Digital Transgender Archive
“The purpose of the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) is to increase the accessibility of transgender history by providing an online hub for digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world.” The DTA was partially developed in response to the placement of transgender history within the archival record: it is often…
Read MoreSelecting Thesauri / Susan Barrett
This study path asks learners to work with an experienced metadata librarian or cataloger in selecting a thesaurus for describing a cultural collection or sub-collection.
Read MoreMinding and Mending the Gaps: A Case Study in Linked Open Data / Karen Li-Lun Hwang
This case study provides a concrete example of the gaps that can occur in standard cataloging practices and their impact on information seeking. It explores an instance of using Linked Open Data (LOD) technologies to address representation gaps, uncovering both opportunities and risks when such interlinking relies on standard vocabularies, which typically represent only mainstream…
Read MoreUsing 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 MoreDLF Cultural Assessment Working Group
This Digital Library Federation Cultural Assessment Working Group works to develop tools for the measurement and analysis of cultural biases and assumptions in GLAM (Galleries, Archives, and Museums) institutions. Other projects include a workflow for inclusive curation and metadata practices, and the maintenance of an ongoing annotated bibliography of sources.
Read MoreDescriptive Metadata in User Interfaces / Erin Baucom
This study path exposes students to how descriptive metadata in digital repositories is used to reinforce or disrupt stereotypes about marginalized cultures and communities.
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 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…
Read MoreDecolonizing Ethnographic Documentation: A Critical History of the Early Museum Catalogs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History / Hannah Turner
To inform debates about decolonizing museum records, this article maps the history of cataloging at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when material heritage was collected for museums from Indigenous peoples, the knowledge within those communities was often measured against Eurocentric biases that saw Indigenous knowledge as the…
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