Metadata as Care: Cultivating Meaningful Access in Digital Archives

by Lisa M. Longenecker

Introduction

As a traditional cataloger of physical resources, I always saw cataloging as an opportunity to paint a picture that would enable the discovery of the resource by catalog users. Thoughtfully including subject headings, abstracts or descriptive summaries, tables of contents, accessibility information, and other descriptive elements allowed my bibliographic records to provide rich points of access. This level of description stood in stark contrast to many of the automated, vendor-supplied records I encountered in my daily work, which contained little more than a title, author, and limited publication information. Through practice and professional reflection, I came to view cataloging as interpretive and, in many ways, human-centered. From a human-centered perspective, cataloging involves more than simply transcribing information from the title page and verso; it requires skill, intention, and professional judgment about how a resource will be represented, contextualized, and ultimately discovered by users of an online catalog or discovery layer. This emphasis on thoughtful description is not simply a matter of individual cataloging philosophy. Karen Snow’s research on catalogers’ perceptions of cataloging quality found that, although definitions of a quality catalog record may vary among catalogers, there is broad agreement within the profession about the importance of high-quality bibliographic description.¹

After moving to a position focused primarily on creating metadata for digital collections, I realized that this same emphasis on thoughtful description is not always carried over into digital repository work. While most galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) recognize the importance of digitizing collections to preserve materials and reach a broader audience, the descriptive metadata for digitized objects is often an afterthought. Many digital repository workflows privilege scale over interpretive impact, prioritizing the creation and availability of the digital surrogate over the description of its role and significance within the collection.² As a consequence, digital objects may enter repositories with minimal metadata, limiting opportunities for discovery and obscuring the historical and cultural contexts that give those objects meaning.

This tendency has been further exacerbated by increasing interest among vendors and library administrators in redirecting archival description and digital collections metadata work to artificial intelligence (AI), as many view AI as a potential solution to limited staffing and growing backlogs.³ Because many institutions lack dedicated librarians to create and curate digital object metadata, the turn toward AI, outsourcing, or grant-funded term positions is understandable. However, this trend requires serious consideration of the contextual, ethical, and interpretive labor that may be lost when metadata creation is treated primarily as a technical task to be automated, accelerated, or outsourced.

This raises an important question: what does it mean to provide access if that access is devoid of context? A digitized photograph with only a generic title and date may be technically accessible, but without descriptive depth, its significance remains obscured. The absence of robust metadata can bury complex histories, obscure marginalized voices, and limit users’ ability to meaningfully engage with digital materials. In this sense, minimal metadata does not simply reflect a lack of time or resources—it can unintentionally shape which stories are told and which remain hidden. As Melissa Adler puts it, this aspect of description essentially “silences particular interpretations and intertextual relations,” making information professionals “complicit in privileging and circulating ignorance—inhibiting rather than opening up” resources to the world.⁴

A digital collection composed of minimally described objects conveys little about the significance of individual resources, making it difficult for users to interpret the collection’s wider narrative or understand its cultural and historical impact. When digital object metadata is treated as an afterthought, information professionals risk neglecting their ethical responsibility to provide meaningful access to the stories embedded within digital archives. “Meaningful access” is a term used frequently throughout library science literature, though it is not always explicitly defined.⁵ For the purposes of this article, “meaningful access” refers not simply to the availability of digital objects in an online repository, but to the presence of sufficient contextual metadata to support interpretation, discovery, and critical engagement with the digital object being described.

If meaningful access to digital objects is the goal, the prevailing approach to metadata creation in digital repositories must be reconsidered. Rather than treating descriptive metadata as secondary to digitization, this article suggests that information professionals must recognize it as central to the user’s interpretive process. From a humanistic perspective, metadata creation can be understood as an act of care: each descriptive element represents an opportunity to honor the complexity of the materials being described and the people connected to them. Enriched metadata not only facilitates discovery but also enables the articulation of the stories embedded within digital archives. When metadata is treated as an afterthought, valuable cultural artifacts risk being reduced to isolated digital surrogates, stripped of the relationships and contexts that give them meaning.

