Today we spent most of the day cleaning and doing chores… and some reorganizing of freezers in the lab due to a power outage! The Open Ed 2021 session we watched tonight was entitled “Creating an Inclusive Subject Vocabulary to Describe Humanities Resources” presented by Sarah Harris an Associate Librarian at the National Humanities Center. As part of a website update, the National Humanities Center library wanted to apply more modern and culturally-appropriate terms for their cataloging. Harris mentioned that most terms used were outdated and biased. They now aggregate a variety of terms to use appropriate sources and terminology. The Humanities in Class Digital Library is an Open Educational Resources (OER) platform and serves as a working repository for educators and students. Harris mentioned that when they started their descriptive metadata they began with GoogleSheets and then moved on to Dublin Core Elements. As the list of terms grew, the group brought in experts and tried to bring in those voices as best as possible. I thought it was interesting to learn from Harris that metadata is not neutral and bias must always be considered. Harris described the use of Airtable databases for more control over vocabularies. The Glossary of Disability Terms from the NC Council on Developmental Disabilities and other groups/projects were included as sources. Harris spoke about the priorities for maintenance and standardizing metadata keyword terms to prioritize equity and inclusion. Their current focus seems to be updating terminology to Black Americans, Black American History, and Indigenous Americans. Harris explained that regular maintenance will be performed biannually to review terms and metadata. They plan on developing ways to apply metadata and best practices to more databases in their collection. Several long-term goals were mentioned including connections to GitHub and Linked Open Data platforms. I was thinking today about keywords and the system used by QUBES to publish resources. I appreciated having a set of keywords for educational resources as well as the option to input custom tags. I know tags are a topic of interest for working with Hypothes.is and PowerNotes. I wonder if there are open tag ontologies that we should be considering?
