Nicole Smeltekop | Can Library Metadata Stand with Hong Kong?
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 2020-04-24

Nicole Smeltekop, Joshua Barton, Mike Erickson, and Lucas Mak | Michigan State University

Presentation description:

In early 2019, protests erupted in Hong Kong against the extradition bill proposed by the semi-autonomous region’s government. After the bill was suspended, unrest continued with protester demands including humane treatment of protesters and universal suffrage. That fall, a zine-related listserv shared freely-downloadable zines, posters, and flyers from the protests, urging libraries to print and preserve them. Our library did so, creating metadata for the material in our shared online catalog.

Cataloging material about an ongoing political (and emotional) event raised ethical issues and necessitated creative solutions. Traditional library cataloging relies on tools and resources known for dependability, not nimbleness. Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH, our controlled vocabulary) are established after reaching a “literary warrant” threshold (i.e., people are publishing on the topic) and creating them using mainstream scholarly sources can take months. Cataloging primary sources about current world events pushes LCSH to be more responsive to current trends in thinking about organizing knowledge, and in the case of the Hong Kong materials, it forefronts the perspective of those seeking justice when framing these events for posterity.

Catalogers are generally trained to be “neutral” when describing material, however the field has begun to acknowledge and question implicit bias and recognize the fraught nature of creating “neutral” descriptions. Catalogers skeptical of neutrality may weigh traditional factors like creator intent, but also metadata lifecycles and the historical ramifications of descriptive work and the power of naming, as well as safety and privacy concerns for creators. We contend that cataloging materials with these factors in mind can be an act of solidarity with creators seeking justice by both disseminating access to the material and disseminating data about the material particularly through traditional, mainstream channels. Our talk will discuss these issues and explore how metadata creation with primary sources might intersect with solidarity.

For more information about the 2020 Global DH Symposium visit msuglobaldh.org.