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NISO Workshop on Metadata for DEIA, October 4/5, 2021
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NISO Workshop on Metadata for DEIA, October 4/5, 2021
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Segment:0 .
KARIM BOUGHIDA: Hello, everyone. Welcome. My name is Karim Boughida. And thank you for being here. So this is a really important topic. So we're very lucky to have really three speakers-- Treshani Perera from University of Kentucky, Merrilee Proffitt, OCLC, and Bri Watson from University of British Columbia. They will introduce themselves, but I want to thank them, and also thank NISO for organizing this.
KARIM BOUGHIDA: Also, I want to acknowledge that this topic is not new. I mean, there have been a lot of discussion even for the last 60, 70 years in the US, Canada, and all over the world. I want to make sure it's not like new about biases, discrimination. So there's a lot of work being done. But now it weighs to the point where there's more awareness, and there's-- people are more willing to implement changes, especially structural change.
KARIM BOUGHIDA: That's the hard part. OK. Treshani.
TRESHANI PERERA: All right. Alice? Good morning if you're joining from the United States, and welcome everybody. Alice, do I have permission to share my slides? Oh great. All right. Can everybody see my slides?
ALICE MEADOWS: Yes. Thank you. If you want to put them in presentation mode, Treshani, but we can see them fine.
TRESHANI PERERA: OK. Great. Great. Hello. I can't see anybody, so hopefully you can see me and hear me well. I'm Treshani Perera. My pronouns are she/her. Joining from the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Osage people, the Cherokee East Band people, and the Shawnee people, which is now known as Lexington, Kentucky.
TRESHANI PERERA: I'm the Music and Fine Arts Cataloging Librarian at the University of Kentucky, and I also serve as the Head of the Fine Arts Cataloging Unit, where I oversee operations in cataloging, processing, binding, and preservation, and manage several special collections projects. So I'm going to jump right into my presentation, and provide a little bit of background on my positionaility as a speaker.
TRESHANI PERERA: My approach to cataloging, and description in general, is influenced by my lived experience as a woman of color in the United States and in academic libraries. According to the American Library Association's Diversity Counts Report, which was published back in 2010, academic librarianship back in 2010 was 86% white. I'm well aware of my minoritized racial identity in professional spaces.
TRESHANI PERERA: But it also gives me a unique perspective when cataloging materials representing historically underrepresented and marginalized people. Having said that, I cannot speak for all marginalized identities. For example, I'm a cis woman of color and I'm able-bodied. So therefore I cannot speak for the experiences of a trans woman of color or a disabled woman of color. When working with collections representing intersectionality, as defined by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, I approach my work with cultural humility by reading and listening to voices from those communities.
TRESHANI PERERA: I also pay attention to who's performing labor and how that labor is recognized as part of my cataloging work. Recognition of the labor implications is also organic to the collections I work with, as I work primarily with fine arts and performing arts resources. I prioritize description for creators and contributors alike, despite how the actual print or media resource may credit that labor.
TRESHANI PERERA: The collections I work with also have an inherent Western cultural bias, and how cataloging rules, guidelines, practice, and terminology are constructed and applied sometimes perpetuate that bias. I prioritize inclusive description for non-western and nondominant cultural resources, because there are still gaps in making professional practice more inclusive.
TRESHANI PERERA: I focus on keyword access, in addition to subject headings, the search and retrieval. For resources highlighting diversity and inclusion in performing and fine arts collections, I make a conscious, nonneutral decision to highlight gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity and geographical data and description. This often leads to a customized and nuanced approach to description, which is sometimes in conflict with the notion of standardization.
TRESHANI PERERA: I took the time to go over my positionality as a speaker, because I want you to think about the role of standards and standardization more critically. While standards may intend to promote objectivity and consistency, how they are applied very much involves human intervention. I'm not here to talk about machine learning or artificial intelligence in relation to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in description.
TRESHANI PERERA: As a collective, I think it's fair to say, we're here to find ways in which humans with different life experiences can do better to center DEIA, or Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility, in metadata in the libraries, archives, and museums we work in, and the populations, or institutions and organizations served. A commitment to DEIA in metadata requires one to look beyond the actual metadata, and critically examine who is involved in the work, where that work is being done, and how that work impacts the greater librarianship profession.
TRESHANI PERERA: So with that in mind, I want to offer some questions for reflection. We'll also revisit these questions during the discussion. So if humans in libraries, archives, and museums are increasingly trying to do better about ethically discreet describing collections that represent the histories and stories of oppressed groups, then how are you acquiring the knowledge to center DEIA in metadata?
TRESHANI PERERA: Whose expertise are you considering? What kind of labor model are you relying on to prioritize DEIA and metadata? So I know that's a lot to think about, especially-- it's pretty early in the morning here. But I hope you will come back to these questions and reflect on these questions. I don't have simple answers here, but I can offer some suggestions that could lead to long term solutions.
TRESHANI PERERA: So over the past year, I've given a few of these talks. And I'm often asked the following questions. How do we do the work? Where do we get started, and so on. So I want to take this opportunity to change my own script, and say that Diversity, Equity Inclusion and Accessibility in metadata, or DEIA in metadata, should not be approached as siloed work in institutions and organizations.
TRESHANI PERERA: It is not effective to focus on inclusive description if your workplace policies and culture is not inclusive. You cannot address accessibility and metadata if your organization's website is inaccessible, or your physical spaces exclude disabled people and non-binary people. You cannot talk about equitable metadata if your institution or cultural heritage organization hires people with advanced degrees in grant funded, temporary intern positions, and doesn't pay its workers a livable wage.
TRESHANI PERERA: Focusing on DEIA in metadata, while ignoring other areas in your organization or institution, is performative allyship. You cannot truly begin to address bias in description or problematic aspects in cataloging and metadata systems without addressing DEIA in your overall organization or institution's operations. And no, I'm not talking about how proactive your organization is to issue a statement in times of crises, or how you incorporate diversity statements into the hiring process.
TRESHANI PERERA: And I can come up with a whole list of things. The point I want to emphasize is that DEIA, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility, should be a priority in every area of your institutional organization, and not just in how you create and remediate metadata, or reexamine standards and systems. In other words, achieving DEIA metadata takes effort, labor, and time.
