Reflect in an informed and critical manner on information infrastructures and practices, acknowledging the role of power and privilege, the ongoing influence of colonization, and the value of diverse worldviews;
My understanding of information infrastructures and practices has been shaped through my metadata coursework, where I examined classification systems and controlled vocabularies as products of specific historical and social contexts. Rather than neutral tools, these systems reflect structures of power and privilege, and continue to carry the influence of colonization in how knowledge is organized and represented. For example, the Library of Congress Classification system for religion allocates a disproportionate amount of space to Christianity, while grouping other major world religions and diverse Indigenous traditions into broader, less differentiated categories. This not only marginalizes non-Western and Indigenous knowledge systems, but also imposes a hierarchical way of organizing knowledge that does not reflect how these communities understand their own traditions. Recognizing this made me more attentive to how information infrastructures reflect and, in turn, perpetuate imbalances in intellectual power, privileging certain knowledge over others.
My conceptual understanding became more concrete through the Echoes from the Stacks digital collection project. In this project, we worked to digitize borrowing cards for music by marginalized groups. As we identified potential items, we found it difficult to locate these works within the existing Library of Congress systems. This difficulty was not accidental, but reflected how dominant classification structures have historically marginalized or obscured certain communities. We were also struck by the use of the term “Eskimo” as a subject heading to describe music by Indigenous communities. Encountering this term made the issue more tangible for me, showing how colonial language remains embedded in widely used systems, shaping not only access but also how communities are represented and understood.
In response, we revised the term in our local metadata with care. As we designed our metadata schema, we also tried to push against these limitations by introducing fields that made the community or nation affiliation of the musicians, as well as their gender identity. This enabled users to discover materials through cultural and identity-based connections, rather than relying solely on conventional Western categorizations. Through this experience, I came to see that even small metadata decisions are shaped by larger structural constraints. While we were able to revise terms and introduce new access points in this single project, it will require ongoing collective effort in the future to reflect on and push against these limitations.
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