Hi, and welcome to "This is America: Creating Anti-Racist Metadata
for Digital Collections."
I am Laura Ramirez, a metadata specialist at the University of Houston.
This poster briefly showcases the metadata unit's work on reparative metadata
and illustrates a few examples of changes made to various records
from Theodor de Bry's "America,"
a digital collection of 23 engravings from one of our rare books dated to 1594.
Our focus here was to more accurately represent the contents of the collection.
As such, we worked to change harmful or inaccurate terms
like "Indians of North America" to more updated and more inclusive terms
like "indigenous people of South America"
and "indigenous people of the Caribbean."
And when possible, to more specific terms,
like "Taino" to highlight the culture or group.
Because this type of information can be difficult to find,
we use geographic terms like "Cumana, Venezuela"
or "Hispaniola" to provide another level of representation.
For titles, we reverted to the original German
and moved our translations to the alternative title fields
and used brackets to indicate any updated language.
These changes were then noted in the description fields
in addition to our original description, along with our legacy title
to retain it as an access point to users.
If you'd like to learn more about this collection,
please visit the UH Digital Collection site.
If you are interested in seeing more of our legacy metadata,
you can find it at the UHTC dataverse.
Thank you for viewing.