Since the July 2020 publication of the Visual Resources Center’s Commitment to Ethical and Antiracist Digital Stewardship, we have continued to make changes to the VRC’s digitizing, editing, cataloging, and programming efforts to more ethically steward the collections and better serve the user community. The 2022 update works to continue informing the VRC’s users on the changes and progress made on the action points, and note where we can improve going forward. As staff members, we are continually learning from colleagues and collaborators who are frontrunners in ethical archiving and librarianship, notably the work of Black library and archives workers. As the VRC’s user community grows and scholarship develops and changes, we want to best serve users through responsive changes to our work, including new work in collections development, collaborations, and new programming to meet diverse needs. Editing and maintenance of the collections remains an ongoing VRC priority. Below are specific updates to initial action points:
Actively reach out to and serve as a resource for faculty, instructors, and students working on topics related to artists and movements that are underrepresented in visual culture. Prioritize ethical collection development in the areas most relevant to their teaching and research.
- Records for Mesoamerican and Andean art and architecture have been extensively edited to adjust how style and culture information is represented in the records. Previously, style and culture had been conflated and relegated to the style/period field, with the modern nation state listed in the culture field. Differentiating between style, culture, and region better reflects the context of the works, and indicates differentiations between Indigenous works and colonial impact.
- The VRC has expanded digitization efforts, adding over 2,600 new images of Deccan art and architecture to the Art History Collection to support the teaching and scholarship of new faculty members. This has rapidly expanded the representation of early to late medieval art of the Indian subcontinent, and critical cataloging efforts have expanded to better represent the metadata of these works.
- Outreach to instructors in other Humanities departments such as English, as well as increased course support for AIP instructors for the MAPH program led to the inclusion of new records by Black Renaissance artists and contemporary Black female artists such as Zoe Leonard and Faith Ringgold. These development projects also built off of the critical cataloging work on casta paintings started by the 2021 Metadata Research cohort. The 2022 Metadata Research cohort (detailed below) pursued in-depth research and metadata remediation to the existing collection, including adding new works by Chinese and Taiwanese artists, and increasing descriptions of works related to gender, sexuality, and race.
- In presentations for classes, workshops and other campus events, VRC staff actively sought to highlight relevant ethical considerations, including topics such as: assessing bias in how images are made and circulated and they are described and displayed; ethical considerations for taking photographs—and using others’ photographs—that depict people as well as human remains and sensitive sites and objects; and other models for ethically collecting and archiving, such as post-custodial stewardship and digital sovereignty. We also tried to highlight scholars and artists whose work engages with these topics in the examples we share in our slides.
Participate in the community of visual resources catalogers researching and practicing critical cataloging, a theoretical approach which analyzes and addresses the ethical issues of metadata and classification. Implement critical cataloging practices to repair and improve metadata records that are misleading or incorrect in our metadata projects, prioritizing areas of the collection aligned with active faculty and student teaching and research. Work with individual artist- and cultural authority-produced materials (i.e. use artists’ statements or public-facing web resources made and maintained by the culture we are describing) to source appropriate metadata. Submit corrections and additions to the art vocabulary authorities we routinely utilize as a way to contribute to the field beyond the VRC’s password-protected collections.
- In Summer and Autumn 2021, VRC staff evaluated about 150 images depicting human remains in the Art History Department Image Collection to determine the best approach for ethically archiving and representing these images. This review, along with our efforts to include ethical considerations in our presentations, led to two new guides on Ethical Considerations for Images and Image Captions and Citations published in June 2022. While VRC staff aren’t authorities on either topic, we are invested in educating ourselves and want to be transparent about the work that has inspired our thinking and practices and to continue the broader conversation with faculty and students, encouraging field-specific interventions.
- The VRC did not host any open cataloging workshops this year, though advocating for change in the field of visual resources librarianship and in our VRC remains an ongoing priority.
Hire and train a diverse staff, including student employees, and provide mentored, professional training in all aspects of the digital collections lifecycle. Create an inclusive culture for employees and users of VRC. Follow the field’s best practices for employee retention and growth, including the Digital Library Federation’s Working Group on Labor in Digital Libraries, which produced the Collective Responsibility Labor Toolkit, and The Maintainers.
- The VRC continued the Metadata Research Associate program this academic year, hiring two graduate students. The work of the students over the AY 2021-2022 has integrated the Frank Vigneron collection of Asian art into the Art History Collection on LUNA, making it available to all UChicago users with increased metadata description. Additionally, the work of the Medata Research Cohort has added robust descriptions to over 100 works with themes and artists at the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality, better contextualizing these works and making them more-easily searchable.
Continually educate ourselves on antiracism, institutional racism, allyship, and inclusivity in the library, museum, and digital collections fields through research and professional development. Apply that education to our digital collections work and our research support services, including reference and instruction. Collaborate with campus colleagues and collections whenever possible.
- VRC staff joined the newly-formed UChicago Reparative Description Interest Group, meeting monthly to discuss changes and methodologies that can be made to library and digital collections across campus. During the past academic year, we continued to research and implement best practices for making our digital collections more accessible. We focused on offering accessible, alternative formats for video files, such as captions, and audio-only files, such as transcripts. A summary of our recent efforts is documented in the VRC’s Accessibility Statement.
Bridget Madden, Associate Director
Allie Scholten, Digital Collections Manager
July 19, 2022