This is America: Creating Anti-racist Metadata for Digital Collections

Anti-racist reparative metadata work is challenging. Legacy descriptive metadata may use passive, inaccurate, or outdated terminology. Original titles are difficult to change due to standards or the limitations of digital repositories’ search capabilities. Moreover, appropriate Library of Congress Subject Headings terms are not always available and new local terms are difficult to create, especially for long-term use. In this poster we showcase using the title, alternate title, description, and subject fields in complementary ways, to reduce racist, harmful, or outdated metadata in a small digital collection of Theodore de Bry’s America copper engravings.