Assessment

Table of Contents

[Approval] Plan of Action: Promoting Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion through Purchasing Award-Winning Books / Emily Crawford, Carla Davis Cunningham, Noa Kaumeheiwa

New England Technical Services Librarians 2023 Annual Spring Conference presentation, April 14, 2023

presentation

Temple University Libraries values diversity in its collections and wanted to develop tools and cataloging practices to better identify and collect award-winning works by or about underrepresented groups. Join this session to learn how subject selectors and cataloging librarians worked together, with DEI principles in mind, to curate and improve discoverability of books and highlight diverse voices in a collection.

A DEI Cataloging Audit of a Bibliography / Lisa McColl

ALA Core Cataloging & Classification Research Interest Group presentation, March 2023

presentation

In the Fall 2022 semester Lehigh University Libraries DE&I Technical Services team embarked on a cataloging audit of the bibliography for the course "Diversity and Multicultural Perspectives" taught by Professor Dr. Floyd D. Beachum at Lehigh University.  The team used this microcosm of resources on systemic racism in the education system of the United States to:

1. Identify title and author collection gaps

2. Explore and enhance the quality of metadata in those catalog records 

3. Compare usage statistics to determine if the enhanced metadata increased usage

(Meta)Data Analysis for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Best of Core Forum 2022

ala core login required

presentation

Following the long overdue cancellation of the Library of Congress Subject Heading “Illegal alien” many libraries are assessing options for remediating problematic description in their catalogs. This presentation will describe a method of evaluating Library of Congress subject headings corresponding to historically marginalized populations—women, African Americans, indigenous peoples, and LGBTQIA+ people—by measuring cooccurrences of Library of Congress Subject Headings and Library of Congress Classifications across a library’s collections. The results offer a holistic perspective of description of these populations and produced data that can help guide collection development and resource description decisions.

This webinar was presented on February 8, 2023. It was previously presented in-person as a session at the 2022 Core Forum.

Rethinking Metadata’s Value and How It Is Evaluated / Rachel Jaffe

in Technical Services Quarterly. Vol. 37, Issue 4 (November 2020)

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article

Metadata is becoming more than a tool to facilitate access and retrieval; librarians and other metadata professionals and their users are expecting metadata to perform multiple and diverse purposes and functions: as much as metadata helps connect users to resources, it is expected to appropriately situate resources in relationship to other resources, and within historical and contemporary social contexts. In light of various social justice movements and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts, metadata are being viewed as not only representing resources, but as powerful mechanisms for representing ourselves and others, and moreover, as representative of our organizational, professional, and communal values. Despite these increased demands on metadata and the roles we expect it to play, our frameworks for assessing and evaluating metadata quality have not kept pace. This article proposes that there needs to be increased user-centered research to the end of introducing a new ethical dimension to conventional frameworks and/or expanding our definitions of existing assessment criteria.

Using the Cataloguing Code of Ethics Principles for a Retrospective Project Analysis / Angela Yon 

in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly. Vol. 60, issue 1 (2022)

article

This study uses the recently released Cataloguing Code of Ethics to evaluate a project which explored how to ethically, efficiently, and accurately add demographic terms for African-American authors to catalog records. By reviewing the project through the lens of these principles the authors were able to examine how their practice was ethical in some ways but could have been improved in others. This helped them identify areas of potential improvement in their current and future research and practice and explore ethical difficulties in cataloging resources with records that are used globally, especially in a linked data environment.

Open access institutional repository version: https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/fpml/145/