Sharing knowledge, language and metadata across the ditch

Catherine Barnes

May 29, 2022

I live and teach on Kaurna land in Adelaide, South Australia. Over the past Summer I had the pleasure of teaching resource description and discovery to students in Aotearoa New Zealand. Although I was physically located in Australia, the students and staff welcomed me to the culture and customs of their land. Each communication was prefixed with Kia ora, a Māori language greeting, and contained many other Māori language terms, used interchangeably with English. I found myself enjoying the bilingual nature of our exchanges and we spent many discussions on how communities are not only represented in our own language but that of our databases. Whilst I was teaching, I was learning not only about their culture, but also my own.

Australia is a very different environment, we have more than 250 different language groups including 800 dialects. Each language is specific to a particular place and people, with separation from land and community resulting in language loss.¹ In recent years it has become practice to acknowledge the land we meet upon with a formal Acknowledgement of Country, however this is usually completed in English and sometimes forms an ‘agenda item’ rather than natural part of our interactions.

Description and classification can be challenging when you are working across cultures, but I did not expect such a culture shock with our friends ‘across the ditch’.²

It started with an exploration of plastic summer footwear; known as thongs, flip-flops or zori. However, I discovered the Kiwi term for this superstar of Summer, jandals, does not appear as an alternate term in Library of Congress Subject Headings. This led me to consider, how are our cultural terms represented when a minority, with little input to vocabularies, is a stakeholder.

There has been much work accomplished over recent years in the area of ‘critical cataloguing’, however an area in need of research is ‘cultural cataloguing’. We need to ensure the language we use not only doesn’t reflect racist or demeaning terms, but reflects the culture and language of those it represents. Projects such as Cultural Safe Libraries: Working with Indigenous Collections ³ and the National Library of Australia addition of AIATSIS Pathways subject headings ⁴ have proved successful in informing and educating our field. Examples of implementation are the use of indigenous place names in map databases and indigenous names in Name Authority Files. However, products such as the Mukurtu CMS ⁵ are leading lights in this field, allowing community members to manage, share and exchange their digital heritage in a culturally relevant manner. First Nations representation is vitally important in any project, as is frequently penned “nothing about us, without us”.

Back to my reflection on teaching in Aotearoa New Zealand, despite our background and qualifications, we are all students of culture, even our own. An openness for feedback and discussion is important in embarking on any project involving description. As information professionals, we need to provide an environment where we are the student in the room and allow our cultural elders to take the lead.

About the Author

Catherine is a Course Coordinator and Lecturer in University of South Australia, STEM with specialisations in Metadata and Descriptive Cataloguing. She has qualifications and experiences in Information Management, Information Technology and Education, with a passion for information and learning. As a working practitioner, a curiosity for not just the how and why of describing things, but also the who has led to further exploration of the connection between description and digital inclusion.