A trauma-informed approach to archives: Theory and Practice

The trauma-informed approach to archives practice is a relatively new addition to the world of archives theory, developed in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Despite being a newcomer, the approach is quickly being adopted by archivists across the world. In this article, I’ll lay out its underlying principles, discuss the ways I’ve used it in day-to-day archives work, and attempt to analyse the ups and downs of the approach with regard to its real-world application.

Before we embark on that analysis, though, a brief introduction and outline of my archival background: I am a recently qualified archivist from the UK, graduating from the MARM course at Liverpool in 2023. From 2023 to 2025, I worked as a project archivist at the Mulberry Bush, a therapeutic primary school for a small number of children with early years trauma and related behavioural difficulties.

As may be expected, the Mulberry Bush collection contained a large amount of difficult and traumatic material relating to the pupils and their psychological health. Seeing this kind of material on paper, day in and day out, can have detrimental effects on the archivist’s own mental health if not properly mitigated. As such, the archives team made a policy decision to apply a trauma-informed approach to our day-to-day work. The school takes the view that its whole environment should be therapeutic for the pupils, and to an extent, this extended to the archive as well. Approaching our work in a thoughtful and reflective manner was encouraged by the rest of the charity on all levels, giving the archives team an excellent opportunity to put the trauma-informed approach to the test.

The Trauma-Informed Approach: Some theoretical considerations

The trauma-informed approach wasn’t originally developed for archivists, instead originating in the fields of psychiatric and social work. It attempts to teach practitioners to recognise the signs of trauma in clients, understand that their own behaviour can have positive or negative effects on a person’s healing process, and work towards preventing re-traumatisation. This approach also takes into consideration the concept of ‚vicarious‘ or ’second-hand‘ trauma – a phenomenon where the person who is dealing with material containing another person’s trauma can develop symptoms similar to individuals who have themselves experienced trauma.

The concept of vicarious trauma is of particular relevance to archival practice. Archival collections can contain vast amounts of traumatic information, and can themselves be focal points of trauma. Working in a trauma-informed way, therefore, means recognising this fact, and working to streamline workflows and processes in a way that meets the needs of both trauma survivors and the staff handling their material. It also re-centres the knowledge and experiences of those who are documented in the archival collection, not just the professionals tasked with its custody.

A central point of the trauma-informed approach to archives, as laid out by Kirsten Wright and Nicola Laurent, is the recognition of the archive as a site of power. Archival collections and their institutions, are not (and cannot be) neutral. The processes of appraisal, preservation and access control are three ways in which archivists can have control over memory and heritage. Archives cannot be separated from the institutions which control them: the national archive of a state serves the interests of a state, that of a company serves the company, and that of a research institution serves the research institution. Taking a participatory, user-centred approach to archives (such as the trauma-informed approach) can’t completely get rid of this power dynamic, but it can ensure that the dynamic is a little more balanced in favour of the people accessing and represented within the archival collection.

This approach is built on five main principles: Safety, Trust and Transparency, Choice,  Collaboration, and Empowerment. The trauma-informed archive must be a place where both staff and users are safe in all aspects – their identity, their psychological wellbeing, and their relationship with the archive itself. This, as Wright and Laurent explain, must be in place before the other four principles can be implemented. The principles of choice, collaboration, and empowerment focus on the involvement of other voices besides that of the archivist in the management of the collection. Individuals‘ preferences and expertise are taken into account in a transparent, consent-driven environment. As mentioned above, the expertise and knowledge of non-professional service users is essential in creating a trauma-informed archive service. In archives where the subjects of records are accessing material about themselves, this is particularly important – recognising the importance of these records to their subjects is a big step towards creating a safe environment for these service users.

