Will introduce you. So, thank you all for
being here. This is Accessible and Inclusive: A
new open access handbook on DEI metadata. And I
am going to turn it over to our presenters who are
Harriet Wintermute from UNL and Heather Campbell and
Nausicaa Rose from the University of Iowa.
They're from Iowa State. Okay, I apologize. No worries!
Thank you. Thank you. And I also wanted to mention
we have two co-authors who worked on the book but
aren't presenting with us today. Christopher
Dieckman and Hema Thulsidhos, also from Iowa
State.
And now Heather is going to start us off.
Thanks, Harriet. all right, so let's get
started.
So in this presentation, we will introduce this
handbook that we wrote. We intended it as a one
stop introductory reference for metadata work that
focuses on diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI.
And oh, could you go back one article.
There we go. That. That's okay. This is the title
of the of the book. I wish we had the cover to
show you, but it's not yet published. And I'll
tell you a little bit more about that, but this is
the title and the authors, and it will be
published by Iowa State University Digital Press,
hopefully next month. so in the presentation,
we will highlight some of the contents of the
handbook. We'll cover the creation of it. the
open peer review process that we used and its
eventual publication, it's going to be an open
access e-book. So. To start. What exactly is
DEI metadata? Well, essentially it is metadata that
is informed by diversity, equity, and inclusion and
practitioners of this kind of metadata work,
contend that creating, enhancing or
remediating metadata while being informed by DEI
principles promotes respect for all people who
either interact with or are described by the
metadata. And this kind of work is also known by
many other names, some of which are listed here.
So what were the goals of this handbook? we
have three main ones. First, we wanted to support
the goals of DEI metadata work in general, and the
goals of that kind of work are enhancing diverse
representation and our metadata, improving
discovery of diverse resources, and mitigating any
negative effects of outdated or offensive
terminology. Our next goal was we wanted to offer
this one stop reference book for our intended
audience. As our main audience, that we had in
mind were library metadata creators, people
responsible for creating or managing metadata. But
we also thought the book would be helpful for
other information professionals like archivists,
museum professionals, researchers, scholars.
and our third goal was we wanted to facilitate
three outcomes for readers gain awareness of
data issues and metadata creation and management,
learning techniques for reviewing and updating
existing metadata, and develop strategies to
create DEI-informed metadata.
Okay, so in the next part of the presentation,
we'll talk a little bit about the contents of the
book. it is organized by chapter. and each
chapter has a topic and the topics are listed here.
we don't have time to go over everything.
so we'll just highlight some of the contents.
there's a lot more information and examples in the
book itself.
Okay. So to start we have a chapter on what's
called inclusive description. And this chapter
focuses on DEI metadata issues that can arise in
metadata elements that are free text or fields
that are uncontrolled. the table here lists
some of the non-MARC elements and MARC fields that
would offer a metadata creator descriptive
flexibility and freedom. And but with that comes
more responsibility to use accurate and respectful
language. so if you are creating or reviewing
metadata in these fields, two broad areas to pay
attention to are references to human identity and
personal names.
So the chapter gives some recommendations for
referring to identity. it's organized by
several dimensions of diversity. For example, we
have some recommendations under ability. And these
advise metadata creators about differences in
preferred terminology. Some terms to avoid. And
then the handbook also gives a lot of links to
external resources. For more information such as
this ADA National Network's guidelines for writing
about people with disabilities.
This chapter also gives some recommendations for
when you have to refer to names in uncontrolled or
free text fields. I'll just mention that the
next chapter of the book. In the next part of the
presentation, we'll go into more detail about
authorized names, name authority records. but
in these uncontrolled fields, it is generally good
practice to follow your typical content standards
like RDA or DACS. these standards will advise
you generally to use the authorized form. but
just in direct order instead of inverted order. Or
if there isn't an authority record, use the
name that is used in the resource that you're
describing or given by another source. however,
you have some flexibility in these uncontrolled
fields, so you can also offer some supporting or
additional information. you should use
preferred names if you can. you also could
give alternative names if it's warranted. and
another thing you can do is provide some
historical context in a note. So in this example
here we have the authority record. uses the
publisher's married name, Mrs. Frank Leslie. But
in the description you can see, it includes
her first name and gives some more information
that she was the widow of this publisher who
managed the newspaper after he died.
