Name: Standards that support diversity, equity, and inclusion

Description: Standards that support diversity, equity, and inclusion

Thumbnail URL: https://cadmoremediastorage.blob.core.windows.net/0e5b2157-7605-4e1a-8b5e-74254b227fe8/videoscrubberimages/Scrubber_1.jpg?sv=2019-02-02&sr=c&sig=jb07h%2F8TchVdpqDGDQ0Hs5niKPXyvTt7of5q24Mipro%3D&st=2025-01-15T05%3A56%3A15Z&se=2025-01-15T10%3A01%3A15Z&sp=r

Duration: T00H34M55S

Embed URL: https://stream.cadmore.media/player/0e5b2157-7605-4e1a-8b5e-74254b227fe8

Content URL: https://cadmoreoriginalmedia.blob.core.windows.net/0e5b2157-7605-4e1a-8b5e-74254b227fe8/2 - Standards that support diversity%2c equity%2c and inclusion-.mov?sv=2019-02-02&sr=c&sig=YlV30Pr72qx5HM5FsiCJlOo3lO%2FgeqmQWy3A4wKfSL4%3D&st=2025-01-15T05%3A56%3A16Z&se=2025-01-15T08%3A01%3A16Z&sp=r

Upload Date: 2021-08-23T00:00:00.0000000

Transcript: Language: EN.
Segment:0 .

