The following post is one in a regular series on issues of Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility, compiled by a team of OCLC contributors.
Dealing with DEI backlash
In her 2023 7 July Toward Inclusive Excellence blog “Forging New DEI Pathways within Academic Libraries and Higher Education,” Alexia Hudson-Ward, Associate Director of Research and Learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries (OCLC Symbol: MYG), offers advice about dealing with the discouraging backlash against diversity, inclusion, and social justice. From across disciplines and within both the personal and the organizational spheres, Hudson-Ward urges us to base our efforts in solid research and data, to honestly reconsider and critically reconstruct our institutions at every level to build inclusion in, and to rely more on people-centered efforts than on received best practice templates.
In today’s political climate, where libraries are battlegrounds for hearts and minds, Hudson-Ward reminds us that “the road to democracy, inclusion, and justice is winding,” requiring vigilance and self-examination. Contributed by Jay Weitz.
Are emojis accessible?
A blog post from Tiny points out that emojis – those cute little images that can be added to texts, emails, and just about any form of communication – may be harming your ability to communicate; “it sounds weird, but despite your emoji-filled social posts and messages seeming to add more depth and breadth, those little pictures could be affecting your content – because they’re not digitally accessible to every reader.”
In trying to improve my own accessibility practices, I’ve been mindful about adopting new habits, such as including alt text for images. This made me wonder, how accessible are emojis, those tiny, seemingly ubiquitous images? This blog post has made me rethink my emoji habits. Consideration of how and when to use emojis goes well beyond accessibility. Ever since a discussion with my teen about the what the “wink” emoji is really intended to convey, I have been wondering about how effective emojis are in helping to convey the intended message. It turns out that this is not just a GenX and GenZ divide in my household – emojis can be read very differently by people from different cultural and religious backgrounds. Although emojis may be universally used, they are not uniformly understood. Contributed by Merrilee Proffitt.
The challenges of enacting change
The British Library (OCLC symbol: UKM) announced its commitment to becoming an anti-racist organization in July 2020. As part of this organizational change, an Anti-Racism Project with subgroups was created. Alan Danskin, who recently retired as Collection Metadata Standards Manager at the British Library, wrote about the work of the Cataloguing and Metadata Subgroup (CAM) in “Challenging legacies at the British Library” (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/alj.2023.4 / Open access version also available). CAM’s recommendations included creating a glossary of problematic and inclusive terminology as a reference for cataloging culturally sensitive resources and working with Indigenous communities and experts to establish appropriate access and description protocols for these resources. They selected the South Asian and Caribbean collections for an audit to identify terminology that may be offensive, discriminatory, or harmful.
Danskin’s article provides some insight into the challenges faced by any large library attempting an examination of its metadata workflows. He notes that the catalog’s metadata is derived from many sources, including several outside the British Library—publishers, other libraries, and even crowd sourcing. The British Library’s approach to using metadata from many sources is typical of libraries. Because of this diversity of metadata sources, developing a more inclusive catalog must be a cooperative effort among metadata creators. Contributed by Kate James.
Medical collections and racial science
Raymond Pun, Patrice R. Green, and Nicollette Davis are the authors of “Medical libraries and their complicated past: an exploration of the historical connections between medical collections and racial science,” published in the July 2023 issue of the Journal of the Medical Library Association. While medical libraries and librarians “have advanced the knowledge of human science by building, preserving, and sharing collections and research” for centuries, these collections are also likely to contain historical research that perpetuated the pseudoscientific belief in a racial hierarchy that our librarian predecessors made available to patrons and thereby perpetuated racial science theories. Viewing this literature through a contemporary lens, medical librarians must not only acknowledge “the racist ideas that plague library collections, it is necessary for librarians to teach about how this misinformation continues to manifest in health information,” as we have seen in recent studies of how white physicians undertreat the physical pain of Black patients. “While we are not able to change the past,” the authors acknowledge, “vocalizing these injustices with transparency and a critical lens can serve as a means towards harm reduction in the health sciences.”
The recent announcement of a settlement in the Henrietta Lacks “immortal” cell line case is a reminder that we must confront the racial injustices done in the name of medical science and the legacy of racial science that persists within the collections of medical libraries. Contributed by Morris Levy.
Merrilee Proffitt is Senior Manager for the OCLC RLP. She provides community development skills and expert support to institutions within the OCLC Research Library Partnership.