So realistically, your institution's metadata
is going to continue to contain some outdated or
biased language. because language continually
evolves and the remediation of legacy descriptions
takes time and resources, your institution's
resources also will probably continue to contain
problematic content, from titles that contain
offensive terminology to photographs that depict
sensitive topics. So this inclusive description
chapter also offers some strategies for addressing
this problematic metadata or content. So the first
strategy is, redaction. if you want to hit
the spacebar to show that. Thank you. so this
is the removal of, or masking of letters or
words like in this jacket summary shown here. It
misgendered the subject of the book. So the
cataloger who did this work? replace some of
the the text in that transcribed um jacket.
Summary. The next one is annotation or
providing explanatory notes, which we talked about
a little bit already. But you could also use this
to, explain your approach or your decision
making. such as this decision here says the
Cataloger decided not to include, a name such
as a dead name that appeared on the title page for
privacy reasons. A third strategy is harmful
language statements. These are also known as
disclaimers or content warnings. you can apply
these at the collection level or at the item level,
like in this example here. This is on a digital
object. It's saying that these materials may be
offensive or disrespectful. should be
considered within their historical context. And
then the last strategy, that this chapter
talks about is, specific genre terms that
could describe an entire work. So these works
would be those that have a clear bias. The whole
work is obviously biased. there is a
vocabulary, RBMS CVRMC. It's available in the
Library of Congress is linked data service at
id.loc.gov. but you can find a lot of these
terms under the prejudicial works term which you
could apply or there are more specific ones as
well. All right. So now we'll move on to the next
slide. Okay. Looks like it's my turn now. That's
okay. Yeah. So, I'm going to be covering
the third chapter in my book, which is,
just different considerations for when you're
doing them authorities. So it mostly focuses on
named authority records or in a year. But a lot of
this is applicable to, some of what Heather
has already discussed. And anywhere else you're
going to use, personal names, in your
metadata. and what it touches on. And here
we've just got a couple of, Kind of guideline
principles that you can refer to. We should I
think we should be sharing our slides so the links
there will work for you. that kind of give
some more ethical background for, name
authority work. But in general, this, uh. And we
touch on issues of privacy, gender and non-English
names in this chapter. But the kind of the main
emphasis is just, making sure that the people
described in our name authority records should be
treated with compassion and respect and that,
the considerations of discoverability,
completeness or other library values don't
outweigh the need to not harm the very people we
seek to highlight with name authority records,
or the library value of privacy. So that's kind of
our first topic. Here is just a few things about
privacy. first is birthdates. for living
individuals, they should be omitted from authority
records whenever possible. just for privacy
sake, it's good to prefer other methods of
disambiguation for living persons. And as
necessary, you can also include a note justifying
the, omission of a birth date from from the
record in a MARC 677 field. and this is
demonstrated in the NACO participants manual. So
it's not like you're really going far afield in
your practice. It's it's a fairly standard way to
approach it. and for non-MARC name authority
records you can make similar. Notes and
whatever note field that you're using. Another
important privacy area is when you have
pseudonymous and anonymous creators. Now, there's
a lot of reasons creators might obscure their
identity. They might be for professional reasons,
like keeping their different professional
identities separate. If someone's like, got an
academic career and then also, like, publishes
pulp fiction novels, they might not want those two
identities overlapping. there might be various
personal reasons that someone wants to maintain,
separate identities or add an identity. And,
among especially among creators in
marginalized communities. Safety is an important
reason to hide your identity. Any.
so information that might identify such a
creator or link their different public identities
should be admitted as. and if there is a
reason to include such information, it's important
to contact the creator and get their
permission prior to adding it to the record.
Okay, this one's pretty easy. As far as, what
to do with gender markers. so MARC includes a
375 field for recording gender and name
authority records, but don't use it. That's,
that's pretty much it. And when you're editing,
existing name authority records, just remove the
375 field if you find them. recording gender
isn't terribly useful for discoverability or
disambiguation, but it poses risks to a person's
privacy, including potentially outing transgender
individuals and whether or not your name authority
records the part of NACO. We recommend following
the program for cooperative cataloging guidance.
