Developing a Community for Community-Centered Vocabulary Work
When your identity is subject to systemic marginalization and discrimination, you are likely to have a complex relationship to
libraries. On one hand, libraries and digital archives may be a lifeline, connecting you to vital resources and stories from
people who have experienced what you have, contrasting against the day-to-day experiences of minoritization and othering.
On the other hand, your access to these life-saving collections is mediated by infrastructure that reflects the same
small-mindedness and discrimination you have come to expect: the book that empowers you to embrace your autism is
shelved under “Diseases”; the sepia-toned pictures showing your family building your city are labelled as “Asiatics” or “East
Indians”; the research you can use to advocate for safe supply is labelled as being about “Drug addicts”; or you cannot find
any books labelled “Queer people,” only “Queer theory,” as if you are only rumoured to exist.
Most library and archival collections adopt centrally-managed, universal, controlled vocabularies to describe items’ content
and subjects, but these vocabularies tend to be particularly poorly suited to collections for communities made marginal by
systemic and historical discrimination. As in the examples above, the controlled vocabularies’ colonial, cisheteronormative,
and ableist origins are made manifest in inaccurate, outdated, and often offensive terminology. This partnership project
connects a number of initiatives centring such communities, with collections and information access designed with and for
those made invisible or misrepresented in dominant practices. The diversity of the vocabulary initiatives among our partners
is a major strength. Their collections serve local and national constituencies that include autistic people, people with
intellectual disabilities, and their families; Black Vancouverites; the residents of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside; the
LGBT2QIA+ community; and South Asian families settled in Canada. The initiatives also differ in governance structures and
institutional context, representing existing university-community partnerships, initiatives of larger non-profits, and small
volunteer-run libraries. Due to the dominance of the universal vocabulary model, each of these projects is reinventing
processes for constructing controlled vocabularies as they construct their own local terminology. These new and emerging
practices are as valuable to information professionals as each implementation is to their local collections and patrons.
Rather than create a new universal controlled vocabulary, one that unifies the aggregate term lists of these different initiatives,
this project seeks connection at the level of processes and principles. The proposed project has two core elements: support for
student workers on vocabulary revision at each project partner, and project-wide workshops connecting all of these workers
and their supervisors. We envision local vocabulary work informing workshop topics and activities, with the final year of the
project devoted to synthesis and documentation that facilitates the sustainability of partner projects and gives professional
audiences the tools to undertake their own community-centered work.
Our model increases the capacity of local initiatives while generating shared expertise and shareable knowledge on topics
such as community engagement, software management, and structures for multilingual vocabularies. The overall structure of
the project promises to translate these local experiences into adoptable processes for community empowerment through
vocabulary work, applicable for other institutions serving communities made marginal.