SPEAKER 1: Hello, everyone and welcome to the NISO plus 2021 session discussing standards that support diversity, equity, and inclusion. We have a fantastic panel today representing a lot of different viewpoints and geographies. That panel includes Trevor Dawes from the University of Delaware, Simon Holt from Elsevier, and Katharina Ruckstuhl from the Otago Business School. I'll allow the panelists to introduce themselves and how they're approaching this topic through their work.
SPEAKER 1: And then we'll reserve time for an engaging live discussion afterwards. So to start, we'll go to Trevor Dawes from the University of Delaware. And one moment, I will share the screen. OK. Take it away, Trevor.
TREVOR DAWES: Great. Thank you so much, Hannah. As said, I'm Trevor Dawes, the Vice Provost for Libraries and Museums at the University of Delaware in the United States. And it's a pleasure for me to be sharing this virtual stage with my colleagues. I'm looking forward to the presentation as well. Although, our conference host, NISO, manages certainly a lot of technical standards, there are other types of standards that are yet to be developed that we may wish to employ in libraries, and other spaces as they relate to equity, diversity, and inclusion.
TREVOR DAWES: My talk is going to obviously focus on libraries since that's where my expertise lies. And I should advise at the outset that while there may be some universal appeal on the topic on which I'm speaking, it is primarily, I think, US-centric but I certainly look forward to the discussion where we can talk about the applicability outside of the US and also in settings other than in libraries.
TREVOR DAWES: So quite coincidentally just today, the day of this recording, we announced that the University of Delaware Libraries, the University of Binghamton University Libraries in New York, and Ithaka S&R will be launching a talent management anti-racism audit. In this audit, we'll be inventorying our policies, practices, and outcomes related to recruitment, employment, promotion, and retention patterns in our libraries, but certainly this audit will be applicable not just to libraries but to any work setting.
TREVOR DAWES: And we can certainly talk more about this audit in the Q&A. I look forward to that. We'll be presenting more about this and publishing about this more in the coming weeks and months. But for the standards, from a standards perspective, we really ought to be looking at these items that I've listed here on the slide, looking at our collections, looking at how we communicate, looking at our hiring practices, hence the talent management audit, looking at our organizational climate and culture and our services.
TREVOR DAWES: I'll say just-- speak just about a minute about each-- a few seconds about each of these. And then we'll move on to Simon. When we think about our collection, certainly a lot of us in academic libraries, certainly we have our collection development policies. And those policies are tied to meeting the needs of our campus community. So we have doctoral programs in x area.
TREVOR DAWES: We make sure that we collect very deeply in this area. And some of the areas, we may not collect as deeply or as broadly in our collections. But when building those collections, do we look at the types of perspectives that we bring in building those collections? Are they mostly eurocentric? Or do they bring in newer writers, female writers, African-American authors, Native American speakers?
TREVOR DAWES: What sorts of voices are centered in our collection building? And how do we assess for that? We often talk about libraries as neutral spaces. And I believe that libraries should not be neutral spaces because we have to present-- we're neutral in that we're presenting information broadly, but we cannot be neutral in the ways in which we present our values and have interactions with our user population.
TREVOR DAWES: How are we communicating? And communication is more than the printed word or the printed publications that we share with our communities. But what do we say on our website? What images do we use when we present information both in print or in electronic means? And how is that-- how do we represent ourselves in libraries?
TREVOR DAWES: Again, no standards for these. But if we want to be inclusive and welcoming, really thinking about those from a diversity and inclusion perspective, then we have to move beyond and not just the staff photos that we'll often see in some publications but having a realistic presentation of who we are and who we want to be. I've mentioned the anti-racism talent management audit that we will be doing.
TREVOR DAWES: But this is really helping us to look at our hiring practices. Where do we advertise our positions? Who do we bring in for interviews? What questions do we ask in our interviews? What sort of biases, implicit or explicit biases, exist in these practices? And so these are the kinds of questions that we'll be asking ourselves. And in the talent management audit, we'd be looking at numbers because the numbers will also tell one story.
TREVOR DAWES: But we'll also be looking very closely at the organizational climate and culture as well as it relates to things that I just referenced in terms of the biases. Organizational climate is-- this is a biggie. So we want to make sure that not only the people who work in our libraries, but the people who use our libraries feel welcomed, they feel respected, that they feel valued.
TREVOR DAWES: And so we've also done an organizational climate assessment at the University of Delaware as they have in many other places. And conducting an organizational climate assessment is one of the ways that we can really look towards developing some sort of standards for how we interact with each other in the work space. And perhaps, as importantly, how we interact with our users, the users of our spaces.
TREVOR DAWES: And in conducting an organizational climate assessment, you'll want to look at how do people feel in terms of-- do they feel respected? Do they feel valued? Are their opinions heard throughout the organization? But also, things as simple as no-- simple perhaps to us in the position in which I sit. But what are the-- looking at salary equity issues, salary equity among genders, salary equity among racial lines.
TREVOR DAWES: And ensuring that there is as much equity, that there is equity, there's not as much equity, ensuring that there is equity across the organization. And finally, then we're looking at our services. Taking all of the other factors into consideration, then how does that all tie together to deliver the kinds of services that we want to deliver to our user population? In the US, we know that we'll be a majority-minority population.