TRESHANI PERERA: So we can't make systemic change without collective responsibility. And we cannot reach a collective responsibility without an individual commitment. Everyone has to commit to being responsible for their own education, and how to dismantle bias, whether it's your internal biases or external biases perpetuated in collections and description.
TRESHANI PERERA: An individual commitment requires you to put in the time and effort toward self-education, which can lead to systemic change, which Karim mentioned earlier, in how we approach description, and the systems and standards we use in libraries, archives, and museums. So I want to take this time to remind folks that everyone has a certain amount of privilege. And part of self-education and self-awareness is acknowledging your privileged identities.
TRESHANI PERERA: When I do these presentations and workshops, I often hear attendees say, well, I don't have the power to make these kinds of changes, which is understandable. I understand that hierarchical structures are visual reminders of one's lack of power. But you still have access to power through your privileged identities. And I want to encourage folks to lean into that acknowledgment as part of your personal commitment to do better.
TRESHANI PERERA: If you are in a position of power and authority, if you're in a formal leadership role, I encourage you to evaluate and re-evaluate how description work is done. Who is doing that work? Who's voice and perspective is missing? And who can you sponsor and champion to be included in spaces where description work is done?
TRESHANI PERERA: So at this point in the presentation, I would typically offer a list of resources. And today I'm providing you some links for your own research and self-education. I will share my slides, so there's no need for you to write these things down. I also want to recognize who is doing the work for others to easily access this information. So this resource has been shared many times during these kinds of presentations.
TRESHANI PERERA: The cataloging lab, which is a website founded by librarian Violet Fox, provides a myriad of resources, controlled vocabularies for specific underrepresented groups, for catalogers and non-catalogers to be involved with new subject heading proposals, and revisions to existing Library of Congress subject headings. There's a clearinghouse for statements addressing bias and description.
TRESHANI PERERA: And also a crowdsourced list for problematic Library of Congress subject headings. This next resource is a resource list or bibliography that I have compiled for previous critical cataloging webinars. It is not an exhaustive list. It is quite difficult to keep up with the amount of resources that have come up recently. But I want to encourage you to get started with these resources as a place for reading and self-education.
TRESHANI PERERA: The CritCat.org website, which is founded by one of our speakers, Bri Watson, also has a resources page. And then the critlib.org, coming out of the critical librarianship tradition, has a recommended resources page for critical librarianship, as well as resources on the CritCat web page that would be more specific to description. I want to point out that these resources come from the critical librarianship and critical cataloging movement, which has been pretty active in recent months.
TRESHANI PERERA: Additionally, there is work being done to address ethical collection development, description and outreach efforts, especially in the archives field. Much of this work has been led by Black and Latino activists, I believe. Linked a few readings in my resources list, and I trust that these other resource sites will also point you to those readings.
TRESHANI PERERA: So my time is up. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I think Merrilee will present next.
ALICE MEADOWS: Treshani, I think, as your host at the moment, you have to just transfer those rights to Merrilee, please.
KARIM BOUGHIDA: I want to thank Treshani. You're asking really, really the right question. We say the beginning of wisdom is asking the right questions.
TRESHANI PERERA: Thank you. Merrilee, I think you should be all set.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: OK. And I hope you guys are seeing my screen.
KARIM BOUGHIDA: Yeah.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: OK, super. Thank you for letting me know. Thank you so much, Treshani, for your powerful remarks. I think a lot of what I have to say will amplify what you have to say. I'm Merrilee Proffitt with OCLC Research. My pronouns are she/her. I encourage you to reach out to me on social media, or find me on LinkedIn, or send me an email. I would love to hear from you and connect to you further on this topic.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: I want to acknowledge that I live and work on the unceded and traditional land of the Chochenyo Ohlone people, in what is now Oakland, California, where I am beaming into you from this morning. So Oakland is just across the Bay from San Francisco, and a really distinct community. I've been with OCLC for 20 years, and as a statement of positionality, I am a white, able-bodied cis woman and I benefit from considerable privilege in my employment and life situation.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: And know that I've made mistakes in this area, and I will likely continue to make mistakes in this work. But it is super important that I continue to educate myself and to lean into my own discomfort. And I am so grateful to those that have generously worked with me, including my two co-panelists, and others of you who are in the audience today. I also work for an organization that occupies a special space in library land.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: And I want to acknowledge that also. As stewards of metadata, we are working to understand the systems of oppression that have accrued over time, as well as how white supremacy and racism have impacted policy and practice. And just to underscore something that Treshani said, there's nothing like a neutral policy. Everything is a reflection of our society and culture, and therefore reflects bias.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: As I will share with you, we are seeking consultation with community members, as is NISO, and doing research to understand what work is in front of us so that we don't deepen harm through our actions. Earlier this year, I saw a video in which Trevor Dawes put this quite succinctly, how do we create the sorts of spaces in our libraries and in our institutions where everyone is not only valued and respected, but where they also feel valued and respected-- where they actually feel it.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: We state in a variety of ways that we value and respect everyone that enters our libraries. But what is the reality? Are we really treating everyone like they are valued and respected? Do we provide services that make people feel welcome and that they belong in our libraries? How do people see themselves reflected in the catalog? So many of you may have seen this 2019 documentary.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: If you have not, I highly, highly encourage you to see it. Through the eyes of these students at Dartmouth, we can see that, as libraries, we are not living up to the goals that we have set for ourselves. We see that our descriptive practices and our systems are getting in the way of our goals and objectives. So this is definitely worth your time. It's under an hour. I encourage individual and group reading and discussion about what lessons this has to teach us.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: In 2017, this talk was given to OCLC staff and members by Dr. Kimberly Christen, We Have Never Been Neutral: Search Discovery and the Politics of Access. So for me, this was a really pivotal moment, and I started to question the way that I had done my work. 2017 was a really big year for us. That same year, we did a survey across members of the OCLC Research Library Partnership on equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: And we saw in survey results that although institutions all had active EDI efforts, they were really struggling to find traction in describing items and collections in a respectful and inclusive way. And so since that time, we have hosted numerous webinars on this topic, and hosted discussion sessions. The outputs of these have all been very popular. Many people have attended the webinars, viewed the recordings and slides of the sessions, as well as read our blog posts.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: So I can see that people are hungry for models and tools to advance our own work. And this may be the case for you today. There are a lot of you who signed up, and a lot of you who showed up. I was also part of this work, which I did in collaboration with my colleagues Mercy Procaccini and Karen Smith-Yoshimura on respectful and inclusive descriptive practices of indigenous people.