At the same time, it would be overly simplistic to dismiss current practices in digital collections as careless or misguided. Many institutions face significant pressures to digitize at scale, often with limited staffing and resources. The emphasis on quantity is, in part, a response to institutional pressures to increase access and visibility of archival collections. However, this raises a critical tension among digital repository practitioners: how do we balance the imperative to make more materials available with the responsibility to describe them in ways that support meaningful discovery and engagement?

This article argues that prioritizing scale in digital repository workflows can come at the expense of meaningful descriptive metadata, limiting discovery and obscuring the historical and cultural significance of digital objects. Drawing on literature in critical cataloging, slow librarianship, digital archives, and the ethical concept of care, this article positions metadata creation as an interpretive and ethical practice rather than merely a technical process. Grounded in my professional experience transitioning from traditional cataloging to digital collections metadata creation, the article draws on reflective practice to examine the value of care-based metadata approaches. To illustrate these approaches in context, it includes a case study on descriptive metadata choices made for the Forest City Hospital digital archive, which documents the history of Cleveland’s first integrated hospital. Because the archive centers on efforts to achieve medical equality for both patients and medical professionals, the case study provides a relevant context for examining how care-based descriptive decisions can support discovery, contextualization, and ethical representation. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of practicing care-based metadata amid current pressures to automate metadata work through AI. It also advocates for sustained investment in labor, expertise, and ethical judgment that enable contextual, relational, and care-driven description.

More Product, Less Meaning? Access vs. Meaningful Access

Contemporary digital archive practices have been deeply shaped by the legacy of Greene and Meissner’s “More Product, Less Process” (MPLP) framework, which privileges efficiency and scale over detailed description.⁶ MPLP advocates for minimal processing in order to make more collections accessible in a timely manner, emphasizing “collection-level intellectual control” over more time-consuming item-level work. For many archivists, this pragmatic approach was regarded as a necessary adaptation to address decades of inadequate staffing, continually expanding collections, and the ethical urgency to make hidden materials more visible to researchers. Greene and Meissner’s research found that over half of donors, researchers, and resource allocators had become dissatisfied with archives due to processing backlogs.⁷ Within this context, MPLP offered a way for the archival profession to respond to mounting criticism, demonstrate institutional accountability, and make more collections available despite limited resources.

While this approach has played a crucial role in addressing archival backlogs within a traditionally understaffed and underfunded field, its emphasis on minimal processing has had unintended consequences when applied to digital collections, where users rely heavily on metadata to facilitate discovery and interpretation. Despite this shift in user interaction, many digital repositories continue to rely primarily on collection-level, box-level, or folder-level metadata. Although comprehensive statistics on descriptive practices in digital repositories across institutions are rather limited, available studies suggest that item-level metadata remains the exception rather than the norm. For example, a 2023 study of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) digital library found that out of their 550 published collections in 13 different digital repositories, only 96 collections had item-level metadata (approximately 17 percent).⁸ While there are many staff and funding limitations to providing item-level metadata for every collection, another major barrier to item-level description is that MPLP-informed descriptive practices are still actively defended within the archival profession. As Hardman observes, “Over time, archivists came to defend this approach as the art of ‘just enough’ description: a calibrated labor that balanced evidentiary care against finite resources.”⁹

By prioritizing quantity over enhanced descriptive metadata, extending MPLP-informed workflows into digital repositories creates a disconnect between the goal of increasing access to archival collections and the actual use of those collections. While GLAM institutions may view mass digitization efforts as significantly increasing accessibility, the lack of contextual metadata can inhibit discovery and limit meaningful engagement. This raises an important question about what constitutes meaningful access in digital archives. Empirical research supports this concern. Therrell’s user study on digital image retrieval from the New York Public Library (NYPL) digital collections (characterized by minimal, collection-level descriptive metadata) versus a Flickr collection (with more item-level descriptive terms assigned to each image) showed that users had a significantly more difficult time retrieving images from the NYPL digital repository.¹⁰ Likewise, Therrell cites Chapman’s study at North Carolina State University which showed that images with enhanced metadata were about four times more likely to be discovered by repository users.¹¹ This evidence suggests that heavy reliance on collection-level metadata in digital repositories may impede the discoverability of digital objects.