And. guidance and just omitting or removing
the field as they advise.
Managing too many screens at once. All right. And
now we're kind of getting into, handling
different types of names. The first area we're
working on is just transgender people's names.
and here we recommend following the Trans Metadata
Collective's guidance, which is just to,
create a name authority record for the creator's
current name and use it in the records of any of
their works in your collection. and that's a
and then avoid including all public names in the
name authority record and never include any names
not associated with a creator's work. So if they
have a separate like, private name, it's very
important not to doubt that.
So, as we saw in one of Heather's earlier
examples, sometimes married women's names are
formatted, especially in older materials, as Mrs.
Husband's first name. Husband's last name,
basically. And so we see that here in this
example with Minnie Newington Goodwin's name,
where she's listed as Mr. Fred, Mrs. Frederick S
Goodwin. And while this was once conventional and
obscures women's contributions to society in many
ways, and so to improve both discoverability and
to recognize women as people in their own right.
it's important to consult additional resources
when you see a name in this format to try and
identify, women identified this way with their
full actual names so that they might be recognized.
And because I've done this kind of work, it's not
always possible to find someone's name or just
find out for sure that you've got the right person,
but you. It's necessary to try at least.
now we come to non English name romanization,
which, is a whole complex area. and
there's a lot of ways across all different types
of languages that this can be difficult to
transliterated names accurately. So we recommend
just using a person's own transcription of their
name if it's available. If it's not, then consult
with someone knowledgeable in the language and
culture you are working with. And then,
finally familiar at familiarize yourself with the
linguistic and cultural issues that could lead to
a less than ideal transliteration. And the one
caveat we have to this is just if you're doing a
Nikah records, the what's recorded in MARC 100
field needs to use the LC romanization tables.
so sometimes that might lead to a transcription
that's not ideal. And in that case you can still
include alternatives in the 400 field. So we've
got an example here. where Pacha du Provence
name is. It's transcribed as the romanization
tables. Prefer, and then an additional name with a
fuller form and a different transliteration of her
first name. And now I will hand it off [to Harriet].
Thank you, Nausicaa. And.
And so we're going to continue talking about
different aspects of persons and groups. We're
also going to cover this more specifically in the.
limiting fields. We also have an opportunity
to put attributes in our metadata. So there's many
reasons why we want to do that. if a person
they might have to go out and collect books or
sometimes it's really hard to find, someone
who has an identity that is diverse. And so,
if you're trying to create an audience with
authors with different identities, they, you want
to have a science book by we are on there, or you
want to have a graphic novel by a disabled author.
You would need to already know that person's name
of the creator or a title or something. And if you
don't, then you have to need to do some pre
research to find that list of people who might do
that and then go back and look for those words. So
sometimes you have to, you know, to find clues in
other document in other places just to identify
works by those people that you're looking for,
like theory of names. Or of course, you can also
have your book library. But the point is that we
now have resources that can make it more easily
discoverable, hopefully. We always have to
continue to be careful with privacy concerns and
not be in every possible attribute about a person.
But here's a list in the corner on the box on the
right. different attributes that we can
include things like age, education level.
Like, college level versus elementary level of
text. We also have, the cultural identity that
you can include, language that is spoken in
the resources, medical, psychological and
disability attributes. Also regions like different
if a citizen of a different country occupations
religion and social group, social group these
things that you're interested in like so we are
all librarians. So we are a social group of people
who are interested in libraries. I also wanted to
mention one more thing. You might not be familiar,
but it's kind of the same concept. it's called
Archival Silence. This concept talks
about like omissions or incorrect records because,
the historical information is just not there.
moving on to the next slide.
So things are getting better now because we do
have some metadata fields that are available and
people can use those. With a different vocabulary.
So for example, just based on what type of record
we're talking about, you see here we have the
bibliographic records. You have four fields or
different fields that can be used to show the
audience characteristics or the creator's
contributions. And if you have a or authority
record.
I would like not to mention, we don't add
gender, but in other places we do, like we
might have occupation or other characteristics of
that entity or group. Other ways that we can use
to, identify them for, digital resources.
