Conscious Editing-Driven Metadata for Archives and Digital Collections: A Case Study

In the past decade, academic libraries have adjusted their approaches to codify their digital collections metadata standards. At the core of these efforts were conscious editing and reparative metadata initiatives that embraced, at varying levels based on the institution, ethical standards that provided inclusive terminology, addressed historic racist and sexist terms by placing them in context with contemporary language, and improved accessibility by using subject-specific thesauri outside the Library of Congress' controlled vocabularies. Dozens of academic, special, and public libraries have published guides to focused on these issues over the past four years. The approach can be time consuming or feel overwhelming as institutions attempt to boil down what the process of conducting conscious editing or reparative metadata work entails, who is qualified to do the work, and how to evaluate the impacts of such work. At the University of South Florida Libraries, our efforts to improve our overall metadata standards incorporated conscious editing as a guiding framework that, over the course of four years, evolved into a multi-departmental effort aimed at the strategic goal of increasing the accessibility of our collections in the broadest definition of the term.