This limitation grows even more evident when considering the fundamentally different ways users interact with digital collections. In digital environments, access is mediated almost entirely by whether a user’s search terms match the often-minimal metadata assigned to each digital object. While MPLP may have been an effective solution for uncovering hidden collections in physical archives, it cannot be applied in the same way to digital repositories without losing important contextual meaning. Physical archives typically include a reference archivist who can help users navigate collections by supplying context, explaining collection provenance and organization, and helping users to interpret the significance of materials. In digital repositories, however, this human intermediary is largely absent, often without the addition of enhanced metadata to compensate for this loss.¹² Without either a knowledgeable intermediary (i.e., the archivist) or sufficiently rich descriptive metadata, users may struggle to develop a solid understanding of digital collections, resulting in a lack of meaningful access. When metadata is limited to collection-level description with minimal item-level enhancements, digital objects may be technically accessible yet functionally invisible or difficult to interpret. In this context, applying MPLP principles reveals a critical mismatch between the goals of efficiency and the realities of digital access.

This mismatch also underscores the distinction between access and meaningful access. Within MPLP-informed frameworks, access is often equated with availability—the mere presence of materials in a repository, regardless of the depth or quality of their description. When transitioning to digital archives, however, meaningful access requires more than the mass digitization of objects; it depends on the presence of thoughtfully produced, object-specific metadata that enables users not only to locate materials but to interpret and critically engage with them. Without enhanced descriptive metadata, digital repository users may not be able to discover or contextualize the meaning of the digital objects. In this sense, minimal metadata shifts the burden of interpretation from the archivist onto the user, requiring a level of background knowledge, persistence, and interpretive labor that many users may not possess.¹³ Meaningful access, therefore, must be understood not simply as the ability to retrieve an item but as the ability to comprehend its context, significance, and relationship to broader historical and cultural narratives.

From a humanistic perspective, privileging minimal description raises important ethical concerns, especially in the context of archival collections of underrepresented or historically marginalized groups. If we consider collection-level metadata sufficient, the historical and cultural significance of digital objects may be obscured, and the narratives of those represented within them diminished or misinterpreted. In this way, carrying the MPLP-based description workflows into the digital repository not only limits discoverability but also risks perpetuating marginalization and reinforcing the silencing of already underrepresented groups. Reframing descriptive metadata creation as an act of care—one that provides item-level context and relational understanding—challenges this paradigm. It underscores that meaningful access requires not only making digital objects available online but also providing thoughtful, enhanced descriptions that foster deeper engagement and understanding.

The Intersection of Critical Cataloging and Slow Librarianship

Critical cataloging has been defined as “a social justice-oriented style of radical cataloging that places an emphasis on radical empathy, outreach work, and recognizes the importance of information maintenance and care.”¹⁴ As such, scholars in critical cataloging and metadata studies have long challenged the notion that description is an objective or purely technical act. Rather, metadata creation is increasingly understood as a subjective and interpretive practice that reflects and reinforces a particular viewpoint. As Gartner puts it, “There is nothing objective about metadata: it always makes a statement about the world, and this statement is subjective in what it includes, what it omits, where it draws its boundaries, and in the terms it uses to describe it.”¹⁵ Similarly, Melissa Adler demonstrates how cataloging practices can “actively produce, reproduce, and privilege certain subjects and disciplinary norms,” while simultaneously obscuring or excluding resources associated with marginalized communities.¹⁶ Emily Drabinski further extends this critique by stressing the contingent and socially constructed nature of cataloging—particularly classification systems and controlled vocabularies—arguing that they are always situated within specific historical and political contexts and are therefore inherently unstable and subject to continual revision.¹⁷

