Descriptive practices can have significant effects on how users perceive and navigate materials when materials are encountered through a digital interface. Digital interfaces rely on metadata description to organize materials and provide access according to the logics behind these descriptions. They do so through set vocabularies that reflect how information workers who write metadata deploy their knowledge of the communities they work in and for. Descriptive practices can shape what an archive becomes in its digital form while potentially effacing the evidence of that shaping. “Good” digital interfaces resolve tensions by providing search retrieval and navigability that work so well the interface virtually disappears.

In contrast, lesbian-feminist history is complex, acrimonious, and multivalent, rooted in affective histories where sex, gender, race, class, and ability meet. The Lesbian Herstory Archives’ digital interface must struggle to find ways to represent the acrimony, ambivalence, and tension critical to lesbian-feminist histories.

— Information Activism by Cait McKinney