Draft Charge:

Goals (incomplete, needs cleaning up):

• Environmental survey/scan of past practices (without subjects/people/controlled vocabs and language issues)
• Identifying technical barriers that might pose issues for generating ethical description
• Creation of guidelines for reviewing existing description with a critical lens
• Survey of past descriptive practices at CUL - examine legacy metadata
• Review existing guidelines for community collaboration and translation into actionable items for a CUL context

This group will develop guidelines for the critical and ethical examination, review, and remediation of existing description and descriptive workflows. It will also produce a Best Practices guide for library description moving forward (i.e. outside of remediation efforts). The guidelines will provide enough information so that the best practices moving forward can be implemented without an expansion of existing resources, but they will also outline and clarify what additional resources will inevitably be necessary for remediation efforts. This group is not responsible for finding/allocating resources or the overall implementation of these best practices across CUL.

Practical outputs:

The group will produce three separate documents, to be completed in the following order:

• Best practices moving forward
• Prioritization for remediation
• Best practices for remediation

The preliminary timeline is to produce the first document by spring 2022, as that will inform the work and timeframe for the following documents.

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Members:

• Jasmine Burns (lead)
• Tabitha Cary
• Julia Corrice
• Laura Daniels
• Dianne Dietrich
• Katerina Dimitriadou-Shuster
• Marcie Farwell
• Liz Parker
• Ben Wrubel

NOTES

2 phases 1) past practice and 2) staging the questions for future/best practice

how to get from creating guidelines to implementation? can we make sure to deliver the best practices portion of the charge to ourselves.

central info gathering and dissemination to become aware of all the efforts across many silos, also identifying places where remediation has been happening

we dont know what we dont know? what is underdescribed and how do we figure out the details around past practices?

what could an environmental scan be and what do we mean by an analysis of past practice?

instead of everything we do with description, what if we did a scan of what remediation efforts have happened? what worked or did not work? when our efforts failed what did that look like?

what are our markers of failure?

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