One possible option is MODS, which is metadata
object description schema. And so that
uses the description under the name so that you
can identify that person. Their role. So you can
add a little bit more about their character or
attribute.
and then there's also several resources for
talking about controlled, vocabulary. There's
no one perfect sauce, but I recommend that you
look and find the best match for your needs.
Sometimes you might need 2 or 3 descriptors for
one person, which is fine. You need three with
mammals. some traditional vocabulary that we
use. So we have the demographic terms. This is the
thing you can use for that. This is also a
relatively new option from the Library of Congress
specifically for demographic group terms. It is
not complete, but it's still pretty thorough.
Another one is the homeless stories. This is I
think, data vocabulary more LGBTQ I think. But
individuals and very goes in depth in that area of
many resources. And so that's a great place to
look to get correct terms. The third one I
mentioned is the American Folklore Society,
ethnographic historians. I mentioned this one
because, it's a very small historian, but it
has a critical category, respectable use of
names that the different people preferred.
there's many, many more resources. I could include
even the Library of Congress of depending another
one, that you might not be aware of, but it's
worth mentioning is the gender savvy sexual
orientation vocabulary. So, I repeat it. It's
g f o.
Okay. Next slide please.
And then I'll give you a couple of examples in the
interest of time. these are a couple of MARC
items, and we have two fields that we can use, the
385, which explain the characteristics of the
audience. And 386 explains characteristics of the
creator/contributor. So the first example you
can see in the children's book. And so we did that
in 385 fields that we're specifying that the
audience for this item is children. The second
example is a music score with the person. the
creator's name is identified. It's enriched a
little bit more in the 386 to describe the creator
more. They're African American and some
other terms agree with you here about the music.
Next.
And we, all of you are very familiar with the
definition of classification, as I have up here in
the, slide. But in the United States, we
usually use Library of Congress classifications or
the Dewey Decimal Classification. Next slide.
Can you click. There we go. Thank you. And then we
often use subject headings to describe and
classification as are very commonly used in the US.
And then even though technically those are there.
But we also have some problems with both of those
classifications. Your subject heading. And we
actually in our handbook there's two chapters on
those topics. Next.
So here is an example of one possible bias that we
see in library classification in subject heading.
Other than, for example, this religion in the
Dewey Decimal. you see, the religion
classification is in the two hundreds. And if you
look at this with a heavily, Western culture
oriented. So a lot of the religious are things
that we find in the Western cultures where the way
at the bottom, you see to 90 is for all the other
religions. So that's one example of bias. Yeah.
Other forms of finance like the, are.
For example, the Library of Congress Subject
Headings sometimes use films which mean someone
who named the group, but not the people in the
group naming themselves. It's someone outside
naming them. So one example of that would be the Fox
Indians that the Library of Congress subject
heading that was given to them externally. Their
their name for their tribe is Meskwaki people. So
that's one example, where recently I think
people have become better at doing that with the
naming. But I just wanted to give you an example,
you know, outdated or offensive terminology.
for example, illegal aliens for a while
was there, but that was changed by the Library of
Congress in 2021. And it's been updated. So
we mentioned that in our book.
Many.
So we explain quite a bit of this in the book with
some more examples. But we would typically. For
all kinds of talk, or even sometimes we have to
work within the system in a classification that
was given, which is fine. We do have some
strategies that we worked in that book, trying
to keep up with the changing times, even though
the system might be antiquated if it does change.
And so we can keep our eye open in updating some
things, like for example, the tools that are
available on the web platform for clubs and
web websites that one had like a publicly
available list, proposed and finalized changes.
So keep an eye on that and see if there's any of
those practices that you can incorporate in your
local standard. also, you can be an active
participant yourself and help us share some of
those along. You can. Sometimes it's not up to the
Library of Congress. Our community is responsible
for bringing those people's attention. there's
a Google group for proposed review division. It's
called the Dewey Contributors. You can join that
group. another option or a strategy that you
can take at your library is if you want to follow
the retroactive changes, then like, for
example, with the illegal aliens. you know, if
you want to update everything in your system, you
could.
So those are two different possible strategies
that we have available to us. And now we are going
to go back to Nausicaa. Okay. So I'm going to go
over a chapter seven which is uh over
accessibility and accessibility metadata
specifically. which is maybe not something
we're used to. I know I'm not used to thinking
about necessarily in metadata, but it's very
important.
