Ethical and Multilingual Description Standards

Last updated on 2025-06-18 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

  • Who is your intended audience?
  • What are their needs?

Objectives

  • Describe your data’s intended audience and their needs.
  • Appraise the strengths of different existing standards.
  • Understand basic descriptive metadata ethics.

In this episode we will evaluate different methods to cleanup and enhance your data, all while keeping in mind an ethical obligation to provide inclusive access to information. We will then apply these techniques to our sample data set.

Knowing your audience is the first step to ensure you have adequate data categories. In our spreadsheet we started with typical access points such as title, creator (institutional host), resource type, subject, language, and URL. Then we thought of some of our target audiences. What access points would students, faculty, or other librarians want to search by? So we added more detailed subject analysis with columns such as Country Coverage and Time Period.

Target Audience

Imagine one target audience includes students, teachers, and librarians in Latin America. What kind of metadata might enhance access to your data? (Choose all that apply)

  1. Terms in Spanish & Portuguese
  2. Country Coverage
  3. Resource type

Answer: A & B. While A, B, and C are all useful metadata, adding additional columns for subject access in Spanish and Portuguese provides a broader audience the ability to keyword search in multiple languages. And adding the ability to narrow by specific countries, rather than a broader Latin America or by continent, gives the user more precise searching capabilities.

Don’t start from scratch!

Find a cheat sheet for cleaning up spreadsheets, such as:

Marina Georgieva’s Data Remediation at Scale: How to Clean Up Your Metadata Quickly and Effectively Using Excel

Existing Tutorials for General Spreadsheet Cleanup

There are free tutorials and other tools to help you clean your data quickly. For example, Google Sheets has a built-in Smart Cleanup tool. You can find it under Data–Data Cleanup–Cleanup Suggestions.

For more info, see Google’s Sheets Smart Cleanup to prepare your data for analysis

Appraise the Strengths of Different Standards

Metadata standards already exist for all kinds of data. If you can find one that matches some of your needs, you will save yourself a lot of time. One area that we recommend outsourcing when possible is the use of controlled vocabularies. Instead of coming up with your own list of terms to use consistently (and thus enhance collocation of results), see if one exists.

Appraising Controlled Vocabularies

The sample spreadsheet is part of our larger project featuring free online resources relating to Latin American, Caribbean, Latinx and Iberian Studies. Which of the following controlled vocabularies best fits our data?

  1. Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)
  2. Hispanic American Periodicals Index (HAPI) Subject Headings
  3. Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)

Answer: B. HAPI Subject Headings align neatly with our defined area. While based in part on LCSH, HAPI is more focused vocabulary and also has the flexibility to update their terminology without the long proposal process at the Library of Congress. Updating the names of indigenous tribes, for example, is a multi-year project for LC while HAPI can update those names more quickly.

Don’t want to create your own controlled vocabulary?

Find an existing one! Search for one related to your scholarly area or try Patricia Harpring’s Introduction to Controlled Vocabularies: Terminologies for Art, Architecture, and Other Cultural Works

Basic Descriptive Metadata Ethics

When choosing which metadata to capture, how to organize it, and how to use it, we necessarily apply our own perspectives and experiences to those choices. Thus it is important to conscientiously work to avoid bias as much as possible. Take a step back and think about how the structure of your metadata may help or hinder access by your target audience.

For more guidance, see: + The Cataloging Code of Ethics + Statement of Internaitonal Cataloging Principles

Matching Metadata Standards to a Target Audience

Imagine one target audience includes students, teachers, and librarians in Latin America. What kind of metadata might enhance access to your data? (Choose all that apply)

  1. Terms in Spanish & Portuguese
  2. Country Coverage
  3. Resource type

Answer: A & B. While A, B, and C are all useful metadata, adding additional columns for subject access in Spanish and Portuguese provides a broader audience the ability to keyword search in multiple languages. And adding the ability to narrow by specific countries, rather than a broader Latin America or by continent, gives the user more precise searching capabilities.

Evaluate Sample Dataset

At this point, go ahead and copy the lacli-sample-data spreadsheet to your Google Drive. We’ll explore the data through the following two questions.

Use tutorials and other existing Google Sheet shortcuts. Filtering within a column, for example, is a fast way to pull out terms only used once, some of which may in fact be typos.

Use Find & Replace