“Nothing for us, without us”: Stakeholders involvement in preserving social justice data.

On 25th May 2018, Irish citizens voted to remove the controversial “Eighth Amendment” to the Irish Constitution, opening the way for the introduction of legislation allowing abortion in some circumstances. Feminist and left groups had been campaigning for a liberalisation of abortion laws in Ireland from the 1980s onwards. In this presentation we will give an overview of the Archiving Reproductive Health project which provides long-term preservation and access to the many at-risk archives generated by grassroots women’s reproductive health movements during the campaign. The project was funded by the Wellcome Trust and co-ordinated by the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI). DRI is a trusted digital repository, which provides reliable long-term preservation and access to Ireland’s humanities, cultural heritage, and social sciences digital data. The collections preserved include: the records of the stakeholder organisations in the Repeal of the Eighth campaigns, the In Her Shoes: Women of the Eighth Facebook page, the first Facebook dataset to be archived in the Digital Repository of Ireland and research data generated by social science researchers examining the campaign. Not only does the project archive material from the recent repeal campaign (2012 - 2018), but it also archives historical campaigns on reproductive health including interviews with activists who were involved in the women’s movement in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. This paper will give an overview of the collections. We will also outline both how the project benefited from the advice and guidance of key stakeholders as well as our less successful attempts to ensure that stakeholders’ were centred in the archiving process.