Making a Commitment to Ethical Description at the UCLA Libraries and Archives
This Statement outlines the commitment by UCLA cataloging and metadata practitioners to assess and align our cataloging and metadata work toward more critically and ethically informed anti-racist description practices.
While guidelines found within individual sections of this Libguide generally focus on specific metadata elements, there are also ethical description principles and considerations that are widely applicable when creating or revising metadata. Professional associations such as the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) have recently charged task groups to explore critical cataloging issues, resulting in reports such as the PCC Standing Committee on Standards Task Group on Privacy in Name Authority Records, which suggests that while unambiguous (i.e. differentiated) identification is still the guiding principle of authority work, such work should be informed by a clear attention to privacy of both catalog users and the subjects of the name authority records. The following principles and best practices are informed by this report.
Some things to note:
Privacy Principles related to Name Authority Work:
Best practices:
“Catalogers have an ethical and professional duty to reduce the risk of harm to subjects, by practicing privacy-informed identification and description. The safety and well-being of people who are the subjects of authority data overrides bibliographic concerns.”
--From page 7 of SCS Task Group on Privacy in Name Authority Records: Final Report Transmittal & Tracking Sheet
Feminist ethics of care in archival context stresses the importance of incorporating the ethics of care in the relationship between archivists’ and the records' creators, subjects, users, and larger communities (Caswell & Cifor, 2016). A cataloging approach based on this principle centers context, connections, and responsibility in description work that is constantly evolving over time.
This LibGuide is meant to aid catalogers and metadata practitioners in metadata creation and revision when approaching library resources having content that is considered harmful and/or when describing people within metadata records.
Critical cataloging and ethical description issues are complex. Depending upon the types of materials being described, library or department policies, and which cataloging conventions are being used, metadata practitioners and catalogers may find themselves transcribing offensive words in a title, making notes about marginalized individuals or painful circumstances, or adding subject headings that are outdated. This LibGuide attempts to guide decision-making in these circumstances and to consider their impact on the user. It should be considered a tool for creating a more inclusive, equitable, diverse, and anti-racist environment for library staff and patrons.
This guide is intentionally non-prescriptive, as there can be many approaches to addressing ethical description issues in metadata work.
This guide provides a framework for decisions and actions that individual metadata practitioners can take for making catalog records or finding aids more inclusive, and might inform departmental or unit-level cataloging policies related to ethical description.
This guide is organized into sections by the metadata elements that may include problematic language and/or pose some critical cataloging considerations. Each section includes an introduction to the ethical considerations of the metadata element, questions to consider when recording the element, and examples of possible approaches to different metadata scenarios. The questions and examples included come from MARC cataloging, digital collections, and archival description contexts, which metadata practitioners may adapt into their specific work.
Created in 2023 by Ethical Description Sub-Team Members:
This LibGuide is a living document. We encourage additional examples or requests for guidance if a particular circumstance isn’t addressed in this guide. It will be reviewed periodically to ensure that it remains useful, relevant, and up-to-date.