Draft Charge (for internal purposes):

Goal:

To provide inclusive descriptions requires an acknowledgement and understanding of the role of language in identifying content, context, and intention of any literary or archival work. The goal of this subcommittee is to identify some problem areas in regard to library work in multiple languages, and to provide some suggestions for better, more inclusive practices. 

Early discussions focused on particular holdings within the CUL collections and are considered starting points for much broader conversations and investigations. 

Some identified problem areas and focus of initial research and investigation: 

• Transliteration 
• Names (Family name and surname are not used globally) 
  • Islamic names (not standardized from country to country)
• Titles (including religious, royal, and those based on caste systems)
• Scripts
• Native American languages
• OCR (Optical Character Recording)
• Language and digitization
  

After discussion of some of these early identified issues, the committee will develop some recommendations for changing methodologies. 

Practical outputs: 

• Define best practices
• Analyze history of practices at Cornell, across libraries and collections
• Provide authority training for those whose work concentrates on languages outside of western normativity
• Work to make archival materials in other languages more visible
• Always provide original script with cataloged materials 

Membership

• Brian Arnold (lead)
• Mary Campany
• Courtney Dalton
• Katerina Dimitriadou-Shuster
• Emily Zinger