The open knowledge platform Wikidata contains about 99 million items describing people, places, concepts, and things. The platform acknowledges that certain descriptors for people have the potential to violate the privacy of those involved; P21, the property number for sex and gender descriptors, is not one of them.
A research team surveyed participants in the Program for Collaborative Cataloging’s Wikidata Pilot Project to explore how galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (collectively referred to as GLAM institutions) are navigating these ethical issues.
Members presented the findings, to be published this summer in the journal KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies, in the session “The Best Solution for the Time: Ethics and Options when Including Gender Information in Open Knowledge Platforms” at the American Library Association’s 2022 Annual Conference and Exhibition on June 26.
Greta Suiter, manuscripts archivist at Ohio University in Athens, introduced the concept of reparative description when working with potentially problematic archive materials. “The main goal with reparative description work is to create antiracist, anti-oppressive descriptions to provide better context and representation, and to also locate and articulate institutional silences.” She cautioned that, when it comes to gender, “these are very personal data points that are essentially fluid over a person’s lifetime and as such very hard to pinpoint with just a couple of options in a library catalog.”
Nerissa Lindsey, head of content organization and management at San Diego State University, laid out the methodology of the survey, which involved 73 individuals after data scrubbing, and its findings. “We were trying to get a sense of what people were actually doing,” she said. “We wanted to know not only if people were including gender information but we asked what people were including in terms of all kinds of personal demographic info. We were asking people explicitly to talk about their practices around including information about living persons.”
The survey asked, among other things, whether libraries had policies guiding description of gender, whether those policies were written or unwritten, and whether these policies were linked to equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives; the majority of libraries had no formal policy. Open-text responses showed participants were grappling with some of the issues involved, Lindsey said, but that on the whole participants expressed a desire to improve discoverability around demographic properties, highlight inequities within collections, and promote social justice.
Kurt Hanselman, catalog librarian at San Diego State University, presented the team’s recommendations, emphasizing that written policies, clear references, and explicit buy-in from living persons described are crucial to ethical handling of personal demographic information.
“It’s important to note that there really is no perfect solution,” he acknowledged. “Perhaps including no personal demographic information at all in Wikidata would be the safest and most ethical option and ensure no breach of privacy; however, this isn’t exactly the most realistic option or the most helpful suggestion, either, when this data already exists in Wikidata and has precedent.”
Hanselman concluded: “GLAM institutions should shift their focus away from collecting metadata as a cumulative process of description and access and toward the work as an iterative and evolving process, one that is critical and reflective and responsive to change.”
