(27 Feb 2024) Outdated and offensive language haunts archival and library catalogues, potentially causing harm to those searching for and accessing the material these institutions hold. In other cases, there are silences — people can’t find material because the search terms they employ have not been used by the Library in the item’s descriptive record. These issues, however, are not beyond fixing.
This blog post outlines some of the issues we at the Alexander Turnbull Library have identified with the words used in the Turnbull Archival Catalogue (Tiaki), our catalogue for unpublished and archival material. It looks at what others in the libraries and archives sector have done, and what we propose to do to address these issues in our catalogues.
Read the article in full here.
