UX design in online catalogs: Practical issues with implementing traditional knowledge (TK) labels

Abstract

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.

Shortcomings of Bibliographic Description in Service of Indigenous Peoples in Canada

“…The work of bibliographic description has undergone many iterations and codifications in the century and a half since Charles Cutter first discussed the objects of the catalogue (Reijerkerk, 2020). The latest iteration of the standards according to which cataloguers create bibliographic descriptions are laid out in RDA and encoded in MARC 21.…”

“…The latest iteration of the standards according to which cataloguers create bibliographic descriptions are laid out in RDA and encoded in MARC 21. RDA is a standard that determines the content recorded in a bibliographic description (Hart, 2014, as cited in Reijerkerk, 2020, and MARC determines the layout of this information and what recorded information is shown or hidden in the OPAC (Reijerkerk, 2020). The development of these standards in the North American context, led by the Library of Congress, has always taken place in a Western, positivist paradigm (Moulaison Sandy & Bossaller, 2017).…”

“…Memory institutions, like libraries, in what is now Canada are paying increased attention to the needs of marginalized communities. For Indigenous Peoples, some of these needs include metadata to describe resources that reflect an Indigenous worldview, recognition of Indigenous communities' authority and ownership over their heritage and knowledge, which they may have been restricted from accessing until recently (Reijerkerk, 2020), and bibliographic description that foregrounds the Indigeneity of resources. These principles have been codified in the First Nations Information Governance Centre's (FNIGC, 2021) OCAP® principles, which state that, with regards to their data and knowledge, Indigenous peoples must have ownership, control, access, and possession.…”

“…Respecting and supporting Indigenous sovereignty in metadata is an ethical imperative (Jaffe, 2020;Reijerkerk, 2020). In current practice, interoperability is strongly favoured at the expense of ethical metadata and customization to best serve local users: "[cataloguers] are now most often instructed to not … [customize and enhance records] so as to not compromise the quality, i.e., the interoperability and reusability of the records they create, or to expend more resources than are necessary" (Jaffe, 2020, p. 437).…”

“…Budget cuts and efficiency have governed cataloguing workflows. Cataloguing must move beyond a strict adherence to neutral (Long et al, 2017), interoperable description to critical analysis and ethical reflection on what descriptive elements could be included to serve Indigenous users more equitably (Reijerkerk, 2020). There is power in the decisions that cataloguers make in their work with Indigenous materials and current practices must change to better serve Indigenous users.…”