The trauma-informed approach is seeing increased interest, particularly in the UK. The MA in Archives and Records Management at UCL has begun teaching a module on the topic, involving input from archivists (including from the Mulberry Bush!) who put the approach into practice. The next special issue of the UK Archives and Records Association’s journal (Spring 2026) is dedicated to trauma-informed approaches to archives, illustrating the broad appeal this methodology has to the wider archive field in the UK. In light of this, let’s have a look at what using the trauma-informed approach actually looks like in day-to-day archives wor

The Day-to-Day: Trauma-Informed Archiving in Practice

The focal point of the trauma-informed environment created around the Mulberry Bush collection was the needs of the individuals represented therein. Recognising that the archives team and I held a large amount of power and control over the records was the first step of this process. The individuals who had spent time at the school had often had extensive interactions with the care, criminal justice, and disability support systems in the UK, all of which are very disempowering experiences. As such, I considered it to be of paramount importance that such people felt a real sense of ownership and control when it came to how their information was stored, from their observation notes down to photograph albums.

Blick in einen großen Raum mit einem langen Tisch, auf dem Aktenstapel liegen. Am Ende des Tisches steht eine Person neben einem Aktentransportwagen
The process of sorting and cataloguing pupil files. This was a labour-intensive and somewhat difficult process, but made the files far more accessible to ex-pupils requesting data.

We made sure to implement the principles of choice and collaboration throughout the project. This collaboration was not a great departure from existing practice at this archive, as stakeholder groups had often been engaged in this way in the past. However, the approach we took to the Mulberry Bush collection was more intentional and informed, allowing the archives team to take time developing a sustainable, tailored approach. In some cases, choices made in collaboration with ex-pupils led to me making preservation decisions which would not otherwise have been made.

One such example is the approach I took to photograph albums. Ordinarily, photographs left in the plastic wallets of albums will be removed and placed in Melinex sleeves, to prevent them from degrading over time. However, in the case of Mulberry Bush photograph albums, the physical objects themselves held a large amount of affective importance – removing the photographs from their original housing would, in essence, remove much of the meaning of the object for ex-pupils and staff. Therefore, we made the decision to leave the photographs in the albums, preserving the whole object as well as possible, while creating a digitised copy of the album to be stored in the digital archive.

In this case, the trauma-informed approach led to a rather large change in archival practice on a day-to-day level. Without collaboration between stakeholders and archivists, the collection would have been managed in a way that made ex-pupils feel more disempowered and unheard, and far less likely to continue engaging with the archive in a positive way. In this case, relinquishing some of our inherent power as archivists to allow users to manage their own records may, in a sense, have allowed the archive to have a somewhat therapeutic function.

Throughout this process, the archive team ensured that a high degree of transparency was maintained – all of our decisions were made with the knowledge of stakeholders both within and outside the organisation. In keeping with the trauma-informed approach, our transparency ensured that we remained accountable as custodians of information which, in essence, belonged to other people. In order to involve stakeholders in the cataloguing and packaging process, I held workshops and community engagement sessions with ex-pupils and staff. We brought photograph bundles out of the archive, and worked alongside the ex-pupils to conserve and re-package them into more stable housing.

For this process, we made sure that the photographs being worked on were taken during the time the ex-pupils were at the school. This gave them a sense of real ownership and security (as they could see how the memories from their time at school were being preserved), and provided the archive with additional valuable information, in the form of identifying individuals and locations represented in the photograph collection. In this sense, as well as being a generally positive experience for our stakeholders, taking the trauma-informed approach also provided the archive with material benefits.

Ups and Downs

During the eighteen months of the Mulberry Bush project, I managed to get to grips with the trauma-informed approach in a way I doubt I’d have been able to in another workplace. This unique experience gave me many things, the most relevant of which to this blog is a good understanding of the positive and negative aspects of the trauma-informed approach. To wrap up this blog, let’s go through a few of them.

Firstly, I believe that the trauma-informed approach contributed to a more fully-rounded catalogue, in which the lived experience of ex-pupils and staff added a unique and valuable perspective. I can’t count the amount of times someone mentioned something to me in passing which provided an entirely new way of looking at the school’s history. From a purely practical standpoint, this collaborative involvement made the catalogue a much better resource than it would have otherwise been. From a more emotionally aware point of view (the one used by the archive team and the school!) the trauma-informed approach helped to make the archive and its host site a safer and more welcoming place for ex-pupils to visit. Without this methodology, I think the archive would have retained some of that slightly menacing air of secrecy and „closed-off-ness“ which we archivists work so hard to get rid of.

