At the center of the evolving debates of open access and intellectual property in memory institutions is a long history of excluding Indigenous Peoples from conversations concerning the access and use rights to their belongings. In recent decades many memory institutions challenged prevalent historical and current classifications of Indigenous Peoples in online catalog records. Most recently the Library of Congress (LC) adopted a new cataloging practice called Traditional Knowledge (TK) labeling as a way to return control over access and use of Indigenous materials to their rightful Indigenous owners. The advent of this emergent digital rights tool disrupts previously held assumptions about the purpose of rights statements in catalog records as well as challenges the existing balance between the rights of Indigenous communities and the interests of public access. The adoption of TK Labels in the LC’s “Ancestral Voices” digital collection brings serious practical implementation issues to light that deserve further consideration before memory institutions invest in this new digital access rights metadata standard. Although TK Labels are a technological opportunity that provide more space for community-based relationships within memory institutions, this paper suggests that the practical implementation of TK Labels in Ancestral Voices falls short of its promise to return authority to the Passamaquoddy people. Rather, TK Labels raise more logistical and technical questions about the effectiveness of the TK labeling framework and purpose of re-cataloging records describing Indigenous materials.

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In March 2020, Stony Brook University Libraries began documenting campus communications and the events locally unfolding as the COVID-19 pandemic emerged across the world. These efforts evolved into a larger rapid-response collecting project planned and managed remotely. Documenting COVID-19: Stony Brook University Experiences was developed to preserve institutional history and experiences. With a collecting scope of personal narratives, photographs, and oral histories, the initiative presented new opportunities and challenges for Stony Brook University Libraries. This study discusses the oral history methods for the project from concept to implementation. It describes the planning and managing processes for the oral histories and considers the ethics of recording trauma experiences contemporaneously during the pandemic. The authors offer practical guidance for developing and processing a rapid-response collection of oral histories in a remote environment.

Academic libraries rarely discuss cases of digital repositories that do not meet the standards expected of trusted digital repositories.Implications from inconsistent adherence to technical and professional criteria often surface during migration projects."In 2020, Stony Brook University Libraries began migrating assets to a mono-repository environment. Persistent historical factors presented challenges to repository trustworthiness. This case study discusses a survey project to evaluate legacy repository statuses in the contexts of infrastructure, documentation, and staff capacity. It considers a paradigm of organizational accountability in digital asset stewardship and offers insights for reconciling inherited legacies with aspirations to be a trusted repository."