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: So through structured interviews, we sought to understand the challenges faced by those who work in this area. Because OCLC works across the globe, we were able to engage people from a range of geographies. Because these are issues that are truly global. We conducted the interviews between March and June, 2020, so right at the beginning of the pandemic. We included 41 library staff members at 21 institutions in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: And we included academic libraries, national libraries, independent research libraries, public libraries. Primarily, we were interviewing catalogers, but also curators and archivists. And there's a lengthy blog post that summarizes our findings. But what I want to center on here are the stories of harm. I'm really wanting to center people and the feelings of people in our research findings.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: So we asked in our interviews, have you seen evidence of harm? And catalogers can feel pretty distant from feedback, because there's usually no mechanism in the catalog to report errors or offensive language. However, many interviewees did share stories of harm. And these were experienced primarily by community members who had to confront current descriptions and confront them in a painful way. So these interactions do not build trust with the library.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: They actually subtract from that trust. So this is just one such story shared by a cataloger at a public library in Canada. And it was she shared with a real sense of shame and embarrassment, because it is so wrong. So libraries exert a lot of power in naming and labeling, in bibliographic description. And it is important to witness and confront this harm, and the very real pain that it causes.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: Encounters with the library, through this lens, damages our collective brand. This year, we announced the Reimagine Descriptive Workflows project with funding from the Mellon Foundation, which is a co-investor alongside OCLC. We brought in the Shift Collective to help us design the meeting, and also engage with a wonderful advisory board, who set the agenda for the meeting, not OCLC staff.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: This meeting was held at the end of June over three days, and we are so very grateful to participants for what they shared. So who were our participants? Whose voices were we putting in the focus? We sought out those that had both lived experience as well as expertise in descriptive practice. There was no requirement as to institutional prestige or participation in OCLC services, and all participants were offered a stipend to help compensate them for this work on top of very busy day and personal lives, and again, to help with this.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: It's very it's very emotional work. So we wanted to be sure that people were compensated, at least in some way. We had a diverse range of institution types and roles within the institutions. These were not the usual suspects. And there was geographic diversity with participants from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the US.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: So we've been blogging about this project. And we'll have a draft community agenda available later this year. And I invite you to review this when it's available, and also reflect on what your place is in implementing change. We believe that this effort can be a significant landmark in repairing bibliographic infrastructure, but only if people take action.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: So I want to close with a partial distillation of what we have learned over years of listening and learning. I believe we are being challenged to make really radical shifts, and I want to emphasize this work goes well beyond technical capacity. This is a problem space that lends itself to centering human feelings and relationships. So first and foremost, building engagement and then trust with communities needs to be a primary focus for this work to be done appropriately.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: Involving communities represented in the descriptions is a critical component, and will be a different way of working for many of us. So we're going to need to build new skills. Our core values around cataloging and descriptive practice need to change. We need to shift our view of cataloging from something that is done, to something that may never be final.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: Slow it down. This is advice we received so many times in so many ways. This is going to be a challenge for profession, and even a world, that values efficiencies. Libraries are set up to endure for centuries. So the long game should really come naturally. This needs to be the work of everyone in our organizations, exactly as Treshani said, not a committee, or a few, and especially not those who've already been tasked with this work.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: Organizational structures and cultures resist change. So we will need to ensure that we provide scaffolding that helps us be in this for the long term, while we recognize the urgency of the issue. We must create support for those that have been in this work, but also those who are new. The work around confronting histories that include erasure and genocide is emotional and time consuming.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: We heard this over and over again. Thank you, NISO, for entering this conversation. Organizations and leaders are essential here. And finally, we must cultivate resistance. And for my white colleagues, especially, witness harms without taking offense. Libraries are learning organizations. And in this, as in all things, we are never done learning. So I want to thank you for listening, and also express gratitude for those who were involved in the Reimagine Descriptive Workflows project.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: This has really just been an amazing experience for me personally and professionally. So I will stop sharing and figure out how to pass the--
ALICE MEADOWS: You should be able to just-- there should be a dropdown that says more, and then you can make Bri the co-host, of the host, rather.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: I am not normally a Zoom user. Where do I find the More button? Sorry, Alice.
ALICE MEADOWS: No. No. No problem. If you hover over, you'll-- sort of to the right hand side of your name, you should see More with a little dropdown arrow.
SPEAKER: In the Participants tab. So if you're in the Zoom window, down at the bottom, the third icon over says participants.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: Yes.
SPEAKER: And then that should open a bar on the right hand side. On the right hand side, you can highlight your name, and then More is a button that you can select there.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: The only thing I'm getting is Rename. Gosh, I hope somebody can take the power away from me, because I really want to hand things over to Bri. Oh, look. I can do it this way. OK. Bri, You're in charge.
BRI WATSON: I forgot to turn my video back on. Thank you so much. And thank you for everybody that's already presented. It's a hard couple of acts to follow, but I'll try my best. I'll just check my thing here and share my screen. Good evening. Good afternoon, whoever you are. I hope you are-- Before even beginning, I am speaking to you from Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish.
BRI WATSON: All have traditional ancestral and unceded land occupied and taken, often violently, by the so-called settler nation of Canada on Turtle Island. I am a descendant of Scotch-Irish and English settlers. And as last time, I am but a guest in this land and a beneficiary of colonialism and genocide. Canada and the United States continue this genocide today through pollution, criminal neglect, cultural extermination, and murder.
BRI WATSON: As such, I aim to do and learn what I'm to do to support the nations I live in and the people I live with. And I invite you also to learn to reflect and take action. Please feel free to share where you're joining from and whose land-- nation you're on. If you're unfamiliar with this, native-land.ca is a great resource for this.
BRI WATSON: As we've already talked about, I'll cover your minoritized vocabularies and metadata collectives. I will be trying to build on what Merrilee has already said, and what Karim as well. If you're not familiar with me, my name's Bri. I publish under Brian M. Watson, so you might have seen me under that name as well.
BRI WATSON: I'm a second year PhD student at the University of British Columbia iSchool. I work with a number of minoritized collectives and vocabularies, and I hope to share some of that with you. I'm neurodivergent, disabled, queer, non-binary, and I can claim additional romantic and sexual minoritizations. Resultingly, I'm, very, very aware of the systems that mislabel people and our communities and my communities.
