Items can have, but are not limited to:
Racist, sexist, ableist, misogynistic/misogynoir, and xenophobic opinions and attitudes.
Discriminatory or dismissive language against diverse views on sexuality, gender, religion, and more.
Include graphic content depicting events such as violent death, medical procedures, crime, wars/terrorist acts, and the results of natural disasters.
Our mission is to facilitate the discovery, creation, utilization, preservation, and dissemination of ideas. We seek to educate by preserving metadata that supplies contemporary context while acknowledging that existing descriptions have historically silenced or spoken for marginalized groups without their consent. We strive to balance preserving this history with sensitivity to how users are presented and perceive these materials.
Librarians rely on institutional best practices outside of their direct control to choose what language to use when describing materials. This process often involves the adoption of the standardized terms (such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings) to describe materials. Some of these descriptions were written many years ago using language accepted during that era. Librarians also often re-use language provided by creators or former owners of the material. This supplied language can give important context but can also reflect biases and prejudices. The confluence of sources used to describe materials are reflective of the time in which they were created and require constant monitoring to find and improve records as they are found. As this process is ongoing, items may still hold problematic language which has not been identified yet. The Critical and Reparative Metadata Group works to inform users of the presence of harmful materials and records while also improving descriptions to meet modern standards.
Examples include:
Informing users about the presence and origin of harmful content.
Revising descriptions and standardized sets of descriptive terms, supplementing descriptions with more respectful terms, or creating new standardized terms to describe materials.
Researching concerns, listening to users, experimenting with solutions, and sharing our findings with leadership.
Evaluating existing processes of exclusionary practices or institutional bias that prioritize one culture and/or group over another.
Making an institutional commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.
Our commitment to incorporating the values of inclusion, diversity, equity, and access (IDEA) into everything we do through advocacy, collections & services, inclusive organization culture, and spaces. To See more ways the WashU Libraries are invest in DEIA work, see our IDEA page.
Please note: This process applies only to language found within the WashU Libraries descriptions of the records, not to the content of the described material.
You can help by reporting potentially harmful language that you see in descriptions in the WashU Libraries Catalog and digital spaces.
Report harmful language via the Harmful Language Feedback Form [link]
The WashU Libraries will take the appropriate steps to change or remove terms from metadata descriptions. We will also work to measure the harm of records against considerations such as input from affected communities, accurate preservation of the historical record, professional practices, and allocation of staff resources.