Yelton at #imlsfocus

>> ANDROMEDA YELTON: Thank you, John. I was going to
talk today about why ongoing tech training is hard, the
nuts and bolts of pedagogy and what you can do to help.
Maybe I still will in Q & A, but right now, Baltimore is
burning -- or maybe it isn't -- the stories I hear on
Twitter are not the same as the stories on CNN, and we
as cultural heritage institutions are about our
communities and their stories and about which stories
are told, which are made canon and how and why. So, I
want to talk about how technology training and digital
platforms can either support or threaten our communities
and their ability to tell their stories and to have
their stories reflected and the canonical story that we
build when we build a national platform. I want to make
it explicit that what we are doing in this room today is
about deciding whose stories get told, by whom and how.
Whose get to reach our corridors of power only through
protests and fire. I was reminded this morning of an
article co-authored by MURNa morale S who was
researching the young Lord's party, which is a political
organization in her native Puerto Rico, and she couldn't
find any literature about it, and a sinking feeling, she
thought maybe she should check the header for gangs, and
that was where she found information on this, and I was
reminded of a thing I did at a Harvard library cloud
hack-a-thon earlier, intersectional library cloud, where
I looked at the most popular elements circulated in
Harvard, using the stack score and their API, and I
looked at whether they also had subject headers that
reflected women's studies or LGBT studies or African
American studies, using code and meta data as a way to
surface what people learn matters when they're doing
scholarship and learning at one of the most famous
institutions on earth. TLDR, it didn't really turn out
to matter. They're not reading about stuff like that
when they're reading the things that they mostly read at
Harvard. So, the way that we structure our meta data,
the content we seek, the tools we give people for
interrogating the platform, whom we empower to use these
tools and add this content and teach about these tools
and construct them, how many they are, how diverse they
are have these profound effects on which stories that we
advance and we say matter as cultural heritage
institutions, which in turn, shapes the present and the
future. I've said before that libraries are about
transforming people through access to information and
each other, and that's true, but today, I'm thinking
more about what we can do to let more people transform
libraries and how libraries and our content and API's
and platforms can be tools for more people to transform
each other, how the meta data that courses through
digital platforms is the frame we have to tell and
interpret stories, and how, therefore, as meta data
creators, we must be consciously inclusive, and how,
when we train librarians to use and create national
digital platforms, we can train them to use these skills
in a contextually aware way, not just to understand
technology and use it, but to interrogate it and
construct it from a critical perspective, to see how
technology interacts with our communities and our
stories and where those gaps are and how we can be part
of bridging them, because here we are, comfortable and
safe, mostly white, talking about how millions of
dollars should be spent, and Baltimore is conversed by
its history and by the blind eye so many of us have
turned to it.