This case study describes the development of a custom metadata schema to support the description of 65 educational videos used to help teach sign language. The creators of this special collection had specific access and discovery needs that were not served by standard vocabularies, and the custom schema developed methods to describe information like the
From Archives to Action: Zines, Participatory Culture, and Community Engagement in Asian America
Honma describes the use of zines in an undergraduate classroom to promote alternative pedagogies and incorporate critical inquiry and research skills. By bringing zines into his classroom as research materials, Honma provides an example of how to use archival materials and research to make connections between community archives and community action, and help students view
Understanding by Design Framework
This resource provides an overview of the Understanding by Design Framework for planning curriculum, assessment and instruction activities. Central ideas to this method are assessment and teaching, and designing curriculum based on desired learning outcomes and mechanisms for evaluating their success.
Teaching to Dismantle White Supremacy in Archives
Caswell provides a framework for combating white supremacy, homophobia, and other harmful and persistent perspectives in the information science classroom. Through this framework, she and her students work to recognize the biases in IS and challenge those biases. This article also provides slides about practical steps and paradigmatic shifts to dismantling white supremacy in the
Wampum, Sequoyan, and Story: Decolonizing the Digital Archive
Archives have a long and troubled history as imperialist endeavors. Scholars of digital archives can begin to decolonize the archive by asking, how is knowledge imparted, in what media, by whom, and for what ends? Drawing on a six-year-long ethnohistorical study of Cherokee language and writing, I explore these questions and analyze the epistemological work
Imagining: Creating Spaces for Indigenous Ontologies
For at least half a century, catalogers have struggled with how to catalog and classify Native American and Indigenous peoples materials in library, archive, and museum collections. Understanding how colonialism works can help those in the field of knowledge organization appreciate the power dynamics embedded in the marginalization of Native American and Indigenous peoples materials
Does Information Really Want to be Free? Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness
The “information wants to be free” meme was born some 20 years ago from the free and open source software development community. In the ensuing decades, information freedom has merged with debates over open access, digital rights management, and intellectual property rights. More recently, as digital heritage has become a common resource, scholars, activists, technologists,
Indigenous Knowledge, Intellectual Property, Libraries and Archives: Crises of Access, Control and Future Utility
Active Collections
The Active Collections website serves as both a community of practice and a core reading. The website’s goal is to “generate discussion and action across the history museum field to develop a new approach to collections, one that is more effective and sustainable.” The Active Collections Manifesto is an excellent place to start, but the website
Affective Presence: The Metonymical Catalogue / Cara Krmpotich and Alexander Somerville
Drawing on exploratory research of online ethnographic records for particular types of Aboriginal bags in North America, we confront the absence of affective knowledge in museum catalogues and documentation. Although curatorial, ethnographic, and Aboriginal understandings of these items teem with affect, we find affect to be almost wholly lacking from available online records. We ask