BRI WATSON: But yet, despite all of this, I've had a lot of privilege. As I've already said, I'm a beneficiary colonialism. But I was raised as a lower class, middle-- middle class cishet white boy, who was taught ways to hide my disabilities and oddities in order to pass. And that privilege had protected me in ways that others would not have been-- my wokeness has especially.
BRI WATSON: The ways I was raised placed me at the center of the system described to uphold genocide, white settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy. But as I've slowly grown, and learned more about myself, and changed in ways, I've found myself falling farther and farther and farther from that center. And I don't think-- if you read even a little bit into these topics, you're very well aware that you don't need a huge bibliography to know that describing marginalized groups as individuals-- subject [INAUDIBLE] to describe marginalized groups as individuals.
BRI WATSON: Subject headings are not great. They're often criticized inappropriate, misleading, or outrightly offensive. Anyhow, I was going to say that, usually in the traditional literature, we turn to conversations around ethics, around how we can ethically describe and catalog-- and ethics-- this ethically described, ethically catalog is based in this neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics that comes all the way down from ancient Greece that describes a sort of WEBCHAM.
BRI WATSON: If you're not familiar with that term, it's out of Hope Olson's work, and Michelle Caswell has expanded it. And I expand it here as well. But WEBCHAM essentially stands for White, European, Bourgeois, Cisgender, Citizen, Heterosexual, Able-bodied, Allosexual, Monogamous, Men, Settlers. This is obviously a flipping of the usual LGBTQ, or the usual DEI, like, the assigning of acronyms to people who are not in the center-- so this flipping them on the head.
BRI WATSON: And part of the reason I'm doing that, is because knowledge organization, rooted wholly in a philosophy advocated, promulgated and sponsored-- which is to say, this ancient virtue Greek ethics that comes all the way back from us from the far, far past, is probably not desirable or sustainable. We live in a very different society than Aristotle was talking about. We, as a profession-- galleries, archives, libraries, museums, special collections-- we're really great at gathering information, planning, analyzing, thinking about the best way to do something.
BRI WATSON: But talking doesn't go anywhere very often. We're very not very good at taking action. So in the past year, I've worked to build this resource. That CritCat.org, as Treshani has mentioned, was inspired by Treshani's work, originally, which is-- I'm so glad to be here [INAUDIBLE] today. And after reviewing like 600 sources from 1933 to the present day, which are on the website, again, the five recommendations I ended up with, which I'll touch on too here today, are the use multiple alternative vocabularies or classification, the practice of cultural competency, we're considering historic identities or groups, use of ethical outreach when dealing with still living identities, items, or groups, trickster practices of alteration, subversion, extension, or replacement of dominant classification or cataloging at local level, and finally, consultation described subjects.
BRI WATSON: I'm just going to touch briefly on one and five here, after some water. But I want to say here, when we're doing this work, we should privilege language of the communities whose stuff we have. If it's stolen, it should be returned. But if it can't be, or if we're somehow limited from doing that in our professional work, we should take action to approach them with the respect due to their stuff and their community, and sometimes, even their ancestors, whose bodies are still in museums, and libraries, and archives.
BRI WATSON: We should be careful when we apply a label to things, because personal identity terms are not neutral, bias-free, scientific terminology. It is how you describe our innermost identities, our highest desires, or goals. The Homosaurus is the vocabulary I've been talking about. The aim is to factor in the more of the vocabulary. And the second thing I'll just briefly mention here, the Trans Metadata Collective, which is work that I am doing, along with several others, to advance this work.
BRI WATSON: So the Homosaurus is, if you're not familiar with it, it's based in a very long history of the international queer community, but it's also based in-- I have the [INAUDIBLE] library for information on subject headings. It's based in the desire of the community to find language in a catalog to get to the resources that they need.
BRI WATSON: It was founded-- I think it was originally created in 1887, but it was based on earlier vocabularies that had been in existence since 1930s, '40s and '50s. It was originally used in a Dutch gay and lesbian thesaurus. And then it was eventually built out in 2013. For a while, it lived as a Word document on KR Roberto's laptop, floating around Illinois.
BRI WATSON: But eventually it managed to get together with Jack van der Wel and Ellen Greenblatt, who transformed the original Homosaurus into a linked data vocabulary. And that was put-- I believe on the online on 2014. But in 2015, KJ Rawson founded the Digital Transgender Archive, and needed a better vocabulary to use in this. So all of these forces kind of came together to form the editorial board in 2016.
BRI WATSON: 2019, two years ago already, we released the second version of the Homosaurus. And literally this weekend, we have released version three. The only change between version two and version three is that we are finally changed from URLs that used to be homosaurus.org/version2/gay. It's now just a random-- it's HomoIT, and then a bunch of random numbers. This is because if the URI changes, it messes up the linked data.
BRI WATSON: But this shift will allow us to be used in several other places. And, like I said here, we have early data that shows it was being used-- that Homosaurus was being used in descriptions of 7.7 million items in 33 institutions or 11 countries. And we working to expand that work. And I'm happy to share this work. And we're happy to work with many other institutions with this.
BRI WATSON: Finally, the Trans Metadata Collective is work that I am doing. It's a group of dozens of catalogers and an advisory group, about 80 to 100 library archivists, scholars, information professionals, with an interest in improving the description and classification of trans, non-binary, two-spirit, other gender nonconforming people, and [INAUDIBLE]. We're a collective where our primary goal is to follow in the work done archive for Black Lives and other groups.
BRI WATSON: And so far, we have worked to establish the collective. It's slow. It takes hard, and sometimes goes a lot slower than I would want it to. But it's-- that-- you have to move at the speed of trust, which is one thing that has been a lesson that's really, really stuck with me. The four-- five working group that we've split up into are Descriptive Practice, Classification Working Group, Name Authorities and Access, Subject Headings and Authorities, and Ethical Recommendations broadly.
BRI WATSON: The goal is to bring all of these work together, following the model of Archives for Black Lives, and to catalog the ethics groups, and to develop a set of working practices and best practices and summaries of what to do. Knowing that, we will not solve the problem. And any other work that we all do to here today will not solve the problem. But moving things forward is something we need to stop talking and start taking action.
BRI WATSON: So, thank you. If you have any question, feel free to ask here. If you would like to follow up, one on one, I'm free to do that as well.
Segment:0 .
