 All right, so I'm gonna welcome our presenters. I'll just do it very briefly. We're really happy to have from the New York Botanical Gardens, Luesta T. Burks Library, Rashad Bell, and from the William and Linda Steer Urbarium, Regina Vitaleva, who are gonna talk about their project on decolonizing botanical catalogs. So take it away. All right, I'm gonna share my screen. Hopefully this goes well. All right, do you see what I see? Yep. Excellent. Let that load. Okay, so currently the Luesta T. Mertz Library and the Steer Urbarium at NYBG are working on decolonizing our catalogs. Botanical resources in particular have a colonial past and our catalogs have some biased subject headings, authority names, and localities built into them. On our web platforms, especially, this language requires an explanation. The herbarium aspires to digitize roughly eight million specimens and make them available on the web because we eventually transcribe and geo-reference all the written localities on specimen labels. We often end up highlighting obscuring comical names of places. So you can see here is an example of a label that shows a location called Useless Bay, which I think is quite funny for a name, but it can also highlight places that have a clear history of European exploration. For example, this is Robinson Crusoe Island or in this particular example, we have Pirates Cove and here we have places named Indian Village, which is not a proper noun. That's just a description a collector wrote. Less frequently, but equally noticeably, we have labels with offensive language in the locality itself. The official place names of these locations can contain words that little groups of people and even racial slurs. And you can see some of these have much more upsetting locality names. Transcribing and geo-referencing and posting these place names is a process that can stress our staff and create a false impression of institutional values. Staff working on digitization projects, volunteers and interns are often the first line of discovery for this text. Locality is often need to be transcribed many times. So in this particular example, you can see how a collector might visit a location frequently or multiple collectors could visit a location and you can have to transcribe a place a lot. We have created a workflow to mark and separate these types of records for senior level staff to review. We're working with multiple herbaria and local peoples to make a disclaimer for this type of data for our virtual herbarium site. Yet, we don't want to censor information related to our collections. It's important that we do capture all of this information. So then there's another aspect to our decolonization process. When presenting label information to the public, we face another challenge. The hidden figures listed as secondary collectors. Like the authority records in libraries, our collection records generally only attach a party record for the first collector named on a specimen. This is a practical measure meant to save time entering data. Much digitization work in herbaria is grant based so it's critical to not over detail records. However, lots of information on women and indigenous collectors can be made obscure by not attaching a full record of their person. It is not uncommon for the wife who shared collecting responsibilities. So in this particular example, you can see J. G. Lemon and his wife and in the lower image on the screen, that's actually Herbert Smith's wife's handwriting and there's a lot of documentation and field notes that she actually mounted and collected almost all of his specimens. Yeah, so they share equal responsibility collecting a specimen to be, they might not be listed on the label or listed second on a label. Often scientists visiting a region will enlist the help from locals. Historically, Botany rarely acknowledged these people's role in collection or it was not the prominent number listed. When their work was recorded, there was almost never a name of the individual who did the collecting. One of the ways we're placing more emphasis on capturing this information by attaching party records for these types of individuals, creating a record for what we know about some of the specimens unnamed primary collectors. So if a local person collected the specimen and we don't have a name for them, we can make a party record for that person. And even if we don't have details, we can at least give them credit for their work. This should also improve the discoverability for these types of stories. We are placing more emphasis on capturing this information. I think people sometimes believe that scientific records are free from social biases and historically problematic thinking. However, with the digital visibility of this information, I think Herberia now can collaborate with local communities and even official place naming channels. So something interesting we came across while doing research on our more hard to transcribe labels is that the names of these official places don't necessarily have to stay the names of those places. In fact, where collectors collect can sometimes be small and obscure natural areas that don't even have a large population, which might be why they still have old fashioned names. So there's avenues for updating how these places are referred to. While the scope of this work is large, it goes a long way towards changing the relationship scientific data, data collection has with the communities from which it's harvested. All right, and then I think Rashad can present on the library end of our work. Thanks, Regina. Yeah, do you mind clicking through for me since you got control of the person? I got you. Thank you. So yeah, in