TREVOR DAWES: The census tells us that we're going to be a majority-minority population. And so what impact will that have on the ways in which we provide services to our different constituencies as they begin to become the majority population in our spaces, in our library spaces? The ways in which we've traditionally provided services may not be the ways in which our users expect our services to be provided.
TREVOR DAWES: So how do we reach out to our changing communities and determine the ways in which they want to be held to the ways in which we need to contribute to their success as they, again, from an academic library perspective, pursue their very academic degrees? So again, not much in terms of standards that have been developed in these areas as yet, but through these assessment initiatives assessment programs that we are undertaking and that we can undertake, we can certainly begin to develop a baseline for where our services, our collections, our communications, our hiring practices ought to be.
TREVOR DAWES: And then build on those so that they can become perhaps standards in the ways in which we operate in these library spaces and other spaces as these, I believe, are certainly transferable in places outside of libraries as well. So thank you. I look forward to having some conversation during the Q&A session later.
SPEAKER 1: Awesome. Thank you so much, Trevor. I will now hear from Simon Holt from Elsevier.
SIMON HOLT: Hi, everybody. Thanks for putting my slide up. So my name's Simon Holt. I work Elsevier, the publishers. I'm a book publisher. And also, I'm the lead for disability inclusion at Elsevier. So I run Elsevier Enabled, who are Elsevier's disability employee network representing both people with disabilities and also people with caring responsibilities across the organization.
SIMON HOLT: So when I was asked to come and talk at NISO, my kind of thoughts really turned to think about, what our standards? Why do we have standards? And what do we use standards to achieve? And I want to talk today about the thorny question of how many of you are there about self ID and about how we can use metrics within diversity and inclusion to try and improve outcomes for everybody.
SIMON HOLT: I'm going to talk mostly about disability, but I'm hoping that the principles of what I've taught, what I'm going to talk about today, are a bit more widely applicable. As you may or may not know, Elsevier has done quite a lot of work in terms of metricizing diversity and inclusion in terms of-- especially in terms of the gender report that was released last year, and thinking about having put some metrics together come to some conclusions about what that tells us about the publishing industry and the people that publish in it and what they publish.
SIMON HOLT: So I want to talk to-- I want to initially think about standards and kind of why we have standards and kind of how this affects, how this impacts diversity, equity, and inclusion. So for me, the reason we have standards are because we want to improve outcomes. So you bring everybody up to a level and say, this is a minimum quality or quantity level that we can all agree upon.
SIMON HOLT: With diversity, equity, and inclusion, that becomes more problematic when it's quite hard to pin down the thing that you're actually trying to get a standard around. So for example, when we're thinking about gender identification, for example, you've got men and women, but you also have non-binary, and you also have "I prefer not to say." For race, there are, I think, I checked the UK census earlier today, and I think there are 14 different categories.
SIMON HOLT: Well, for disability, you don't even have that because there isn't a common accepted definition of what disability is across all around the world. I put at the top right of the slide here the definition of disability from the Americans with Disabilities Act. As you can see, it's pretty general. The UK has a slightly different one. The UN has a slightly different one. And then there are all kinds of different organizations who specialize in disability inclusion that I've put at the bottom right here to each have their own definition and each have their own idea of what success looks like.
SIMON HOLT: Therefore, we have to think about this on a self-identification basis. Do you consider yourself to have a disability? What does that mean? Also, there's quite a lot of stigma around disability. And the reasoning for that, you can probably see on the left-hand side of the slide, where I lay out what I'm going to call the problem statement. As you can see, outcomes for people with disabilities are quite a lot worse than for the rest of the population in terms of employment in particular and also in terms of representation within our industry, within the publishing industry-- [INAUDIBLE] And because there isn't a definition of disability, it's quite hard to gauge with any accuracy whether the amount of people that identify are all identifying with the same thing or whether they mean different things by disability when they're identified, et cetera, et cetera.
SIMON HOLT: Disability also can have a temporary nature to it. If you break your leg, you are temporarily disabled. But then when you recover, you won't be. So it's quite a complex situation. And so without definitions, it's quite hard to then think about outcomes and actions. So going back to-- looking at the right-hand side of the screen.
SIMON HOLT: Again, why this is important? Why this is of interest? Well, it's of interest both to employees and employers-- it's of interest to employees simply because by sharing a disability status, you then get on a pathway to get the help you need. And it's important for employers because it allows employers to put together an action plan that reflects the people that work for them now, who might work for them in the future, and make sure that they're providing what their employees need in order that they can do-- that they can perform to the best of their ability.
SIMON HOLT: Because actually, why do we have standards? And why do we have metrics? Well, the reason we have metrics is so that we can have actionable results. So we can have a defined set of actions that come as a result of these to improve outcomes for people. So this is where your information standards and your data interacts with culture and cultural change.
