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representation and our metadata, improving discovery of diverse resources, and mitigating any negative effects of outdated or offensive terminology.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.