KARIM BOUGHIDA: Hello, everyone. Welcome. My name is Karim Boughida. And thank you for being here. So this is a really important topic. So we're very lucky to have really three speakers-- Treshani Perera from University of Kentucky, Merrilee Proffitt, OCLC, and Bri Watson from University of British Columbia. They will introduce themselves, but I want to thank them, and also thank NISO for organizing this.
KARIM BOUGHIDA: Also, I want to acknowledge that this topic is not new. I mean, there have been a lot of discussion even for the last 60, 70 years in the US, Canada, and all over the world. I want to make sure it's not like new about biases, discrimination. So there's a lot of work being done. But now it weighs to the point where there's more awareness, and there's-- people are more willing to implement changes, especially structural change.
KARIM BOUGHIDA: That's the hard part. OK. Treshani.
TRESHANI PERERA: All right. Alice? Good morning if you're joining from the United States, and welcome everybody. Alice, do I have permission to share my slides? Oh great. All right. Can everybody see my slides?
ALICE MEADOWS: Yes. Thank you. If you want to put them in presentation mode, Treshani, but we can see them fine.
TRESHANI PERERA: OK. Great. Great. Hello. I can't see anybody, so hopefully you can see me and hear me well. I'm Treshani Perera. My pronouns are she/her. Joining from the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Osage people, the Cherokee East Band people, and the Shawnee people, which is now known as Lexington, Kentucky.
TRESHANI PERERA: I'm the Music and Fine Arts Cataloging Librarian at the University of Kentucky, and I also serve as the Head of the Fine Arts Cataloging Unit, where I oversee operations in cataloging, processing, binding, and preservation, and manage several special collections projects. So I'm going to jump right into my presentation, and provide a little bit of background on my positionaility as a speaker.
TRESHANI PERERA: My approach to cataloging, and description in general, is influenced by my lived experience as a woman of color in the United States and in academic libraries. According to the American Library Association's Diversity Counts Report, which was published back in 2010, academic librarianship back in 2010 was 86% white. I'm well aware of my minoritized racial identity in professional spaces.
TRESHANI PERERA: But it also gives me a unique perspective when cataloging materials representing historically underrepresented and marginalized people. Having said that, I cannot speak for all marginalized identities. For example, I'm a cis woman of color and I'm able-bodied. So therefore I cannot speak for the experiences of a trans woman of color or a disabled woman of color. When working with collections representing intersectionality, as defined by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, I approach my work with cultural humility by reading and listening to voices from those communities.
TRESHANI PERERA: I also pay attention to who's performing labor and how that labor is recognized as part of my cataloging work. Recognition of the labor implications is also organic to the collections I work with, as I work primarily with fine arts and performing arts resources. I prioritize description for creators and contributors alike, despite how the actual print or media resource may credit that labor.
TRESHANI PERERA: The collections I work with also have an inherent Western cultural bias, and how cataloging rules, guidelines, practice, and terminology are constructed and applied sometimes perpetuate that bias. I prioritize inclusive description for non-western and nondominant cultural resources, because there are still gaps in making professional practice more inclusive.
TRESHANI PERERA: I focus on keyword access, in addition to subject headings, the search and retrieval. For resources highlighting diversity and inclusion in performing and fine arts collections, I make a conscious, nonneutral decision to highlight gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity and geographical data and description. This often leads to a customized and nuanced approach to description, which is sometimes in conflict with the notion of standardization.
TRESHANI PERERA: I took the time to go over my positionality as a speaker, because I want you to think about the role of standards and standardization more critically. While standards may intend to promote objectivity and consistency, how they are applied very much involves human intervention. I'm not here to talk about machine learning or artificial intelligence in relation to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in description.
TRESHANI PERERA: As a collective, I think it's fair to say, we're here to find ways in which humans with different life experiences can do better to center DEIA, or Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility, in metadata in the libraries, archives, and museums we work in, and the populations, or institutions and organizations served. A commitment to DEIA in metadata requires one to look beyond the actual metadata, and critically examine who is involved in the work, where that work is being done, and how that work impacts the greater librarianship profession.
TRESHANI PERERA: So with that in mind, I want to offer some questions for reflection. We'll also revisit these questions during the discussion. So if humans in libraries, archives, and museums are increasingly trying to do better about ethically discreet describing collections that represent the histories and stories of oppressed groups, then how are you acquiring the knowledge to center DEIA in metadata?
TRESHANI PERERA: Whose expertise are you considering? What kind of labor model are you relying on to prioritize DEIA and metadata? So I know that's a lot to think about, especially-- it's pretty early in the morning here. But I hope you will come back to these questions and reflect on these questions. I don't have simple answers here, but I can offer some suggestions that could lead to long term solutions.
TRESHANI PERERA: So over the past year, I've given a few of these talks. And I'm often asked the following questions. How do we do the work? Where do we get started, and so on. So I want to take this opportunity to change my own script, and say that Diversity, Equity Inclusion and Accessibility in metadata, or DEIA in metadata, should not be approached as siloed work in institutions and organizations.
TRESHANI PERERA: It is not effective to focus on inclusive description if your workplace policies and culture is not inclusive. You cannot address accessibility and metadata if your organization's website is inaccessible, or your physical spaces exclude disabled people and non-binary people. You cannot talk about equitable metadata if your institution or cultural heritage organization hires people with advanced degrees in grant funded, temporary intern positions, and doesn't pay its workers a livable wage.
TRESHANI PERERA: Focusing on DEIA in metadata, while ignoring other areas in your organization or institution, is performative allyship. You cannot truly begin to address bias in description or problematic aspects in cataloging and metadata systems without addressing DEIA in your overall organization or institution's operations. And no, I'm not talking about how proactive your organization is to issue a statement in times of crises, or how you incorporate diversity statements into the hiring process.
TRESHANI PERERA: And I can come up with a whole list of things. The point I want to emphasize is that DEIA, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility, should be a priority in every area of your institutional organization, and not just in how you create and remediate metadata, or reexamine standards and systems. In other words, achieving DEIA metadata takes effort, labor, and time.
TRESHANI PERERA: So we can't make systemic change without collective responsibility. And we cannot reach a collective responsibility without an individual commitment. Everyone has to commit to being responsible for their own education, and how to dismantle bias, whether it's your internal biases or external biases perpetuated in collections and description.