the library, challenges are similar, but a little different also come from dealing with antiquated language that is coupled with useful information and it's easy to see that kind of stuff in a book title. Regina, if you don't mind clicking through. Yeah, so we see that it's like George Washington Carver, God's Ebony Scientist, that wouldn't really fly today. And historically, what the library has done with this kind of stuff is put an excerpt from a book review to kind of validate the information or in the authority of the text. If you don't mind giving me another click through. So you can see here, we have the title page and then this book review from 1944 when the book was released, even in the first sense you can see it says Basil Miller's book on Dr. Carver is pedestrian but contains fresh material that is interesting. So even though this book might initially seem a bit offensive, try to say, hey, this is at something worthwhile in it and we're not just holding on to it for antiquity. So we deal with this kind of stuff and it's one of those things you can't really always initially handle, because you're not sure what's in every book. Every book isn't gonna tell you from its title that it has questionable content or something that might bother someone. So there is a plan to write a disclaimer because after a couple of conversations, it's like, well, you can talk to the catalogers and have them put something in the record, but it's like, we have so many items in the collection. It's not as easy as like with your barrier content where, and that's not to say it's easy, but it's not as obvious, I guess I should say. So you're never gonna know and it's like, all right, I'm gonna add this much work or already swamped catalogers and we don't have interns or things like that. So it's usually just me in the stacks and I might discover something when I'm pulling it for someone else's research or my own, but so there's the committee, but the issue is the awareness. How do we get the rest of the staff to be aware when they encounter this stuff and what do they do? We've had situations where people will just not say anything or we've had situations where people have been hesitant to add things to the collection and the goal is to not censor anything. So you wanna make people comfortable with that. So there has to be a conversation on that level as well. And so like I said, I've brought it up before and it's just a process of progress if you will of what to do and now we have a committee formed to write a disclaimer and then the question becomes like, is there a rule by committee and then how many places around do you put the disclaimer to make sure that that's seen and then that can potentially set you up for scrutiny because then we live in a world of access, that's kind of the goal for what we do, but there's always trolls and people that are gonna go looking for trouble, but Regina, if you don't mind giving me another click through real quick, I put another name example of questionable content here. So this is like from a survival guide for military and you see we have caricatures of natives and little questionable ways and how to interact with them that can be considered demeaning and could be insulting for some, even though this is of a certain time, how people love to use content to various means these days. So have to be careful with that, but figured maybe if you guys were curious, I would read what was tentatively written by someone in the committee as our disclaimer and that goes the New York Botanical Gardens collection databases offer public access to a wide range of information, including historical materials that may contain offensive and unacceptable language. NYBG is committed to preserving collections data and their original forms for historical accuracy and to facilitate research. Information associated with the collection data does not reflect the views or values of NYBG. We welcome feedback and questions about language found in our databases. Please contact collections at nybg.org. So that was written and that was written by someone in the committee, one of the air barrier staff. But like I said, the question becomes where do you put this? And also we manage these collections, but we work for an institution. And so then a committee's form, the institution has to have to say they may not be as familiar with the collections as we are and get stuck in these weird rule by committee issues. And so that becomes the biggest issue. And like I said, you kind of just want to build awareness amongst your staff to be able to handle this stuff in addition to having the disclaimers and everything. And that's kind of how I see the work of decolonizing a collection. I agree. Yeah, that's what we've been working on as well. Particularly, just to piggyback on that mentioning feedback, I feel like that's a huge aspect of this. We have feedback buttons on our website as well that allow us to locate things and make sure that they have the right kind of context. Yeah. All right, let me hit exit. You are sharing, sorry, let me. Except the screen share? Yeah, I can't exit my screen share. I'm so sorry. Is it pause share? I think so. Yes, okay. I should know it was even better than I do by now, but. Oh, you know, it feels intuitive usually. And okay, good. Are we back? Excellent. So yeah, that was, I really was hoping to start a conversation about this as well because I know everyone here works with museum collections and the context around them. And this is something that I'm sure people have similar experience with in terms of how do you present things digitally and not give a false impression and also represent the creators that went into this