May 30, 2023 Allison McCormack, Spring 2023 DM Faculty Grant Recipient

Briefly describe your project and the challenges, lessons learned, and obstacles overcome in the execution of it. What were the professional, academic, and personal motivations underlying your project?

As a special collections cataloger, I think very deeply about how to describe books, archival collections, and other library resources so people can find and understand how to use them for their personal and professional projects. It’s a complex process that involves making detailed observations, conducting historical research, and trying to imagine all the many ways someone could use a particular item. I write highly detailed records for everything I catalog, but many of our older records lack sufficient metadata for today’s students, faculty, and outside researchers to find them effectively. This is especially true for archival collections containing materials by and/or about historically marginalized groups such as Black, indigenous and other people of color (BIPOC) and religious minority communities. Despite recent efforts by the Marriott Library archivists to include more diverse stories in our collections, our oldest collections remained siloed and disconnected from patrons that could use them.

Funding from the Digital Matters Lab allowed me to conduct a pilot program to remediate BIPOC and religious minority collections in our archive. I was able to train a student worker, Emma Fox, to enhance our archival metadata, and she and I took several Library Juice Academy courses to gain additional skills. Emma’s experience writing bookstore catalog descriptions for historical materials gave her a great foundation for this work. However, there is no shortcut to learning how to work with metadata, and the entire 5 months of the grant period was an iterative learning process for both of us.

When working with the archives of marginalized groups, we had to think carefully and critically about how to write about and refer to these communities. Removing once-neutral but now pejorative language was a big component of this, of course, but we also wanted to provide contextualizing language that reflected how groups saw and referred to themselves. The stories of struggle and pain that exist in archives – for example, the lynching of Robert Marshall and the imprisonment of Japanese American citizens during World War II – must be handled with care, but we also wanted to be sure that white discomfort not get in the way of shining a light on history. Emma and I had many discussions about the best way to write about this. There’s always more work to be done, but I think the 82 collection-level records we remediated during the grant period are more respectful, honest, and illuminating than what existed previously.

The last phase of my project involves investigating ways to use data visualization to communicate cataloging and metadata information to people unfamiliar with this sort of work. It’s proving to be very tricky! Besides needing to incorporate dozens of different data points into the visualizations, I also want to be sure the final products are respectful of the many communities whose materials are represented in the archive. I’m part of a panel on data visualization for special collections during the Rare Books & Manuscripts Section (RBMS, part of the American Library Association) conference in June, and I expect to receive a lot of useful feedback that will help point me in the right direction.

How did the Digital Matters Faculty Grant dovetail with your academic pursuits? What interested you in applying for this grant?

It’s very difficult to find grant funding for cataloging projects; this part of the lifecycle of library and archival materials is often overlooked, so I’m always on the lookout for grants that can support this work. It also overlapped with the work I’m doing for the RBMS Bibliographic Standards Committee’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Steering Group regarding DEI best practices for metadata. I’ve written previously on data visualization and metadata (for example, in a recent article with Rachel Wittmann: https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v41i2.13415), so this was a great opportunity to combine my various research threads into a single project.

What insights have you gained in regard to your specific field as a result of your project and grant experience?

This project has reminded me how much power librarians and archivists have. We’ve historically emphasized our neutrality as a profession, but since neutrality helps the oppressor I’m very happy to see this thinking fall by the wayside. If we encourage marginalized communities to trust us to care for their materials, we have a duty to ensure that these items are treated respectfully and holistically. I hope Emma’s and my work this past semester has helped bring that to fruition.

What would you tell potential faculty grant applicants to help them shape their own digital scholarship project?

I was initially reluctant to apply for this grant because I wasn’t envisioning a grand, world-shaping, completely original digital project. But your project doesn’t have to be like that! Taking a first step towards incorporating digital methodologies, especially in fields that have approached digital scholarship with reluctance or skepticism, is a great way to frame projects for this grant.

What do you see as the upcoming important issues surrounding digital scholarship in your field? What areas/issues could students and scholars investigate to extend the knowledge in this area?

I think librarians have long championed digital scholarship. “Information wants to be free” is one of the core mantras of our field, after all, and the digital realm has broken down barriers like few technologies before. However, it’s important to balance this with the need for human labor, human sensibilities, and human emotions in library and archival work. During the Q&A section of the Spring Research Talk, I was asked about automation as an aspect of metadata remediation. As I replied then, I simply don’t think it’s possible to automate this kind of work. As I discussed above, grappling with the pain, hardship, and injustice that is contained within archives is a key component of remediation, and no machine or computer program exists that can do this. Instead, I’d love to see researchers develop new tools to help under-resourced libraries and archives identify records in need of remediation, perhaps, and to find better ways to communicate the necessity for and impact of these kinds of projects.