TRESHANI PERERA: An individual commitment requires you to put in the time and effort toward self-education, which can lead to systemic change, which Karim mentioned earlier, in how we approach description, and the systems and standards we use in libraries, archives, and museums. So I want to take this time to remind folks that everyone has a certain amount of privilege. And part of self-education and self-awareness is acknowledging your privileged identities.
TRESHANI PERERA: When I do these presentations and workshops, I often hear attendees say, well, I don't have the power to make these kinds of changes, which is understandable. I understand that hierarchical structures are visual reminders of one's lack of power. But you still have access to power through your privileged identities. And I want to encourage folks to lean into that acknowledgment as part of your personal commitment to do better.
TRESHANI PERERA: If you are in a position of power and authority, if you're in a formal leadership role, I encourage you to evaluate and re-evaluate how description work is done. Who is doing that work? Who's voice and perspective is missing? And who can you sponsor and champion to be included in spaces where description work is done?
TRESHANI PERERA: So at this point in the presentation, I would typically offer a list of resources. And today I'm providing you some links for your own research and self-education. I will share my slides, so there's no need for you to write these things down. I also want to recognize who is doing the work for others to easily access this information. So this resource has been shared many times during these kinds of presentations.
TRESHANI PERERA: The cataloging lab, which is a website founded by librarian Violet Fox, provides a myriad of resources, controlled vocabularies for specific underrepresented groups, for catalogers and non-catalogers to be involved with new subject heading proposals, and revisions to existing Library of Congress subject headings. There's a clearinghouse for statements addressing bias and description.
TRESHANI PERERA: And also a crowdsourced list for problematic Library of Congress subject headings. This next resource is a resource list or bibliography that I have compiled for previous critical cataloging webinars. It is not an exhaustive list. It is quite difficult to keep up with the amount of resources that have come up recently. But I want to encourage you to get started with these resources as a place for reading and self-education.
TRESHANI PERERA: The CritCat.org website, which is founded by one of our speakers, Bri Watson, also has a resources page. And then the critlib.org, coming out of the critical librarianship tradition, has a recommended resources page for critical librarianship, as well as resources on the CritCat web page that would be more specific to description. I want to point out that these resources come from the critical librarianship and critical cataloging movement, which has been pretty active in recent months.
TRESHANI PERERA: Additionally, there is work being done to address ethical collection development, description and outreach efforts, especially in the archives field. Much of this work has been led by Black and Latino activists, I believe. Linked a few readings in my resources list, and I trust that these other resource sites will also point you to those readings.
TRESHANI PERERA: So my time is up. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I think Merrilee will present next.
ALICE MEADOWS: Treshani, I think, as your host at the moment, you have to just transfer those rights to Merrilee, please.
KARIM BOUGHIDA: I want to thank Treshani. You're asking really, really the right question. We say the beginning of wisdom is asking the right questions.
TRESHANI PERERA: Thank you. Merrilee, I think you should be all set.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: OK. And I hope you guys are seeing my screen.
KARIM BOUGHIDA: Yeah.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: OK, super. Thank you for letting me know. Thank you so much, Treshani, for your powerful remarks. I think a lot of what I have to say will amplify what you have to say. I'm Merrilee Proffitt with OCLC Research. My pronouns are she/her. I encourage you to reach out to me on social media, or find me on LinkedIn, or send me an email. I would love to hear from you and connect to you further on this topic.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: I want to acknowledge that I live and work on the unceded and traditional land of the Chochenyo Ohlone people, in what is now Oakland, California, where I am beaming into you from this morning. So Oakland is just across the Bay from San Francisco, and a really distinct community. I've been with OCLC for 20 years, and as a statement of positionality, I am a white, able-bodied cis woman and I benefit from considerable privilege in my employment and life situation.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: And know that I've made mistakes in this area, and I will likely continue to make mistakes in this work. But it is super important that I continue to educate myself and to lean into my own discomfort. And I am so grateful to those that have generously worked with me, including my two co-panelists, and others of you who are in the audience today. I also work for an organization that occupies a special space in library land.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: And I want to acknowledge that also. As stewards of metadata, we are working to understand the systems of oppression that have accrued over time, as well as how white supremacy and racism have impacted policy and practice. And just to underscore something that Treshani said, there's nothing like a neutral policy. Everything is a reflection of our society and culture, and therefore reflects bias.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: As I will share with you, we are seeking consultation with community members, as is NISO, and doing research to understand what work is in front of us so that we don't deepen harm through our actions. Earlier this year, I saw a video in which Trevor Dawes put this quite succinctly, how do we create the sorts of spaces in our libraries and in our institutions where everyone is not only valued and respected, but where they also feel valued and respected-- where they actually feel it.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: We state in a variety of ways that we value and respect everyone that enters our libraries. But what is the reality? Are we really treating everyone like they are valued and respected? Do we provide services that make people feel welcome and that they belong in our libraries? How do people see themselves reflected in the catalog? So many of you may have seen this 2019 documentary.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: If you have not, I highly, highly encourage you to see it. Through the eyes of these students at Dartmouth, we can see that, as libraries, we are not living up to the goals that we have set for ourselves. We see that our descriptive practices and our systems are getting in the way of our goals and objectives. So this is definitely worth your time. It's under an hour. I encourage individual and group reading and discussion about what lessons this has to teach us.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: In 2017, this talk was given to OCLC staff and members by Dr. Kimberly Christen, We Have Never Been Neutral: Search Discovery and the Politics of Access. So for me, this was a really pivotal moment, and I started to question the way that I had done my work. 2017 was a really big year for us. That same year, we did a survey across members of the OCLC Research Library Partnership on equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: And we saw in survey results that although institutions all had active EDI efforts, they were really struggling to find traction in describing items and collections in a respectful and inclusive way. And so since that time, we have hosted numerous webinars on this topic, and hosted discussion sessions. The outputs of these have all been very popular. Many people have attended the webinars, viewed the recordings and slides of the sessions, as well as read our blog posts.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: So I can see that people are hungry for models and tools to advance our own work. And this may be the case for you today. There are a lot of you who signed up, and a lot of you who showed up. I was also part of this work, which I did in collaboration with my colleagues Mercy Procaccini and Karen Smith-Yoshimura on respectful and inclusive descriptive practices of indigenous people.