Metadata for diversity: A field scan of current trends in describing library resources

Although laudable strides have been made to highlight and provide access to diverse library materials about and made by traditionally marginalized communities, current approaches are curatorial, non-scalable, and non-systematic. In this project, we conducted a field scan of knowledge organization tools to better understand metadata elements, values, and organizational structures needed to enable more systematic and scalable access to diverse library materials. Findings show that gender, geography, audience, and age are represented across most schemas, as well as a "basket element" that pools many identity-specific values into one element. While findings are promising, more analysis and consideration around metadata expressing diversity is needed