Demographic

Age: 23

Gender identity: Female 

Race: White

Indigenous: N/A

Class: Working class / middle class

Other identity (e.g. linguistic, religious): Bilingual, Queer, Disabled

Education: Masters

Language(s): French and English

Personal responsibilities: Charlie is a busy student balancing work, school, personal life, and health. She has been managing chronic pain over the last 4 years. 

Location: (relationship to Lower Mainland – from here, were from here, from elsewhere): Grew up on Vancouver Island, did her undergrad in Victoria. Recently moved to Vancouver from Victoria. Still goes back regularly to visit family and friends.

Widgets: Tools & Platforms

• Transcription – From The Page, Scribe (2.0), Scripto
• Collaborative Annotation – Annotator, Annotorius, Textus
• Curation – Ponga, HistoryPin
• Flagging Harmful Language – Description-Audit

Brief Biography

Charlie Chambers (she/her) is a 23-year old (Gen Z) white settler from Victoria BC who is currently an MAS (archives) graduate student at UBC iSchool. She has a background working and volunteering in community archives and is interested in queer and disabled archives. She is proficient with technology and is learning the foundations of archival practices and theory, but sometimes finds the jargon challenging and the archival structures and tools confusing. Charlie is working on developing a digital archives that documents queer events in Vancouver, and is primiarily concerned about consent, copyright, descriptive and respectful metadata, and sustaining the digital platform in the long-term.

Character description

Charlie often gets intimidated by the archival jargon that she encounters and sometimes finds it difficult to articulate her needs or what she’s looking for. Because of this, in addition to managing a busy life as a graduate student, she can get overwhelmed and may stop communicating or can be a bit flaky. She loves sharing her findings in the archives and hopes to share them with others through her digital archives platform.

Interest in archives & Life experience

Why interested in archives: Charlie comes to archives through her experience working and volunteering in community archives in Victoria and the Lower Mainland. She is currently a first year graduate student enrolled in the MAS (archives) program at UBC and is learning the theory and practices behind archives.

Community affiliations: Charlie is mostly affiliated with DIY and community archives. She has visited a handful of city and university archives before to do personal research. She recently signed up for some archives-related listservs to stay invovled on current discussions in the field and joined the queer metadata collective.

Represented in archives: As a white woman, Charlie often sees external representations of herself in the archives, however, finding queer and disabled representation is often more challenging. She generally encounters outdated and hurtful terminology when doing archival research. She is determined to focus on reparative metadata description in school.

Professional affiliations: In addition to the Queer Metadata Collective, Charlie is affiliated with the University of British Columbia, and the UBC student chapter of the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA).

Access needs and mobility: Charlie experiences chronic back pain and requires access to an ergonomic chair. She must also avoid long hours of sitting without moving which can be difficult as an archival researcher / student. She has encountered some challenges getting her access needs met in archives and at school, but generally has been accommodated. 

Motivations

Why: As a graduate student, Charlie is looking to build a capstone project that can highlight her work and areas of interest to future employers. She also wants to bring greater visibility to queer communities in Vancouver and to preserve that history for posterity on a digital platform.

Frustrations

Barriers: Charlie is primarily concerned about consent, copyright, descriptive and respectful metadata, and sustaining the digital platform for the long-term. She hopes to pitch her idea to a larger institution to help sustain the project and is in conversation with local events organizers and photographers to gauge their interest and to discuss some of  her concerns mentioned above.

Info and Tech Access & Experience

Hardware: Charlie is competent using desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. She is more familiar with Macs but can navigate PCs too.

Software: Charlie is familiar with Microsoft software, Google products, social media, and video conferencing. She has no experience actually developing software, but has some coding (CSS/html) and website CMS experience.

Network connectivity: She has access to wifi at home and at UBC. She often uses cellular data to do work on her cell phone while on the bus out to UBC.

Experience with archival tools: Charlie has some self-taught experience using Access to Memory (AtoM). She is particularly excited about digital libraries and archives, and has played around with Omeka and Collective Access sandboxes.

Experience with archival frameworks: She has a general understanding of the hierarchical organizational structure of archives, but is gaining a more in depth understanding throughout her education. She is gradually building more confidence in explaining archival tools and concepts.

Comfort with learning technology: Charlie is proficient and learns technology quickly. She asks a lot of questions and learns best through hands-on learning.

Goals

What do they want to do: Charlie wants to create a digital archives that features current documentation of queer activities (dances, nightlife, exhibitions, performances, etc.) in Vancouver. She strongly believes that there is a unique and diverse range of queer events that should be documented and shared to make up for a historical lack of queer representation in archives.

What relationship do they want to the archives: Charlie wants to become a professional archivist who works in an archives. Ideally, she’d like to work closely with communities as an outreach and engagement archivist and to support people doing archival research. She is keen to spend time learning in the archives.