Information Digitization in the Humanities: The Cultural Assessment Interest Group

The Cultural Assessment Interest Group is a new Digital Library Federation Assessment Interest Group initiative that sprang from many conversations held during last year’s DLF Forum following Safiya Noble’s keynote about power structures in information technology entitled “Power, Privilege, and the Imperative to Act”, and continued to gain steam with the keynote during 2016’s DLF Forum by Stacie Williams “All Labor is Local”. Growing within the digital library community was a sense of unease as evidenced by the themes of such talks. Perhaps we have not been quite as aware we’d hoped when it came to information creation and digitization. This year a group of GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) specialists came together to begin evaluating how well librarians are representing and delivering the shared cultural heritage in digital collections. The Cultural Assessment Interesting Group takes a critical look at the processes that create digital collections from material selection to metadata creation in order to highlight areas of potential perpetuation of societal power structures and correction of biased representation in digital collections.

This discussion will highlight the necessity of this work, the progress of this group to date and their intended outcomes over the next year.