Driving in the slow lane: Improving digital collections one quarter mile at a time

Abstract

Curators and metadata creators have immense power to shape collections: libraries, archives, and museums (LAM) invest significant resources in making accessible a wide variety of research materials by providing robust descriptions, developing and sustaining online repositories, and ensuring the long-term preservation of these materials. Recently, LAM institutions have begun to grapple with the biases in our systems and collections, with many institutions turning to increased efforts to make accessible materials that represent diverse and marginalized communities. Yet, when digital projects focus on the fallacy that more is better, and seek to digitize diverse collections under the guise of democratizing access, they fall short of achieving an equitable and inclusive sphere. Such work often uses the rhetoric of radical librarianship, but - consciously or unconsciously - sidesteps addressing the root of inequality in areas such as digitization, digital projects, metadata, and authority control. <br>

This presentation offers an alternative: slow down and make small improvements towards radical change. The presenters will discuss a number of practices to make this work more meaningful, including valuing maintenance work and workers, critically examining the use of linked data, changing how name authority records are created, and the use of dynamic digital collections. We will also discuss the Slow Movement in the context of both curation and cataloging, which prioritizes and values the time necessary to truly understand a collection, a dataset, and a collection as data. We will end with a call for reflection, not action, and encourage attendees to understand the boundaries they need to establish to protect the wellbeing of their communities and themselves.

Presented at the ACRL / NY 2023 Symposium “Embracing Slow Librarianship." Dec. 1, 2023