In order to guide and standardize metadata work, a series of best practices are required. Ethical guidelines take these documents beyond practical applications to consider philosophical or sociopolitical dimensions, aiding in decision-making.
These selected examples contain various codes of ethics developed by library, archive, and museum professionals:
The ethics of ownership and control of cultural heritage materials are also being examined by community members and institutions alike. One approach is post-custodialism, first used as a term to describe the changing management model of archives supporting record owners but no longer obtaining physical items. This concept has narrowed to describe changing power relations between institutions and source communities, aiming to repair past extractive archival practices that have largely impacted Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) cultural heritage. Other interventions include community archives and collaboration, seeking input from community members on everything from display and metadata creation to preservation.
These selected resources represent a variety of projects and approaches to collaborative metadata practice, and provide assistance in working collaboratively with community partners, including post-custodial partnerships:
Narrowing down to metadata usage, there are also a number of guidelines to ensure ethical reproduction or aggregation. Linked below are a number of resources that address different facets of usage ethics, from handling sensitive information to managing access. It is important to understand that information ethics are not broadly shared values but are instead contextual. A good example are the CARE data principles, linked below, which outlines best practices for usage of Indigenous-created data. Note that open access, a common principle in information science, is not considered a best practice in CARE. Instead, "Authority to Control" is key to maintaining Indigenous sovereignty over their own data, as well as respecting any rights that may be connected to the data and related objects or communities. Here, data should be carefully managed. It can be helpful to familiarize oneself not only with best practices in one's field but also those that relate to the cultural/historical context of the materials and source communities connected to it.
These selected resources provide assistance in approaching metadata from an ethical usage lens:
The following sources were used to create this page:
Carroll, Stephanie Russo, Ibrahim Garba, Oscar L. Figueroa-Rodríguez, Jarita Holbrook, Raymond Lovett, Simeon Materechera, Mark Parsons, et al.. 2020. “The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance”. Data Science Journal 19 (1): 43. https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-043
“Dictionary of Archives Terminology.” Society of American Archivists. n.d. https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/postcustodial.html
Ham, F. (1981). Archival Strategies for the Post-Custodial Era. The American Archivist, 44(3), 207-216. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.44.3.6228121p01m8k376
LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections. “Identifying PostCustodial Partners in Latin America Lessons Learned in Mexico,” 2016, April. https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/251b4f72-fd29-4fe7-a0ea-b06377380573/content.
University of Texas at Austin Libraries. “About Our Work.” Latin American Digital Initiatives. 2019. https://ladi-prod.lib.utexas.edu/en/about
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