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: So through structured interviews, we sought to understand the challenges faced by those who work in this area. Because OCLC works across the globe, we were able to engage people from a range of geographies. Because these are issues that are truly global. We conducted the interviews between March and June, 2020, so right at the beginning of the pandemic. We included 41 library staff members at 21 institutions in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: And we included academic libraries, national libraries, independent research libraries, public libraries. Primarily, we were interviewing catalogers, but also curators and archivists. And there's a lengthy blog post that summarizes our findings. But what I want to center on here are the stories of harm. I'm really wanting to center people and the feelings of people in our research findings.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: So we asked in our interviews, have you seen evidence of harm? And catalogers can feel pretty distant from feedback, because there's usually no mechanism in the catalog to report errors or offensive language. However, many interviewees did share stories of harm. And these were experienced primarily by community members who had to confront current descriptions and confront them in a painful way. So these interactions do not build trust with the library.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: They actually subtract from that trust. So this is just one such story shared by a cataloger at a public library in Canada. And it was she shared with a real sense of shame and embarrassment, because it is so wrong. So libraries exert a lot of power in naming and labeling, in bibliographic description. And it is important to witness and confront this harm, and the very real pain that it causes.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: Encounters with the library, through this lens, damages our collective brand. This year, we announced the Reimagine Descriptive Workflows project with funding from the Mellon Foundation, which is a co-investor alongside OCLC. We brought in the Shift Collective to help us design the meeting, and also engage with a wonderful advisory board, who set the agenda for the meeting, not OCLC staff.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: This meeting was held at the end of June over three days, and we are so very grateful to participants for what they shared. So who were our participants? Whose voices were we putting in the focus? We sought out those that had both lived experience as well as expertise in descriptive practice. There was no requirement as to institutional prestige or participation in OCLC services, and all participants were offered a stipend to help compensate them for this work on top of very busy day and personal lives, and again, to help with this.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: It's very it's very emotional work. So we wanted to be sure that people were compensated, at least in some way. We had a diverse range of institution types and roles within the institutions. These were not the usual suspects. And there was geographic diversity with participants from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the US.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: So we've been blogging about this project. And we'll have a draft community agenda available later this year. And I invite you to review this when it's available, and also reflect on what your place is in implementing change. We believe that this effort can be a significant landmark in repairing bibliographic infrastructure, but only if people take action.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: So I want to close with a partial distillation of what we have learned over years of listening and learning. I believe we are being challenged to make really radical shifts, and I want to emphasize this work goes well beyond technical capacity. This is a problem space that lends itself to centering human feelings and relationships. So first and foremost, building engagement and then trust with communities needs to be a primary focus for this work to be done appropriately.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: Involving communities represented in the descriptions is a critical component, and will be a different way of working for many of us. So we're going to need to build new skills. Our core values around cataloging and descriptive practice need to change. We need to shift our view of cataloging from something that is done, to something that may never be final.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: Slow it down. This is advice we received so many times in so many ways. This is going to be a challenge for profession, and even a world, that values efficiencies. Libraries are set up to endure for centuries. So the long game should really come naturally. This needs to be the work of everyone in our organizations, exactly as Treshani said, not a committee, or a few, and especially not those who've already been tasked with this work.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: Organizational structures and cultures resist change. So we will need to ensure that we provide scaffolding that helps us be in this for the long term, while we recognize the urgency of the issue. We must create support for those that have been in this work, but also those who are new. The work around confronting histories that include erasure and genocide is emotional and time consuming.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: We heard this over and over again. Thank you, NISO, for entering this conversation. Organizations and leaders are essential here. And finally, we must cultivate resistance. And for my white colleagues, especially, witness harms without taking offense. Libraries are learning organizations. And in this, as in all things, we are never done learning. So I want to thank you for listening, and also express gratitude for those who were involved in the Reimagine Descriptive Workflows project.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: This has really just been an amazing experience for me personally and professionally. So I will stop sharing and figure out how to pass the--
ALICE MEADOWS: You should be able to just-- there should be a dropdown that says more, and then you can make Bri the co-host, of the host, rather.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: I am not normally a Zoom user. Where do I find the More button? Sorry, Alice.
ALICE MEADOWS: No. No. No problem. If you hover over, you'll-- sort of to the right hand side of your name, you should see More with a little dropdown arrow.
SPEAKER: In the Participants tab. So if you're in the Zoom window, down at the bottom, the third icon over says participants.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: Yes.
SPEAKER: And then that should open a bar on the right hand side. On the right hand side, you can highlight your name, and then More is a button that you can select there.
MERRILEE PROFFITT: The only thing I'm getting is Rename. Gosh, I hope somebody can take the power away from me, because I really want to hand things over to Bri. Oh, look. I can do it this way. OK. Bri, You're in charge.
BRI WATSON: I forgot to turn my video back on. Thank you so much. And thank you for everybody that's already presented. It's a hard couple of acts to follow, but I'll try my best. I'll just check my thing here and share my screen. Good evening. Good afternoon, whoever you are. I hope you are-- Before even beginning, I am speaking to you from Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish.
BRI WATSON: All have traditional ancestral and unceded land occupied and taken, often violently, by the so-called settler nation of Canada on Turtle Island. I am a descendant of Scotch-Irish and English settlers. And as last time, I am but a guest in this land and a beneficiary of colonialism and genocide. Canada and the United States continue this genocide today through pollution, criminal neglect, cultural extermination, and murder.
BRI WATSON: As such, I aim to do and learn what I'm to do to support the nations I live in and the people I live with. And I invite you also to learn to reflect and take action. Please feel free to share where you're joining from and whose land-- nation you're on. If you're unfamiliar with this, native-land.ca is a great resource for this.
BRI WATSON: As we've already talked about, I'll cover your minoritized vocabularies and metadata collectives. I will be trying to build on what Merrilee has already said, and what Karim as well. If you're not familiar with me, my name's Bri. I publish under Brian M. Watson, so you might have seen me under that name as well.
BRI WATSON: I'm a second year PhD student at the University of British Columbia iSchool. I work with a number of minoritized collectives and vocabularies, and I hope to share some of that with you. I'm neurodivergent, disabled, queer, non-binary, and I can claim additional romantic and sexual minoritizations. Resultingly, I'm, very, very aware of the systems that mislabel people and our communities and my communities.
