Using Coyote to Describe the World / Sina Bahram, Susan Chun, and Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli
In November of 2015, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) launched a website with a rare accessibility feature. The website team had committed to making all of the images on the site accessible to the widest possible audience—particularly visitors with vision impairment—through visual description. To do so, the MCA worked with Sina Bahram and…
Read MoreMissed Connections: What Search Engines Say About Women / Safiya Umoja Noble
Noble writes evocatively about the effect of search algorithm biases on users — in this case, young black girls who will find that Google searches for “black girls” do not lead to books about black girls or communities in which young black girls might connect, but instead pornography as the top results. Noble investigates how…
Read MoreArchaeology of a Digitization / Bonnie Mak
Excellent article in the history of digital materialism, exploring the layers and effects of collection, curation and remix by exploring the deep history of a commonly-used library database, Early English Books Online (EEBO). This article is particularly relevant to projects considering the labor and implications of digitization and reformatting, and also serves as a model…
Read MoreSkins 1.0: A Curriculum for Designing Games with First Nations Youth
Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC) conducted the Skins workshop to explore a pedagogy that integrated North American Indigenous cultural frameworks into the design of video games and virtual environments. Skins provides instruction in digital design, art, animation, audio and programming within a context of Aboriginal stories and storytelling techniques. In the pilot workshop with Mohawk…
Read MoreGames as Enduring Presence / Elizabeth LaPensée
Games offer a space for Indigenous artists to reify the connections between tradition and technology since Indigenous games can directly engage players in Indigenous ways of knowing through design and aesthetic. The social impact game Survivance, the musical choose-your-own-adventure text game We Sing for Healing, and the mobile game Invaders exemplify games as self-determined spaces…
Read MoreAdvocacy by Design: Moving Between Theory & Practice / Purdom Lindblad
Advocacy by Design (AbD) is a design framework for critical engagement centered on advocacy. AbD advocates for transparency, openness, polyvocalism, stewardship, and how to achieve these goals. In order to best fulfill these goals, the presentation suggests that libraries take part in collaborative projects. For more information on collaborative projects and the importance of collaboration…
Read MoreKnowledge Organization from an Indigenous Perspective: The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology Project / Sandra Littletree and Cheryl A. Metoyer
Native Americans create, preserve, and organize knowledge within the context of community, thereby ensuring the inclusion of Native American philosophies. Historically, mainstream cataloging and classification systems have not adequately represented this knowledge. The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology was designed to incorporate an Indigenous perspective into mainstream controlled vocabularies. Using story as pedagogy,…
Read MoreProviding Cognitively Just Subject Access to Indigenous Knowledge through Knowledge Organization Systems / Heather Moulaison Sandy and Jenny Bossaller
This article explores cognitively just, reliable subject access to indigenous knowledge through knowledge organization systems (KOSs). Cognitive justice requires that indigenous people be able to access materials in a way that respects their worldview, yet dominant KOSs are based on positivist, Western approaches that are fundamentally incompatible. Alternatives to universal systems include the creation of…
Read MoreNative America’s twenty-first-century right to know / Allison Boucher Krebs
More than 30 years ago, in October of 1978, Standing Rock Sioux scholar Vine Deloria Jr. prepared a paper for The White House Pre-conference on Indian Library and Information Services On or Near Reservations titled “The Right to Know.” In his paper, Deloria establishes the United States Federal government’s treaty responsibility for Indian Country’s: …need…
Read MoreSubject Access to African American Studies Resources in Online Catalogs: Issues and Answers / Doris Hargrett Clack
Clack’s work is foundational in this area, and her published work is some of the earliest to explore inclusivity in metadata. In 1973 the author conducted a seminal research study which concluded that subject analysis for African American studies resources was seriously inadequate and that the area was neglected in research. Twenty years later the…
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