Cataloging & Metadata Librarian Adrian Williams, together with the other convening members of the Trans Metadata Collective (TMDC), has been honored with the Visual Resources Association's 2024 Nancy DeLaurier Award in recognition of their role in the research and development of the "Metadata Best Practices for Trans and Gender Diverse Resources."
The document contains guidelines, policy recommendations, and a set of best practices for the description, cataloging, and classification of information resources and the creation of metadata about trans and gender diverse people, including authors and other creators. They are usable across a wide variety of information and cultural heritage institutions, from libraries and museums to local historical societies.
Metadata is important because description leads to discovery: from keywords and titles to authors and dates, records are fetched by knowledge organization systems according to their tags, which are created by cataloging and metadata library and archival workers. More nuanced description leads to better discovery and better service for students, researchers, and community members.
“Metadata records may persist for decades, and are often created by people who may be unfamiliar with the communities they are describing,” said Williams. “These best practices form a living document which we continuously revise to align with the living language that our communities use to describe ourselves.”
The TMDC was first convened in 2021 after an overwhelming response to a call for participation. The group eventually comprised over one hundred catalogers, librarians, archivists, scholars, and information professionals who were organized into working groups in a non-hierarchical structure pursuing self-assigned work.
As the co-coordinator of the Subject Headings & Authorities Working Group, Williams ensured that the work proceeded on schedule and remained in alignment with the overall scope of the project. Williams presented and reviewed working drafts at Coordinating Committee meetings that brought the disparate sections into a cohesive whole.
“It’s been very rewarding to be part of a group of people working toward a singular goal of making catalogues more inclusive and accessible for other folks,” said Williams. “It takes a lot of work. It takes a group of folks to make the time to create a proposal, attend monthly coordination meetings, and work through multiple iterations of drafts. And staff librarians may not have the same amount of time for this kind of work that is allowed to faculty.”
The history of the organization and its working process are detailed in a 2023 paper published in the Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, “‘Our Metadata, Ourselves’: The Trans Metadata Collective.”
Trans and gender diverse creators are uniquely vulnerable to being outed by their data records, and to discrimination and violence through the disclosure of their gender identities from the names assigned to them by knowledge organization systems. Many of these records contain sensitive information that has not come from the authors themselves. The TMDC’s best practices offer recommendations for correctly naming and identifying trans and gender diverse individuals and helping institutions make the process of metadata creation more transparent.
They also provide terminology for culturally and contextually appropriate labels for trans and gender diverse communities and subjects – the area in which Williams offered their expertise.
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) provide standardized terminology for describing the subject matter of a resource. First developed at the end of the 19th century, they have become ubiquitous across information and cultural heritage organizations and are the most widely-used subject heading language in the world.
“Historically, this has been a very US-centered vocabulary that struggles to fully encompass ideas that don’t originate from a Euro-centric mindset,” said Williams. As such, the LCSH contains terms describing marginalized groups that are often criticized as inappropriate, misleading, or offensive.
“It was only in September 2021 that works about Black people stopped being subdivided under N for Negro,” said Williams. “Similarly, the subject headings for occupations and vocations have been structured so that the male counterpart is always the standard: you see “teachers” and “women teachers,” for example, or “librarians” and “women librarians.” We’re only just now seeing the use of ‘‘male this’ or ‘male that,’ finally breaking the expectation that maleness is the default setting for humanity.”
The LCSH also under- and misrepresents trans and gender diverse people. The vocabulary contains only four broad categories of trans identities and three concepts for gender diversity, grossly inadequate for the many ways trans and gender diverse people describe themselves. Additional subject headings exist for a variety of aspects of lived experience. The TMDC’s best practices outline each of these areas, with specific recommendations for their use.
The document also includes detailed discussion of headings that require extra consideration, many of which are harmful or exclusionary. For some, the TMDC suggests alternatives; others they recommend to avoid entirely. Where no headings currently exist, the TMDC offers nuanced suggestions for the combination of existing headings.
As noted above, LCSH can be painfully slow to change – but there are pathways by which to propose new headings or revise existing ones.
Most LCSH are created by the Library of Congress (LC) or by members of the Subject Authority Cooperative Program (SACO). “SACO Funnels” are groups within the SACO Program that contribute subject headings with a particular focus, including the Gender and Sexuality SACO Funnel Project. “New, much more granular LGBTQ+ subject headings are finally being consistently added thanks to the work of the Gender and Sexuality SACO Funnel,” said Williams.
The TDMC also recommends the use of alternative subject vocabularies, such as Homosaurus, which can provide a more specific, nuanced, or rich terminology. Thesauri and alternative subject term vocabularies have been developed in libraries since the 1980s as supplements for bodies of knowledge that have historically been excluded from LCSH. Use of the Homosaurus vocabulary supports LGBTQ+ research by enhancing the discoverability of LGBTQ+ resources.
Williams serves on the editorial board for Homosaurus, where they lead workshops and collaborate on term development. Several additional vocabularies are detailed in the TDMC’s best practices.
“It’s cool to get an award – it’s even cooler for the best practices to be used, and for folks to have questions about them and new thoughts that inform their work” said Williams. “If this award means that more folks are seeing these resources and using them, that’s what means the most.”