work. I have a comment for Rashad. I'm glad you talked about the placement of the disclaimer because that's a conversation that we've had twice now in two years about how to notify people that there's stuff in the repository that might surprise them a little bit. And we decided about a year and a half ago to just put it in item records. So not say at the very top of the collection, you're gonna find some stuff in here that might bother you, but to sort of hide it in metadata. And in our repository, which is dSpace, you have a collection and then an item landing page and then you get down to item metadata. So it's pretty far down right now. We talked about this again very recently, maybe a couple of weeks ago. We decided that we're still happy with that decision, but I'm wondering what other people have discussed if they've discussed the same thing. Maybe I can jump in at the Hibaria. We have put a disclaimer on our website at the moment under digital collections. We are intending to put it actually prominently on the side where we do the database search. And I know the Peabody here at Harvard, the museum has a similar disclaimer and similar to what Rashad had read. And they have it at the front of their database search as well. So it's not on item level. It is really right there when you access our digital data. We want to, the people see that first because when you search our database, the individual results that you may get, you may see some in the summary already. So I feel like it's for in our situation, how our database is structured and how our web present is structured. That's a better place. Yeah, I think we've been discussing that as well at the right up front and center where, maybe it's also because we now have the time to really do the work on this and make sure our disclaimer is worded exactly how we want it to be that we're thinking about putting it much more prominently than on item levels that we've had in the past. I just wanted to read some comments and questions from the chat, but Diane, did you want to read your comment or is it okay if I do? I'm happy to go ahead and read it. Okay. The Smithsonian libraries and archives are grappling with the same issue and maybe Polly is going to want to chime in also, but particularly with respect to digitized open access items, like we have a lot of sheet music and some of it has racist depictions, things like that. So do we put a disclaimer? It doesn't go with the image or do we decide not to make them open access publicly viewable online? And currently we do have an open access committee that is, I think what we're doing is holding those back until we've come to some sort of consensus on what kind of disclaimer or do we just not make those publicly viewable even though they should be CC zero online? Maybe I can jump in again. We had conversations with our disability office here at Harvard and the DIB office. And I also talked to the American Museum of... Oh my gosh, I'm always blanking on the full name of the museum. I'm sorry. At the Smithsonian, the African American Museum of History and Culture, I think that's it. And the consent kind of like was to not hide data because it's part of the history and rather to involve or start, make it a conversation and then education or use it as an educational tool. And part of the reason to not hide the data is because it is history. You don't necessarily, you don't wanna hide history and you also don't wanna deduct information because that makes it impossible for some folks of the population to actually use and find the data. So it is a rather complex issue and I think it really needs a lot of discussion. But that was like the short summary of the conversations that I had and other folks had also. And CH2, excuse me, my boss is a public historian and so he feels very strongly that content should be made available with the proper context. And it's so nice to have someone like him in the room to express that really eloquently. It just cuts through all kinds of conversations where people are really hesitant and they don't wanna offer the material and they're really frightened about the response from the public. So I'm very lucky in my context to have him there. Maybe one thing that I should add was that there seemed to be the consent that if there is a historical name and it has been replaced with a more modern name, it is absolutely fine to do the replacement because that's different from Reduction. But maybe if you decide to keep the historical name to really make sure to denote that that is like the original language. And then kind of like Mark or what Mark the currently used name. And that for the herbarium specimens, it is mainly place names on labels or maybe cultivar or toxin names. So we had some, a few questions coming in the chat. I just wanna make sure we don't miss any of them. It looks like you answered this one in the chat, but we had one question using book reviews in that way is really interesting and useful method for indicating the library's intended value of questionable texts, but you're right, a lot of work to find and add. And Rashad responded, it's very hard to maintain, especially for older titles. And then let's see, we have another question here. Can we hear more about the process of surfacing quote unquote hidden figures, especially women who might be identified in records using their husband's name? Any advice on the research process to identify these names? Yeah, so there's kind of two types of hidden figures we have in these secondary collector fields where you have someone who is named but is almost always a secondary collector, so they might not have a full parties record. And that because we have a name, we