SCELC Channel One: Reparative Cataloging at SCELC Institutions

UPDATE: This week's chatlog is available here, and the recording lives below

For this week, I'm pleased to pick back up where we left off on DEI implementations in the SCELC Community (see last November's DEI Audit of Library Collections @ University of the Pacific) with a session highlighting reparative description and cataloging.

For those to whom this was a new term (including your humble narrator not so long ago): reparative cataloging can be understood as libraryland's manifestation of the concept of "reparative description" that has bubbled up in archival practice over the past few years: "remediation of practices or data that exclude, silence, harm, or mischaracterize marginalized people in the data created or used by archivists to identify or characterize archival resources" (via Archivists.org). As for how librarians have adapted that concept into our spaces, recall Library of Congress' subject heading update which officially replaced the terms "Aliens" and "Illegal aliens" with "Noncitizens" and "Illegal immigration". 

To ground the session firmly in the SCELC context, I've called up a bunch of ringers to get us started this week:

Peter Rolla, Head of Cataloging & Systems at Loyola Marymount University's William H. Hannon Library, will provide an update on his Lightning Talk given at Colloquium 2022, which outlines his experience in leading LMU's implementation of the LC subject heading update referenced above. 

Justine Withers, Electronic Resources Cataloger at USF’s Gleeson Library, will describe some of the key decision points in developing Gleeson Library’s recently approved (and soon-to-be published) harmful language statement and her ongoing textual analysis of a collection of published statements. (Updated from a May lightning talk at the Northern California Technical Processes Group 2022 Annual Meeting and a preview of an upcoming poster at CORE Forum.)

Zoe Hume, Gleeson Library’s inaugural Reparative and Inclusive Description Survey Scholar, will share her experience and reflections so far in the internship. Zoe received her Master of Science in Information in 2020 from Florida State University and is currently pursuing a PhD in Museum Education and Visitor-Centered Curation there. Zoe’s research interests include visual rhetoric, media studies, public history, museum informatics, social justice curation, conscious and reparative metadata, and Indigenizing museum practice.

So this week's Channel One is an open forum dedicated to the reparative cataloging work already being done out in the SCELC universe, and a kickstarter for anyone who wants to get started at their shop.