SIMON HOLT: I always say that cultures change one conversation at a time. And certainly, what we want to do is encourage more people to share the disability status. We need this stigma-- we need to destigmatize it. We need to normalize it. We need to understand what it means to have a disability. We need to define that better.
SIMON HOLT: And we also need to think about what pathway you want. If you share your disability status, people need to feel reassured that the outcomes won't get worse for them. They're not going to lose their job or be discriminated against. That they're going to get better. And similarly, for organizations, for companies, they need to know that when they collect this data, they're able to do something actionable with it, that will help people in both a bespoke so an individual way, but also in a universal way that will help different categories of people.
SIMON HOLT: So it's a kind of roundoff what I'm kind of talking about here. I was asked to think about two questions really. One was, where do you think existing standards for sure? And the second is, how can standards improve outcomes? Well, for the first one, I think the takeaway here is that we need to be better at definitions. But in order to be better at definitions, we need to take the necessary time to think about what those definitions are going to be.
SIMON HOLT: I think quite a lot of organizations, especially in the [? DEI ?] space, rush to define whether it's race or its gender or its disability or LGBT because they're worried about reputation. They feel this is urgent and important. It is urgent and important. But actually, I think what you end up with sometimes is defining the wrong thing because you haven't given enough time and maybe talk to enough experts.
SIMON HOLT: And then the other way that standards could fall short is when they're not universal. So for example, I was discussing with a colleague today who's leading some of our work on race and ethnicity. And they said to me, well, think about it in the UK, the word black means something different than in the US. In the UK the word brown means something very different to what it means in the US. And it will be the same for other countries, too.
SIMON HOLT: So we need to make sure that when we're having these definitions that they're representative definitions. Or when people reply and identify, they know what it is they're identifying with. And then secondly and finally, how can standards improve outcomes? Or standards can improve outcomes [? in DNI ?] because it means that everybody's on the same playing field.
SIMON HOLT: We understand what good looks like. The kind of related area of accessibility, we've done a really good job with the accessibility standards that we now have. With disability, as I've pointed out, it's a little bit more woolly, but I feel that actually this is a discussion that's worth having. And hopefully, we could be the start of a journey where we can define better, we can help people answer better, and then we can action better to make our workplaces, our industry, and our society a bit more inclusive than it was before.
SIMON HOLT: Thank you very much.
SPEAKER 1: Thank you so much, Simon. We'll finally hear from Katharina Ruckstuhl. Katharina?
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] So greetings to all of you and the lands and the peoples to which you belong. My name is Katharina Ruckstuhl. I'm Associate Dean at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And before I start, I need to acknowledge quite a number of people who have traveled this journey with me. And we are part of a collective investigating how indigenous data sovereignty can become part of the fabric and the framework of digital standards. So this is a very early journey. And there are a number of people that you see represented there, including my own family.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And perhaps, the difference with some of the other speakers is that when we're thinking about indigenous data sovereignty, we're thinking about it from not only an individual, as a researcher, or somebody whose material is being used, but also from a collective point of view. So the issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion very much a part of our discussions. But their rise to the level as a collective discussion.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And what this means at a collective level? Because what is indigenous data sovereignty? It's two things, recognizing rights and interests, and these are indigenous or treaty rights, and they can come from a different body of thinking to human rights, which we've seen manifested across a number of countries, and indeed, both Simon and Trevor here have mentioned those. These come out of the rights to one's own property and lands and waters and materials within that.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And so in my introduction, those were the things that I mentioned, my mountain, my [? brother, ?] my ancestors in the lands on which I live. And so recognizing indigenous and treaty rights is also about the cultural and intellectual property rights that come along with it, and that also has implications for commercial rights. And then it is very much about the things that we've been talking about, ethics, and how you do that, and why you would do that.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So it's nuanced, in terms of the discussions we've been having, which is about inclusivity and justice and equity. It's also around property and ability to, maybe not so much own, and in some cases, it might be about owning, but also acknowledgment that you, your lands or properties have in some way become part of a research fabric that has yet or may not have been acknowledged.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So as with Simon and-- it's about, well, how do you actually go about doing this? How do you realize those rights and interests, and why are you doing it? And so really, there are two key areas here. It's around governance, being able to gain access to data to make people's lives better. So that's a type of standard. And then governance of the data, actually being able to ensure that it's relevant and responsive.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So indigenous data sovereignty is not only about indigenous peoples. And in terms of definitions, Simon really pointed to the difficulty of defining, who are indigenous peoples? Who are disabled peoples? That's the same discussion. And indigenous community, who is considered indigenous? And every country has its own particular definition of that.