can easily put in the effort to make them a record and do the type of research to get their dates and the story behind their work put onto our database so that that's accessible. But then you also have folks who are not named. So like in the case of native collector or local guide, much harder to do research for. In that case, we might refer to field notes and sometimes you get more context of like, at least where this person is from and how the collector whose name is on the sheet encountered them and the nature of the work that they did together. And then in the case of, I feel like with the handwriting it tends to be the wives or the secretaries of collectors, unfortunately. That I also use field notes a lot for. There's a lot of biographical information on certain collectors as well. Yes, that is an excellent link that someone just posted. Oh yeah, Harvard has a lot of collector information but I will literally dig into their field notes frequently and they will talk about their travels with their wife and you can gain an insight into the nature of their collecting and how the responsibility was shared between the two. And I guess in terms of recognizing handwriting, that's just something where when you've worked with a particular section of the herbarium and you've worked with collections by that person frequently, you do start to recognize them. Obviously it's not officially signed by that person but it's something we like to put in note so that it's searchable. And yeah, in the case of Herbert Smith where that was clearly recognizably his wife's handwriting and there's a lot of documentation around how his wife prepared almost all of his specimens. There might be a project there where we can get her a different type of credit on that individual record. But currently we can just give context to the Smith collections as a whole so that someone would know his wife was involved in that work. I added that link to Harvard's Herbaria disclaimer and it looks like, is that you Helen adding CSUs? Yes, I mean, if anyone has any other additional links to language, they wanna drop in the shared notes. I know those things are always, I know when I was practicing in a library how other people's language was always very useful to refer to. Any additional questions or points of discussion? Oh, great, thanks for adding another disclaimer. I'll add that to the shared notes. So I guess we can certainly always continue the conversation on the museum's cohort listserv which there is a link to join that at the bottom of the agenda there. So definitely, let's start my video again. Definitely feel free to join up and stay current with what the museum's cohort is working on as well as keep updated on our upcoming meetings. Before I move on to the DLF, oh, sorry, I just missed someone's question in the chat. Are plans moving forward with this work? Yeah, so definitely like we were saying, we want to get more on the website. I feel like Rashad covered a lot how it can be a struggle institutionally what we are allowed to publish and we have to get approval every step of the way. So it's helpful also to show what other institutions are doing. I feel like sometimes in the museum community we like the reassurance of seeing the work of others and knowing that we're on the right track. And yeah, I think on the database end of things that informs our digital presence, we're trying to create more accurate authority files and more accurate ways of searching for these locations. And I guess another thing that we're considering is the type of stress this work has on workers who frequently have to go through these types of locations. So it's the idea of making the workplace a little bit friendlier for people who work with this information on a regular basis. Yeah. And just to, well, first to answer the second part of the question about deal with administrators is really getting, just showing them the value of it. And I think a lot is putting, unfortunately you have to put this kind of stuff on display and kind of get it out there in front of people so that they understand that, oh, this is something we need to take care of. A good example is for, we did a Black History Month exhibit here in the library about Black Botany and that kind of got some attention. And then you're able to have those conversations and the Handlin's website with the Arbarium is a similar example is like, you kind of have to do stuff first and then you just have to show them. So to answer the first question, like one of my plans to move forward is I really, really wanna do an exhibit that just puts this stuff on display. They're just like, you have this stuff in our collections and we're aware of it, we're not trying to hide it. So here it is, like look at it, take it in and then we can talk about the context. Agreed, yeah. Just to piggyback on the Handlin's website is kind of our interactive blog we have with the Arbarium and it lets us attach stories to different specimens. So yeah, we will frequently do a deep dive on maybe a hidden botanist who was the wife of someone or who accompanied a more famous botanist and how their story might get lost if you're just looking at the data. But when you give it context, it's unique and interesting. That's great. Could you make sure to drop a link to that? I can drop a link to that, yeah, right now. Great. Any additional follow-up questions before we wind down? Oh wait, a little bit longer in case anyone's using the chat this time. Great, thanks for that link. All right, so I think that's about it. But thank you so much, Regina and Rashad. This was a really great discussion and a very cool project. So I'm so glad that you came to share this with us today.