So, Yeah. So we'll, we'll look at how,
accessibility can be. Metadata can be included in
MARC and elsewhere and also the how web
accessibility can play a factor especially for our
digital collections and things, including
looking at some best practices for accessibility,
metadata and accessibility is just really the way
to make things possible to enter or use, like
enter like a building or use like a resource. And
for librarians, accessibility means providing
flexibility. That is, giving multiple options to
users, including those with disabilities, so they
can readily access, resources in ways that are
useful to them. so accessibility metadata is
sort of a magic wand where you can use as,
kind loggers and metadata professionals, to
make it possible, to and it makes allows us to
include information on the accessibility of
digital as well as physical resources. And beyond
just this being a good thing to do. There are some
risks being included with not providing accessible
metadata. So, first, it limits the discovery
of resources, which kind of goes against what
we're going for, and it creates barriers between
the users and those resources. And additionally,
from a web access point of view, it brings up
legal problems. due to, the Ada, if
you're not accessible website that leaves you open
to lawsuits and so forth. so I'll walk us
through some strategies to address these
challenges. So for addressing accessibility
issues, we want to promote discovery. and that
can be including. accessibility metadata and
dMarc records such as those listed here. so
the MARC 341 field, 532 field and 041 field can
all be included. Provide important information on
how to access a resource.
and the other major, major challenge with
insufficient accessibly metadata is just legal
non-compliance. Like I mentioned before, with
web accessibility. And this could be addressed by
adhering to the Web Content Accessibility Standard
guidelines and which are in compliance with
the American Disabilities Act. And these
guidelines offer a comprehensive framework for
achieving web accessibility. They include three
different levels. So you can progressively make
your, resources more accessible. And they're
widely recognized and adopted globally. And so we
have some best practice. We're going to discuss
some Brexit practices and web accessibility for
digital resources here. This includes using alt
text for images, extended descriptions for images.
this can help, low vision and unsighted
viewers. Uh users. audio descriptions for
audio visual content. captions and subtitles
as well for AV material and transcripts for audio
visual content. using OCR or hand transcribing
text and digitized written materials is also,
very important, useful and then always
including some language information. So, if
you, if you don't read French and you've got a
resource in French, it's good to know that right
beforehand instead of trying to dig into it later.
yeah. I think I'm handing it back to
Heather.
All right. Thanks, Nausicaa. So as we get closer
to the end of the presentation, we just wanted
to provide some, I guess, action items for you.
it can be challenging to start taking action. How
do you go about even finding the resources, where
it would be helpful to correct the metadata, or to
include DEI metadata considerations that we've
covered in this presentation and in the handbook.
So here are a few ideas for how to determine where
to start. first the author. Sometimes the
author might contact a library to complain or make
a request about how their information is displayed
in the catalog. That would be something that you'd
want to take action on right away. colleagues
of yours might know one author, or I've seen them
talk. obviously things that you're working on,
the items in hand or things you're describing
online or that come through your workflow. Look at
the author's biography. Look at the topic of the
book. You also might read about or listen to, or
learn about an event on campus or in your
community that features a book or an author a
topic. book reviews in particular. A book
talks are a good way to find this kind of example.
some library book vendors also put together
lists of diverse resources, and some publisher
websites have that information as well. you
also could consider working with your collection
development or reference librarians. You could
decide to look at 1 or 2 subject terms. or a
very small classification range and review your
your holdings for candidates for remediation.
we do recommend that you start small if you take
this approach. rather than taking on the
entire catalog. so old publications might be a
good subset to consider. Some of our oldest
cataloging records are either minimal, or they
might use pejorative or outdated language that you
could work to remediate. and then last
students through research projects or class
projects, projects going on in your library
with students. Those could uncover things needing
attention as well.