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And so the UN has a very generic and blanket terminology. So indigenous peoples will define themselves a little bit, as the disability community may, as well. So out of this bundle of thinking have come a number of collectors. And one of those collectors is the Global Indigenous Data Alliance.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And some of those people you can see there, and they are academics, but also community people, indigenous community people from across the globe. And while its genesis may have been more in first world nations, such as New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the US, this is becoming a much broader discussion and conversation. Because data, of course, about, provided by, and used for policy and decision making and research is global.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So coming back to Simon's conversation or discussion around, what is the standard? I sort of think about it as the old to-mah-to or tomato. So in the US, people may say to-may-to, and Commonwealth or English speaking countries, such as New Zealand, we might say to-mah-to. But actually, we know what we're talking about. It's a red fruit, right? And it has a [INAUDIBLE] name.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: But actually, before that, where was its origin? And its origin was in southern Mexico, in the Aztec peoples. So in that very definition of to-may-to, to-mah-to, well, let's just give it a lesson definition. We have, actually, also a history of colonization. And so while now, we blithely put a tomato paste on our pizzas, actually, behind that is the history of what's happened in southern Mexico to Aztec peoples who were colonized by the Spanish in the 15th century.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And so colonization of indigenous lands is very much part of how we're thinking, in terms of the data. Because of course, all artifacts now, whether they are physical, or biomaterial, or intellectual, have been turned into data, and are rapidly being turned into data as more and more is collected from people in our biosphere. So really, indigenous people have a huge stake in data, in terms of not only its provenance, but also being able to understand, well, what is actually happening with the data?
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And is it, what is happening with the data, actually something of integrity? And this takes us right back to ethics. And so as a result of this thinking in indigenous data sovereignty-- and the terminology is very new-- this had really led to, now, a number of different activities. So the first is the IEEE Standards Association.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And I'm part of a subgroup working on, well, what are indigenous data standards? And how would they be implemented, actually? And how do we even think about them, from an indigenous point of view? So the second thing that's been going on is that there's been a discussion with ORCID-- and I'm a member of the ORCID board-- around, how can ORCID, through its activities, encourage researchers and publishers and funders to consider indigenous data sovereignty?
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: What does it actually look like? And we're really very, very fortunate that, for the last 10 years, Professor Jane Anderson, who's there in the middle, who is at NYU, has been working with her colleagues thinking about, well, how do indigenous people want to see the intellectual, cultural properties or artifacts represented? Because coming back to Trevor, there's a heck of a lot of stuff in libraries and museums that does not have provenance, or if it does, it may be incorrect.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And it's really, people have been collecting things for years and centuries, and no acknowledgment has been made of the communities from which those have come. So Jane Anderson, and now others, have been developing a website, a platform called Local Contexts which enables both communities, but also collecting organizations, to identify their indigenous artifacts.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So from a community point of view, communities can put up on their own websites that any materials that people may take from this website may have a traditional knowledge attached to it, and therefore that needs to be acknowledged. But for collecting organizations, such as museums-- and perhaps this is something Trevor and Simon, you'd be interested for us to discuss-- is, how do collecting organizations acknowledge that they have materials that, actually, they're not that sure about its origins?
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: They know it's indigenous, but perhaps they don't know the full story. Perhaps they don't know it's a sacred object. Perhaps they don't know that it's an object that, perhaps, only women might use. But if they do, have they ever had that conversation with the community? So the cultural notices allow an organization to acknowledge the gaps in its own collecting practices.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So this is where it started for museums and libraries and collecting organizations. However, the concept which comes from more open-access labels is really, now, being developed even further. So it's now moving into bicultural collections, particularly data that might be DNA. And now we're starting to think about it from a commercial point of view, as well.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So I'll leave it at that. That's quite a lot to get through, for a rather weighty topic. But I see a lot of similarities and a lot of very open questions about, what is the way, the best way to do this? What are the tools that we might have? And what are the purposes for which such conversations-- why are we having these conversations?
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: What is the end game? So [INAUDIBLE] everybody. Thank you.
SPEAKER 1: Thank you so much, Katharina. That was fantastic. So thanks, everyone. Thank you so much to our panelists, and thank you all for joining us. We really look forward to continuing this conversation in the live chat. And yes, thanks once again to everyone, and look forward to chatting some more on this.

Cadmore media player playing video Standards that support diversity, equity, and inclusion

Video Player

Transcript

Segments

End of Video Player Control