You’ve done the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) trainings, but how do you apply what you’ve learned in your day-to-day work? Auditing collecting practices and metadata can feel daunting and overwhelming. This webinar will provide concrete, actionable guidelines for integrating DEI principles and values into policies and procedures for collection development and metadata management.
Emphasizing people-first values and cultural humility, we’ll explore how to critically examine collecting practices for bias and gaps. How well do your holdings serve your community? Are there cultures, time periods, and movements not reflected in your collections that should be? How might you broaden your collection’s appeal in a respectful and collaborative way?
We’ll also discuss strategies for identifying problematic language and descriptions in your collection data and outline possible steps for addressing them. Do your descriptions perpetuate harmful language and stereotypes? How do you balance historical accuracy with contemporary terminology? And what unconscious biases do you perpetuate by attempting to be “neutral?” In addition, we’ll talk about building DEI values into your processing guidelines and practices for future metadata creation.
Upon completion of this course, you will:

• Learn guidelines to evaluate collecting practices for bias and underrepresented content areas
• Understand the principles of assessing collections data for problematic language and misrepresentations
• Begin to develop plans for updating collection development policies and processing guidelines
• Identify and commit to one audit project at your institution

Who Should Attend:
Archivists, librarians, staff, and managers responsible for collection development and metadata creation and management
What You Should Already Know:
A basic understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion principles is helpful.