Advancing racial equity our core values

The “Reimagine Descriptive Workflows” project convened a group of experts, practitioners, and community members to determine ways to improve descriptive practices, tools, workflows, and related underlying infrastructures in libraries and archives. The resulting community agenda synthesizes their findings and contextualizes the challenges facing the library and information field in inclusive and reparative metadata work. It also suggests actions and exercises that can help frame institutions’ local priorities and areas for change.

In 2021, we established the visiting editor-in-residence program focused on ensuring a representative, multiculturally relevant Dewey Decimal Classification^® (DDC^®) for users worldwide. Our first visiting editor, Kelly West, is contributing her expertise to reduce systematic bias embedded in the DDC by updating terminology for groups of people. The program will continue and also address terminology related to the names of Indigenous peoples and LGBTQ+ topics that are potentially offensive or harmful.

When updating WorldCat^® records, we prioritize controlled headings changes related to equity issues, so that new terms appear in library catalogs quickly. In November 2021, the Library of Congress announced a Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) change to “Noncitizen” and “Illegal immigration,” which we implemented within a few weeks. Because this divided one former LCSH into two, OCLC staff had to specially process approximately 44,000 records with a combination of automated scripts and manual changes. You can learn more by viewing a presentation on this work from the January 2022 OCLC Cataloging Community Meeting.

We’re working to provide more options for local controlled vocabulary features that are currently available in Syndeo^® and CONTENTdm^®. We’re also including more culturally specific subject headings, such as Ngā Upoko Tukutuku, or the Māori Subject Headings, in WorldCat, allowing for Indigenous content to be described using appropriate cultural contexts. Efforts are underway to add similar functionality to other cataloging and discovery services. For example, an option to display replacement terms in WorldCat Discovery results is in development and will be made available in the near future.

We are also working on eradicating insensitive terminology from services, product documentation, marketing collateral, and public web pages. For example, we now refer to “WorldCat records,” “digital originals,” and “base sets.” We are auditing other systems and terminology to ensure appropriate descriptions are reflected.

This project enables WorldCat to filter and facet content about the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples—Australia’s first people—by extending language coding in MARC records to better facilitate ingest and discovery of records for resources that include these native languages. This will help to raise the visibility of the richness and diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. The changes also have applications beyond Austlangs that will allow for significantly expanded language representation in WorldCat.