By Gretchen Neidhardt and Kate Flynn
The Chicago Collections Consortium (CCC) is a member-based organization that seeks to preserve and promote the history of the Chicago region. There are currently over 60 member institutions including large academic institutions, museums, standalone archives, corporations, historical societies and more. In 2015, the CCC launched Explore Chicago Collections (referred to as “Explore”), an online portal that provides access to finding aids and images related to the Chicago region. Part of the work that went into this portal involved building a set of general shared controlled vocabularies by a Controlled Vocabulary Task Force. This Task Force was set up to maintain the controlled vocabularies and convened on a semi-regular basis. Following the launch of the Explore portal, the group met as needed to assess the CCC’s internal list of subject tags used to categorize finding aids and images by “Cities, Neighborhoods and Topics.”
In 2021 the CCC reconvened their Controlled Vocabulary Task Force. The primary goal of the 2021 group was to introduce a new section under Topics that provides demographic and community-related tags. Explore already had a “Cultures and Communities” tag under the Daily Life & Identity topic category, but it was unspecific and users often searched for individual communities by name. We knew creating this new set of tags required specialized knowledge and input, so in addition to the call for Task Force members, we also formed an Advisory Group, made up of back-end users of Explore, but also front-end users who focused on reference and education.
From July 2021 through October 2022, the Task Force met monthly, and the Advisory Group joined meetings every three months. One of the first tasks undertaken was to see what existing subjects and keywords were used to describe communities within the finding aids and image metadata already uploaded to Explore. These terms were mapped to a subject field upon ingest and a report was generated including all subject terms, then analyzed by the Task Force. A small list of potential community terms was generated after this exercise.
We next surveyed different existing controlled vocabularies that include demographic terms, including (but not limited to): Digital Transgender Archive Glossary, Disability Language Style Guide, Faceted Application of Subject Terminology (FAST), Homosaurus, Library of Congress Demographic Group Terms (LCDGT), Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (TGM), Manitoba Archival Information Network (MAIN), Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), and REHABDATA. We wanted to assess both mainstream and comprehensive vocabularies as well as more specific community-maintained vocabularies because there are strengths in both types of systems. The broader and more mainstream vocabularies will be replicated across more systems, and will have designed their wide-ranging terms to work as a group. The more specific vocabularies usually were created and maintained by the community members referred to by the terminology, and we felt that they would more accurately reflect how specific communities self-identify.
Ultimately, we selected LCDGT as the base for the CCC list of community tags, but with several substitutions and additions from various community-created vocabularies (like Homosaurus and the Disability Language Style Guide). Additionally, we made some style choices that we thought would make our tags more uniform and specific to our audience. This included adding “people” to the end of continental and religious terms, such as “Catholic people,” as well as using other local vocabularies, such as the Chicago History Museum’s list of Indigenous endonyms.
Below is a screenshot of our working list. This includes the category of the LCDGT (we largely decided not to include education level, age, or occupational categories), whether or not the term will be added to our tags, which CCC category the tag will go in, whether or not we plan to customize the tag, review notes, and links to 1-2 exemplar existing collections.
Part of our process was formally defining thresholds for adding new tags and adding tags to items. Previously this was left to the discretion of the item depositor, but we felt we needed clear guidelines, especially since the community terms were more likely to only apply to part of an image or collection. For Explore, a tag can be added to an item if it applies to at least 10% of an archival collection, or represents a significant part of the visual content of an image. These thresholds must also be met for at least one archival collection or image in order for a new tag to be created.
The new Communities set of tags launched on November 2, 2022. In advance of the launch, reports were run for each institution, listing both potential matches to terms matching the Communities controlled vocabulary and also objects that had used the previous general Cultures & Communities tag. These were shared with institutions in advance so they could be used as a guide to tagging upon launch.
When these reports and the launch announcement were sent to members, they had the opportunity to sign up for office hours where we gave a very short overview of the new tags and had time for both questions and communal work time. More office hours will be offered in the future. No retroactive tagging or auto tagging will happen. We found during our subject analysis that terms tended to be broad rather than specific and could also be inaccurate or outdated. We wanted to encourage taking a fresh look at terms and left out automatic tagging that would have occurred upon upload to the system. The existing Cultures & Communities tag will remain in place for a little while, but we plan to phase it out over time.
Since the launch, 67 community tags have been used 894 times by seven institutions. We have 139 community tags available, 1,259 items tagged with “Cultures and Communities” across 14 members, in addition to potentially hundreds of other items with community-related subjects in the institutional metadata.There is still a lot of outreach and tagging to do, but we’re encouraged by the response so far and excited to collaborate on these efforts to more specifically and accurately represent our members, their collections, and our audience.
Gretchen Neidhardt is the Metadata and Digital Projects Librarian at Galter Health Sciences Library and Learning Center at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. She previously was the Cataloging and Metadata Librarian at the Chicago History Museum. She has volunteered with many facets of the Chicago Collections Consortium and is most interested in the intersection of inclusive metadata, user-centered description, and metadata manipulation tools and processes.
Kate Flynn is the Portal Manager for the Chicago Collections Consortium and also the Digital Programs & Metadata Project Librarian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She previously was a Resident Librarian at the University of Illinois at Chicago for Digital Programs & Services. She earned an MSI from the University Of Michigan School Of Information in 2011, specializing in Preservation of Information and Archives & Records Management. She is most interested in issues around digital preservation, user experience and metadata.