Now, as you're doing this work, though, it's
important to keep in mind, ethics and
responsibility considerations when you're creating
or updating metadata records. So first remember
that you're biased. Everyone is biased. be
mindful of that. Take a few minutes to look at the
resource or the sources. something might have
caught your eye, but it's important not to make
assumptions or take things at face value. So make
sure to search, confirm the information,
confirm the preferred terminology for the
individual or the group that you're describing
before you decide to use it. next, if
you've decided to add some additional metadata or
attributes about an author, ask yourself, is this
going to be helpful to users in the first place?
and is it public? Would it be violating
privacy concerns like not so discussed? and
then again verify verify verify confirm your
sources. Try to find firsthand sources like the
author's own biography, autobiography maybe, or
their website, their social media. if
you're looking at Wikipedia, make sure to follow
your citations and like confirm those for accuracy.
Use those rather than just Wikipedia. make
sure you're not using or citing stolen information,
like from a doxing website. And then last, after
you review all this information, you might decide
it's not a good idea to record this this
characteristic of this author's identity or,
similar decisions. You can document that, that you
made that decision by inserting a note in your
metadata. This will inform future metadata
professionals, that some identity information
wasn't recorded. You don't have to list exactly
what it is, but you can say, research showed
that based on these this research, we made the
decision to keep this information private. you
also could use this kind of note to record it. Now,
author does actually contact you and say, get this
information out of the catalog record. That's
where you want to make sure no one else adds it
back in later. All right. So. Now we've come to
the very last part of the presentation where we'll
just talk briefly about, why we wrote the
handbook and how we how we did it. Harriet
Wintermute was the one who came up with the
idea. She proposed to that idea because, there
are a lot of resources, but they're scattered all
over the place. They're not always easy to find.
It takes time to review them and synthesize them.
So she really wanted a one stop reference book and
wanted to make it available through open access so
that everyone could use it.
and we were lucky at the time we started
writing the book. We were all part of the Iowa
State University Library, and a unit of the
library is that Iowa State University Digital
Press, which is an open access publisher. it
publishes original open access books, journals,
conference proceedings. In addition to being an
open access publisher, it also has a goal of
diversifying the ideas, cultures, and experiences
represented in the scholarly record.
So here is, a timeline of our research and
writing process. Harriet came up with the idea way
back in January of 2023. We started planning in
February. We made a template for what we wanted
the chapters to look like, and each of us selected
the chapters we were going to write, and we worked
on making outlines. The next month, about March,
we started writing and researching in earnest. We,
of course, consulted with each other throughout
the writing process, but it took many months. I
mean, we also have other jobs to do, and we had
some job changes and other things happening in our
lives. So it took took some time to finish the
writing. but by November of last year, we had
a first draft, and at that point we also had a new
metadata librarian, a cataloger librarian here at
Iowa State, and she kindly read through the whole
manuscript. Her name is Sylvie Manuel, shout out,
and provided us feedback, which was
very helpful.
And then we had our manuscript reviewed. We were
ready to send it to peer review. we we agreed
that we would do open peer review. So we knew who
the reviewers were. They knew who we were. and
our publisher managed that process. However, we
provided a list of ideas of people we thought
would be good reviewers, people who we had seen as
experts or people had already written on DEI
metadata in the field. so Harrison Inefuku,
the publisher, he, contacted these
reviewers did manage that process. That took a
while. I mean, it is pretty long books, so the
reviewers needed some time to to review it in
earnest and write their responses. So we got that
information back in April of this year, and then
we were able to edit in response to those reviews.
And then our final step was, we wanted it copy
edited. so it was consistent throughout.
we hire somebody through EditorsofColor.com
We put a job out there and found someone great.
And she, just finished copy editing, editing
it. This month. We paid her a flat rate based on
the Editorial Freelancers Association rates and
our two libraries. Harriet now is at the
University of Nebraska, Lincoln, are splitting that
payment.
So now we are eagerly anticipating the publication
of the handbook. it could be as early as next
month, but it will be in this summer. and once
we have it, you'll be able to find it in several
places. There will be a DOI. You can find it
in the ISU Digital Press catalog. The link here.
we're gonna make a good record for our
bibliographic records that will be in WorldCat.
And then we also have the all the publications of
the Iowa State University Digital Press are in
a collection in OCLC WorldShare Collection
Manager named after the press.
Okay, so I guess that's it. I think we do have
time for questions, but if you think of something
later on, you can always email us. We have this
address metadata@iastate.edu and we'll be
happy to get back to you. So thanks for your
attention.