PDA Event: Introduction to Metadata Best Practices for Trans and Gender Diverse Resources

Thursday, January 26, 2023 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm

While libraries and archives hold materials about or by trans or gender diverse people, the lack of familiarity with these communities can lead to inaccurate, inadequate, and even harmful classification and description. Consequently, a group of trans and gender diverse information professionals formed the Trans Metadata Collective and convened over the course of a year to create the Metadata Best Practices for Trans and Gender Diverse Resources. This presentation uses that best practices document as a framework to provide some background and context for issues affecting the arrangement and description of materials related to trans and gender non-conforming individuals and communities, and covers guidelines and principles that can be used for creating, assessing, or improving metadata for these materials.

Learning Objectives

After attending this presentation, participants will be able to: 

  • Identify the ways that issues facing trans and gender diverse communities affect the metadata and description for materials relating to these communities in libraries and archives
  • Explore what implementation of descriptive best practices for trans and gender diverse resources may look like in different contexts
  • Develop strategies to assess trans and gender diverse resources in a collection for problematic or outdated metadata and remediation plans

Presenters

Bri Watson is a disabled, white, queer & nonbinary settler scholar at UBC’s iSchool. As a Vanier Scholar, they focus on histories of information and the practice of equitable cataloging in libraries, archives, museums, and special collections. Watson is the Archivist-Historian of the American Psychological Association's Consensual Nonmonogamy Committee (div44cnm.org) and the Haslam Collection on Polyamory at the Kinsey Institute. They serve on the editorial board of Homosaurus (homosaurus.org), an international linked data vocabulary for queer terminology, and are the Director of HistSex.org. For 2022-23, they are one of UBC Library’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Scholars-in-Residence.

Jackson Huang is a gender variant library technologist whose work focuses on the intersections of structural politics and technological infrastructure in libraries and archives. Their research explores how metadata translation and digital aggregations impact the representation of marginalized communities. They currently work as the digital collections and content ingest coordinator at the University of Michigan. 

Register to attend "Introduction to Metadata Best Practices for Trans and Gender Diverse Resources" on January 26. 

Learn about session two of this series, "Implementing Metadata Best Practices for Trans and Gender Diverse Resources at Your Institution" on February 3.

Sponosred by BLC