The warnings are meant to ‘mitigate harm for researchers, particularly those from marginalized communities.’
Princeton University has added trigger warnings to documents in the archives of its library over the past few years, and an email obtained by National Review shows an advertisement for a student-composed focus group meant to determine how best to prevent researchers from seeing materials they might find hurtful.
The email, sent by a current Princeton student with the subject line “Mitigating Harm in Archival Research Session,” includes a description of “recent efforts at Princeton University Library to protect researchers from accidentally stumbling on archival materials that are offensive or harmful.”
The library does so, the student writes, “predominantly through the use of content mediation, warnings, and descriptive notes in the Finding Aids website.”
The “content mediation, warnings, and descriptive notes” the student describes have become relatively commonplace in education over the past decade as part of an effort to ensure those enrolled at institutions of higher education are not exposed to words or concepts that might upset them.
Princeton has added trigger warnings to documents in its collections since 2022, the library’s website shows. To further develop its protocols, the library assembled a focus group study Wednesday — during the university’s “Wintersession” period, in which students do not have typical classes — “to explore not only how we warn users before engaging with the content, but also to better understand what constitutes harmful and offensive content for different users and contexts.”
The email links to a page on the library’s Special Collections blog advertising an information session to “explore ways to protect researchers from accidentally viewing harmful and offensive materials present in the Princeton University Library’s archival collections.”
The blog post continues:
As part of inclusive and reparative description efforts, archival staff in Special Collections have recently begun to implement harmful content mediation features as a way to mitigate harm for researchers, particularly those from marginalized communities, who encounter damaging, injurious, or otherwise hurtful description and/or collection content.
That page includes an example of the library’s trigger-warning system. On a slide titled “Photographs: Anniston, Alabama Bus Burning, 1961,” large-print font reading “Content Warning” sits above a line cautioning viewers that “photos/materials depict scenes of anti-Black racially-motivated violence.”
Michael Hotchkiss, Princeton’s assistant vice president for communications, told NR that the university sees the library’s use of trigger warnings as a helpful part of the research process.
“The Library does ongoing work to ensure that catalog information and finding aids created by Library staff are accurate and do not contain offensive language,” Hotchkiss wrote in an email. “Any content warnings do not restrict or limit access to Library materials. These efforts encourage and support wide use of the Library’s collections to advance knowledge and make information more discoverable for researchers.”