In an environment where ex-pupils frequently make Subject Access Requests (SARs) under the UK GDPR, making the archive more welcoming in this way has further benefits. SARs are frequently a re-traumatising and upsetting process for care-experienced people, including Mulberry Bush ex-pupils. Making the archive itself more welcoming went, I think, some way towards streamlining this process for people making SARs. On our side of the process, cataloguing the archive meticulously made it far easier and quicker to find relevant material, itself making the SAR process easier for ex-pupils by reducing the time they needed to wait for their data.

However, as good as the trauma-informed approach is in acknowledging the emotional and psychological impact of archival collections, it can’t really prevent that impact all by itself. At the end of the day, I was still working with very difficult content day after day for eighteen months. It’s almost unavoidable that this will have some psychological effect on the archivist, and my case was no exception. Over the course of the project, I developed a quite nasty case of vicarious trauma from processing the collection. I won’t get into the detailed effects of this condition here, but it has considerably affected my daily life, including some longer-lasting effects which are still lingering with me now. This, in turn, leads to one of my main issues with the trauma-informed approach: although, understandably, it focuses principally (and rather well) on the traumatising or re-traumatising effects of archives on the user base, I feel that it somewhat skims over how archives can affect the archivists.

To be clear, I don’t think this is a weakness of the trauma-informed approach in general – I found a lot of useful information for practitioners of other fields to which it has been applied – but the methodology’s approach to archives suffers somewhat from a lack of this kind of guidance. In my experience, I found this left me feeling somewhat stranded when it came to processing the more emotionally difficult parts of the collection. With relatively little theoretical basis upon which to build my approach, I had to rely on trauma-informed information for other fields, as well as in-house resources. While the latter was already built into our working environment, it was principally designed for those working in a school environment, directly with children. As such, I found it only partially relevant to my own work. I believe that this is quite an easy issue to rectify, though – as time goes on and more organisations like the Mulberry Bush incorporate the trauma–informed approach into their archive practice, there will be a larger body of experience from which guidelines and resources can be created.

I don’t think this is too far in the future – there are already several bodies working on trauma–informed approaches to archives. Nicola Laurent and Kirsten Wright continue to develop the field, offering seminars and a training course (delivered through the Australian Society of Archivists (ASA)), as well as continued publications on the subject. The Trauma Informed Community of Practice (TIACOP) holds regular online meetings and operates a forum for archivists around the world to share their information and expertise. Through the ICA, Laurent and Wright have also published a quantitative study on the interaction between trauma and archives, with a view to developing resources around the trauma-informed methodology in the future.

To conclude

All this, in my view, is very positive news. Not only is trauma in archives being taken more seriously by the global community of practice, but steps are actively being taken to develop the trauma-informed approach for use in a wide range of archive contexts. From my work with the Mulberry Bush collection, I’ve seen the effects this approach can have on both the archive itself and its stakeholders. By fostering transparency, safety, and trust, the archive team was able to reach a wider audience of ex-pupils and staff, bringing the community together around the archive in new ways. While in our context, themes of trauma and healing were already ingrained, the trauma-informed approach to archives allowed the connection to be made much more strongly between these themes and the archival material which recorded them.

Overall, though, I think the most important thing I took from my experience at the Mulberry Bush was that although a theoretical approach may appear strong on paper, it takes practice-based guidance and resources to make it fully useable. The work of TIACOP, the ICA, and the ASA is invaluable in the development of such resources, and over the next few years I expect the trauma-informed approach to become far more widespread in the global field. Below, I’ve linked to several of these resources, if you’d like to know more about the trauma-informed approach and the organisations working to develop it.

Resources:

Natalya Uemlianin-Stone is a qualified archivist from the United Kingdom.
Since 2025 she is based in Hamburg, where she is involved in preserving the archives of the Magnus Hirschfeld Centrum and Freies Sender Kombinat. In her free time, Natalya writes a blog focusing on archives theory and practice at natsarchiveblog.substack.com.