Article

What Could Have Been?: Surveying the Labor Impact of the 2025 Executive Orders on GLAM Workers

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Abstract

What Could Have Been? is a collaborative project designed to document the labor lost as a result of federal cuts and grant terminations, especially within GLAM institutions. This survey was inspired by a sub-group of members of the 2025 Archives Leadership Institute (ALI) Cohort who came together to collect evidence of the personal and professional losses resulting from the current sociopolitical landscape. While the project seeks to document the effects on the GLAM communities, What Could Have Been? also acknowledges the loss of personal livelihoods and vilification of public servants in addition to amplifying the impact of the erasure of their labor. Affected GLAM workers are invited to document their experiences at https://bit.ly/wchb_survey.

 

Keywords: GLAM, galleries, libraries, archives, museums, survey, federal funding, grants

How to Cite:

Stearns, R., Garcia, A. & DuVernay, J., (2025) “What Could Have Been?: Surveying the Labor Impact of the 2025 Executive Orders on GLAM Workers”, The Political Librarian 8(2), 194-206.