RESOURCE: Toward Ethical and Inclusive Descriptive Practices

UCLA Library Special Collections strives to develop ethical and inclusive descriptive practices. In this brief piece, they share their motivation and approach to creating/remediating “inclusive, humanizing, and anti-oppressive” object description, as well as resources that informed their approach. Informed by recent scholarship, their process has evolved from an act of discovery, with its assumptions of unbiased neutrality, to a political act that eschews “tacit complicity” in favor of “remediating harmful description by creating and implementing an anti-oppressive approach to discovery and access. To sustain this approach, we will center people in all of our metadata practices and adapt our strategies for doing so over time.” To do this, they commit to being “clear about what we know, how we know it, and what we don’t know,” embracing “baseline description as a tool to improve the discoverability of all our materials,” and demonstrating “an understanding that description is a continuous and necessarily iterative endeavor.” They strive for greater transparency and an ongoing process of review and revision.

In addition to works cited, this piece includes resources for Bias, Standpoint, and Positionality; Legacy Harmful Description Practices; Inclusive and Ethical Description Practices; and Ethical Description Practices and Levels of Description.

This set of resources helps make transparent the ethical choices and decisions that go into object description. Such metadata are foundational to digital humanities library work, as many of the projects we undertake–whether for teaching or scholarship–rely on digitized materials. Working with objects that are thoughtfully and complexly described creates an ideal starting point for creating ethical and anti-oppressive digital humanities projects.