Advancing IDEAs: Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, 6 August 2024

The following post is one in a regular series on issues of Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility, compiled by a team of OCLC contributors.

Banner for the WebJunction on-demand class, A Community-Centered Approach to Digital Collections. Graphic includes stylized colorful leaves falling into an extended hand.
A Community-Centered Approach to Digital Collections, from OCLC’s WebJunction

New WebJunction course: A Community-Centered Approach to Digital Collections

Discover how to create inclusive and equitable digital collections with WebJunction’s new free on-demand course, “A Community-Centered Approach to Digital Collections.” This course emphasizes the importance of representing the many voices and narratives within your community by building and sustaining respectful relationships based on mutual support and trust. Participants will learn essential strategies to develop diverse, community-centered collections. It guides you to recognize and address gaps in your collections, identify and connect with underrepresented or underserved communities, and foster meaningful partnerships. The course also highlights methods for maintaining long-term trust and engagement with your community, ensuring that their voices are continuously represented and respected.

This course complements the seven-course Digital Collections Stewardship series and encourages learners to consider how the collections they create do or do not represent the full range of people, groups, and organizations in their communities. By adopting these approaches, cultural institutions can ensure that their digital collections truly reflect the richness and diversity of their communities, making this course an invaluable resource for anyone committed to community-led engagement. Contributed by Dale Musselman.

Recognizing Indigenous interests: Labeling digital sequence information with provenance metadata

Ten biocultural labels appear as small tags with icons representing each label.  The labels are organized into three sections, Provenance Labels, Protocol Labels, and Permission labels.

A policy brief from the Equity for Indigenous Research & Innovation Coordinating Hub (ENRICH) extends the Traditional Knowledge Labels used with other cultural heritage materials. As it has become increasingly easy to generate information about gene sequences (i.e., digital sequence information (DSI)), research practices have not aligned with Indigenous expectations about acknowledgment or attribution. Biocultural labels (BC Labels) are notices for researchers that an Indigenous community has an interest in the digital sequence information, is open to collaboration, or may be able to connect researchers with other Indigenous knowledge about the sequence. Because this provenance data has a persistent identifier, they can also serve to knit Indigenous knowledge into knowledge graphs that use other PIDs, such as ORCID. This provenance metadata “addresses FAIR & CARE Principles in the sharing of DSI.”

This caught my eye because it is an extension of earlier work by Local Contexts to provide Traditional Knowledge Labels. While it may seem particular to genetic research data/RDM, increasingly physical collections in natural science museums are the source of genetic biodiversity information. Specimens may have been collected in the distant past and have lost their association with provenance information from Indigenous communities (or even adjacent field notebooks or other materials managed in discrete library/archival systems). Rebuilding this information as part of a larger knowledge graph can connect these sources with the communities interested in exercising digital sovereignty over traditional information. Contributed by Richard J. Urban.

Investigation into charges against school librarians

An NBC News report, “Inside the two-year fight to bring charges against school librarians in Granbury, Texas,” opens as follows: “The law enforcement officer spent months methodically gathering evidence. He leafed through thousands of pages and highlighted key passages amid reams and reams of paper. He wore his body camera to record his interactions with witnesses and suspects. And he photographed what he saw as instruments of the alleged crime: Books.” Based on an 824-page investigative file that NBC News and the Dallas-Fort Worth station NBC 5 was able to obtain, the report offers “an extraordinary look into the ramifications of the right-wing backlash against books dealing with racism, gender, sex and sexuality.” The case “offers the most detailed and visceral picture to date of an attempt to prosecute librarians amid the nationwide campaign by conservatives to restrict children’s access to books depicting sex and LGBTQ people.” In the end, no charges were filed against three unnamed school librarians.

This detailed and chilling story also reveals that the file included the names of students who had checked out the books in question, a violation of student privacy according to experts on the First Amendment. Chief Deputy Constable Scott London also tried to identify student volunteers responsible for shelving books to prove that the librarians had used minors to help commit the supposed crimes. That would have raised the charges from misdemeanors to felonies. Among the books that London had deemed harmful was Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel “The Bluest Eye,” a popular target of such challenges. Contributed by Jay Weitz.

Thinking about time inclusively

Brea McQueen describes how normative expectations about time create inaccessibility in academic libraries in “Crip Time in the Academic Library,” posted on 10 July 2024 in Toward Inclusive Excellence (TIE), the blog from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). McQueen describes crip time as “a nonlinear way of understanding and moving through time, and it takes into consideration the flare-ups, setbacks, and fatigue that often accompany disability,” citing examples of people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) often running late or frequent sick days taken by people with chronic fatigue. Crip time acknowledges differences in both perception and requirements for time by people with disabilities, often showing up as “extra time” to achieve the same task as someone who is chrononormative. McQueen explains how she accounts for crip time in her one-shot instruction sessions by including short, frequent breaks, providing handouts to walk students through content, and encouraging students to set up one-on-one appointments in which they can work at a speed and time that meets their needs.

As someone with ADHD, I experienced and learned to manage my time blindness before I had ever heard that term or crip time. I know I have tried the patience of my co-workers when my complex system of calendar reminders and tasks lists fails me, and my husband when my promise to be there “in a few minutes” turns into an hour passing. McQueen’s post is focused on academic libraries based on her experience, but a lack of understanding about crip time is probably an issue needing to be addressed broadly in our profession, both for library patrons and staff. What may seem like a problem with tardiness may be a symptom of a hidden disability requiring understanding and accommodation.  Contributed by Kate James.

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