BRI WATSON: But yet, despite all of this, I've had a lot of privilege. As I've already said, I'm a beneficiary colonialism. But I was raised as a lower class, middle-- middle class cishet white boy, who was taught ways to hide my disabilities and oddities in order to pass. And that privilege had protected me in ways that others would not have been-- my wokeness has especially.
BRI WATSON: The ways I was raised placed me at the center of the system described to uphold genocide, white settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy. But as I've slowly grown, and learned more about myself, and changed in ways, I've found myself falling farther and farther and farther from that center. And I don't think-- if you read even a little bit into these topics, you're very well aware that you don't need a huge bibliography to know that describing marginalized groups as individuals-- subject [INAUDIBLE] to describe marginalized groups as individuals.
BRI WATSON: Subject headings are not great. They're often criticized inappropriate, misleading, or outrightly offensive. Anyhow, I was going to say that, usually in the traditional literature, we turn to conversations around ethics, around how we can ethically describe and catalog-- and ethics-- this ethically described, ethically catalog is based in this neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics that comes all the way down from ancient Greece that describes a sort of WEBCHAM.
BRI WATSON: If you're not familiar with that term, it's out of Hope Olson's work, and Michelle Caswell has expanded it. And I expand it here as well. But WEBCHAM essentially stands for White, European, Bourgeois, Cisgender, Citizen, Heterosexual, Able-bodied, Allosexual, Monogamous, Men, Settlers. This is obviously a flipping of the usual LGBTQ, or the usual DEI, like, the assigning of acronyms to people who are not in the center-- so this flipping them on the head.
BRI WATSON: And part of the reason I'm doing that, is because knowledge organization, rooted wholly in a philosophy advocated, promulgated and sponsored-- which is to say, this ancient virtue Greek ethics that comes all the way back from us from the far, far past, is probably not desirable or sustainable. We live in a very different society than Aristotle was talking about. We, as a profession-- galleries, archives, libraries, museums, special collections-- we're really great at gathering information, planning, analyzing, thinking about the best way to do something.
BRI WATSON: But talking doesn't go anywhere very often. We're very not very good at taking action. So in the past year, I've worked to build this resource. That CritCat.org, as Treshani has mentioned, was inspired by Treshani's work, originally, which is-- I'm so glad to be here [INAUDIBLE] today. And after reviewing like 600 sources from 1933 to the present day, which are on the website, again, the five recommendations I ended up with, which I'll touch on too here today, are the use multiple alternative vocabularies or classification, the practice of cultural competency, we're considering historic identities or groups, use of ethical outreach when dealing with still living identities, items, or groups, trickster practices of alteration, subversion, extension, or replacement of dominant classification or cataloging at local level, and finally, consultation described subjects.
BRI WATSON: I'm just going to touch briefly on one and five here, after some water. But I want to say here, when we're doing this work, we should privilege language of the communities whose stuff we have. If it's stolen, it should be returned. But if it can't be, or if we're somehow limited from doing that in our professional work, we should take action to approach them with the respect due to their stuff and their community, and sometimes, even their ancestors, whose bodies are still in museums, and libraries, and archives.
BRI WATSON: We should be careful when we apply a label to things, because personal identity terms are not neutral, bias-free, scientific terminology. It is how you describe our innermost identities, our highest desires, or goals. The Homosaurus is the vocabulary I've been talking about. The aim is to factor in the more of the vocabulary. And the second thing I'll just briefly mention here, the Trans Metadata Collective, which is work that I am doing, along with several others, to advance this work.
BRI WATSON: So the Homosaurus is, if you're not familiar with it, it's based in a very long history of the international queer community, but it's also based in-- I have the [INAUDIBLE] library for information on subject headings. It's based in the desire of the community to find language in a catalog to get to the resources that they need.
BRI WATSON: It was founded-- I think it was originally created in 1887, but it was based on earlier vocabularies that had been in existence since 1930s, '40s and '50s. It was originally used in a Dutch gay and lesbian thesaurus. And then it was eventually built out in 2013. For a while, it lived as a Word document on KR Roberto's laptop, floating around Illinois.
BRI WATSON: But eventually it managed to get together with Jack van der Wel and Ellen Greenblatt, who transformed the original Homosaurus into a linked data vocabulary. And that was put-- I believe on the online on 2014. But in 2015, KJ Rawson founded the Digital Transgender Archive, and needed a better vocabulary to use in this. So all of these forces kind of came together to form the editorial board in 2016.
BRI WATSON: 2019, two years ago already, we released the second version of the Homosaurus. And literally this weekend, we have released version three. The only change between version two and version three is that we are finally changed from URLs that used to be homosaurus.org/version2/gay. It's now just a random-- it's HomoIT, and then a bunch of random numbers. This is because if the URI changes, it messes up the linked data.
BRI WATSON: But this shift will allow us to be used in several other places. And, like I said here, we have early data that shows it was being used-- that Homosaurus was being used in descriptions of 7.7 million items in 33 institutions or 11 countries. And we working to expand that work. And I'm happy to share this work. And we're happy to work with many other institutions with this.
BRI WATSON: Finally, the Trans Metadata Collective is work that I am doing. It's a group of dozens of catalogers and an advisory group, about 80 to 100 library archivists, scholars, information professionals, with an interest in improving the description and classification of trans, non-binary, two-spirit, other gender nonconforming people, and [INAUDIBLE]. We're a collective where our primary goal is to follow in the work done archive for Black Lives and other groups.
BRI WATSON: And so far, we have worked to establish the collective. It's slow. It takes hard, and sometimes goes a lot slower than I would want it to. But it's-- that-- you have to move at the speed of trust, which is one thing that has been a lesson that's really, really stuck with me. The four-- five working group that we've split up into are Descriptive Practice, Classification Working Group, Name Authorities and Access, Subject Headings and Authorities, and Ethical Recommendations broadly.
BRI WATSON: The goal is to bring all of these work together, following the model of Archives for Black Lives, and to catalog the ethics groups, and to develop a set of working practices and best practices and summaries of what to do. Knowing that, we will not solve the problem. And any other work that we all do to here today will not solve the problem. But moving things forward is something we need to stop talking and start taking action.
BRI WATSON: So, thank you. If you have any question, feel free to ask here. If you would like to follow up, one on one, I'm free to do that as well.
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You have requested to see a portion of the video outside of the clip.
Click OK to switch to the full video or click if you would like to stay inside the clip. You can always go back to the clip with Tools and Clip Mode