot do
  • Respond graciously to requests
  • An accommodation is not a complaint³

Bailey Hoffner is Archivist at the American Organ Institute Archives and Library at the University of Oklahoma School of Music. After happening upon a small list of women’s collections at a large repository and feeling enormously empowered by the – albeit late – realization of a historically significant lineage, she became interested in the power archivists wield in preserving (or not preserving) the histories of underrepresented or misrepresented groups. She currently works most closely with the collections of the American Theatre Organ Society, featuring rare materials related to theatre organs which were for many years maligned as insignificant.

Footnotes

1. Texas Disability History Collection

2. Minor in Disability Studies

3. Office of Disability Rights