Draw upon knowledge of professional ethics, the rights of Indigenous peoples, and principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion to guide their practices.
In LIBR 582, I worked on Echoes from the Stacks, a digital collection that digitizes borrowing cards from music scores by historically underrepresented composers held in the UBC Music, Art, and Architecture Library. The goal of the project was to preserve these circulation records, which are one of a kind, and surface a local reception history of underrepresented musicians. By pairing borrowing cards with the corresponding title pages of the music scores, the collection shows how these compositions circulated within the university community and provides insight into how they were accessed and engaged with from the mid-20th century to the early 2000s.
Principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion guided the project throughout. From the very beginning, when we were determining the focus of the digitization project, we reflected critically on how historical music collecting practices have often reflected Western-centric biases and shaped what is visible in library collections today. Therefore, we chose to digitize borrowing cards of music works outside the well-known canon, including those by historically underrepresented musicians such as women composers, Indigenous creators, and other racialized or marginalized groups. In doing so, we aim to bring greater attention to these works.
The metadata creation also focused on facilitating diversity and inclusion. Our team developed a schema based on Dublin Core and added fields to record the cultural or community affiliations of composers. Including these elements helped make aspects of identity and cultural context more visible in the collection and made the works discoverable in different ways. We used LCSH to ensure interoperability, but in the meantime, we were attentive to inappropriate or outdated terms and revised them to reflect respectful and accurate descriptions.
Through this project, I used principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion to guide my practical decisions. I realized that the work of information professionals, especially that which involves decisions about selection, description, and access, directly shapes how marginalized groups are represented and understood by users. Information practices are not neutral, so we must constantly reflect on what each of our decisions may imply.
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