2023 Update on the Commitment to Ethical and Antiracist Digital Stewardship
During the three academic years since VRC staff articulated our Commitment to Ethical and Antiracist Digital Stewardship, we’ve sought to reflect on and organize our work priorities and resources in alignment with the four action points outlined in bold throughout this document. We are sharing the 2023 update to our initial commitment in an effort to be transparent about our work, what has inspired our thinking, and to document the limitations of our practice and where we still can improve and grow to better steward our collections and serve our community of users.
- 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.
Contemporary works by Mexican, Mexican American, and Chicano artists have also been built out through course requests, student research, and contextual development done by the VRC. This area has historically been underrepresented in the LUNA teaching collection.
The VRC collaborated with Prof. Sergio Delgado Moya to digitize archival tabloids from Mexico and South America for use by his student researchers. This collaboration also led to the continued development of images by contemporary Mexican, Central, and South American artists in the teaching collection.
The Totem Pole in Haskell Hall was the only work in the UChicago Public Art permanent collection not represented in LUNA. New photography of the totem pole was taken by VRC student employees, and the record was expanded to include contextual information about the totem pole’s creation, artist, and donating institution. The totem pole is one of the only, if not exclusively, works by an Indigenous artist in the Public Art Collection on campus.
- 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.
The VRC collaborated with Dr. Ellen Larson, a postdoctoral scholar, on a video archive that will present cataloging information in both Chinese and English, using multilingual metadata fields to increase accessibility and prioritize the language of many materials in the video archive.
VRC staff pursued supplementary image collection development for several requests. For example, women and Indigenous artists working on earthworks and land art were added to LUNA in addition to White artists that are more widely represented.
VRC staff discussed ethical considerations of working with images in all our course-based workshops and introductions as well as in our formal Personal Archiving workshops. Topics included examining the implications of privacy, positionality, context, and more in working with photographs depicting people; how image captions and metadata records can be updated to better reflect cultural identities, attributions, and more.
- 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.
VRC staff worked to increase transparency in our student employment program in multiple ways. In our hiring and recruitment process, we established a practice of sharing interview questions with candidates in advance of their interview conversation. In our management processes, we observed a gap in student’s access to information in official systems about how many hours they worked, how many remain in budgeted for their position or project, and when their working hours will be paid out. We addressed this gap by creating personalized, shared spreadsheets for each student employee.
Together with our colleagues on campus, VRC staff are also researching and advocating for how student employees and research assistants are cited and acknowledged in campus projects.
- 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 members joined the Digital Accessibility Advocates, a new advocacy network sponsored by the Center for Digital Accessibility. Together with staff colleagues in the Department of Visual Arts, we collaborated on an open call to offer students a paid stipend to correct an auto-transcript of videos of artist’s talks from the Open Practice Committee Archive. We are pleased that sixteen videos in the OPC’s archive on LUNA now include closed captioning. A form to request an accommodation or alternative format for videos has been added to each record for users to submit, helping prioritize transcription and make videos more readily accessible to users as needed.
Bridget Madden, Associate Director
Allie Scholten, Digital Collections Manager
September 28, 2023