Research Observatory: Cultural hospitality and ethical responsibilities in subject cataloguing

CULTURAL HOSPITALITY AND ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITIES IN SUBJECT CATALOGUING

Revising vocabularies for cultural hospitality: an argument for hospitable processes
By Julia Bullard

Presentation slides

In two related projects, my research team contacted authors for their assessments of the subject headings applied to their own works, finding many instances in which the catalogue record's Library of Congress Subject Headings misrepresented the content of the work and the conventions of its scholarly discipline. Though controlled vocabulary revisions are one way to ameliorate these problems, the governance and revision structures of the vocabularies themselves are relevant to how these misrepresentations occur and to which subjects are poorly served by these tools. In this talk, I will discuss two changes in processes that could improve the hospitality of vocabularies for Indigenous and LGBT2QIA+ subjects

The Cataloguing Code of Ethics 2021: informing subject cataloguing and Indexing for marginalised communities
By Jane Daniels

Presentation slides

The Cataloguing Code of Ethics 2021 is a short document containing ten high level ethical statements. These are a distillation of the special ethical responsibilities that cataloguers and metadata managers identified during wide-ranging and open consultation exercises. But far from being purely aspirational these statements have wide practical application across knowledge and information work, including subject cataloguing and indexing. This presentation demonstrated how the Code can be used to examine and review cataloguing practice and policy, hopefully encouraging stronger community collaborations along the way.