The evolving body of work in critical cataloging forums illustrates the role of metadata not only as a tool for description but as a mechanism that shapes knowledge production, ideology, visibility, and access. However, in order to thoughtfully consider these multifaceted aspects of description, digital repository practitioners must reconsider the extension of MPLP-based workflows into digital description and create conditions in which metadata work can be slowed down enough for care, reflection, and context to shape descriptive decisions. In metadata practice, slowing down may involve taking time to research historical context, consider the implications of controlled vocabulary choices, create or refine authority records, identify harmful language, and reflect on how description shapes user interpretation. This is where recent scholarship about slow librarianship comes into play. As Hoffner explains, when considered in the context of metadata work, the slow librarianship movement can be understood as a further extension of critical cataloging.¹⁸

Inspired by the Slow Food movement of the 1980s, the slow librarianship movement has been defined by Meredith Farkas as “an antiracist, responsive, and values-driven practice that stands in opposition to neoliberal values.”¹⁹ Farkas suggests that to engage with slow librarianship means to engage with library work in ways that remain good, human(e), and thoughtful. In order to practice goodness, we must recognize “that libraries have not always been good for everyone.”²⁰ In other words, slow librarianship calls on us to intentionally recognize and challenge the structures, practices, policies, and assumptions that harm, exclude, exploit, or oppress both patrons and library workers. In a human(e) library, both workers and community members are valued as whole people, rejecting the hyper-productivity expectations that can degrade library workers and their relationships with the community.²¹ Additionally, a human(e) library provides the time, space, and funding for library workers to learn, reflect, and grow in their profession and as human beings.

While the ability to slow down and contemplate what is good, human(e), and thoughtful is necessary to enact care in descriptive metadata, institutions must also align their strategic priorities, staffing models, and workflows in ways that give workers the time and support needed to engage in this work. Slow librarianship thus offers a framework for resisting library workplace cultures shaped by neoliberal values, particularly those that prioritize productivity, efficiency, and output over reflection, relationality, and care. Julia Glassman’s research further elaborates on this, suggesting that “if we reject the capitalist drive to constantly churn out new products and instead take a stand to support more reflective and responsive practices, we can offer our patrons services that are deeper, more lasting, and more human.”²² This framework is especially useful for approaching metadata creation through a critical, reflective, and care-based lens. For metadata practitioners, this may mean resisting workflows that treat description as a neutral production task and instead allowing time for decisions about subject headings, naming, and historical context to be made with greater deliberation.

Understanding metadata as inherently interpretive and value-laden provides a critical foundation for conceptualizing metadata creation as an ethical practice grounded in care. This recognition is especially important for digital collections, where metadata often serves as the primary point of interaction between users and materials. As such, ethical considerations in metadata creation are not ancillary to access but central to it. The following section explores how feminist care ethics offers a framework for understanding and enacting this approach in descriptive metadata practice.

Metadata as Care

Among the many conceptual frameworks applied to metadata in library science and archival literature, feminist care ethics offers a particularly humanistic lens that can be applied to descriptive metadata practices. Rather than treating metadata as a neutral or technical activity, a care ethics perspective can position metadata creation as an ethical and interpretive act carrying implications for representation, access, and meaning. Over the past decade, the concept of care has gained increasing prominence in archival discourse, most notably by Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, whose framework assumes “that archivists have affective responsibilities to other parties and posit that these affective responsibilities should be marked by ‘radical empathy.’”²³ By “affective responsibility,” Caswell and Cifor refer to the ethical obligation of archivists to acknowledge and engage with the emotional and relational dimensions of their work.

Among the four affective responsibilities they propose, the first calls on archivists to engage empathetically with the creator of the resource, allowing this relationship to inform appraisal, description, and preservation decisions.²⁴ Second, they posit that archivists have a responsibility to the subjects or communities represented in archives—who may have been represented without their consent—requiring that special attention be paid to their perspectives, voices, and the historical inequities they may have experienced. Third, archivists must consider the affective experiences of users, recognizing that encounters with records are often deeply personal and shaped by the presence or absence of meaningful description. Fourth, archivists have “responsibilities towards unseen others” to account for community members that may be impacted by archival representation.²⁵ These four responsibilities position archival work as a relational practice grounded in care, a framework that can be productively extended to the creation of descriptive metadata for digital collections.

Recent scholarship on community-led and participatory archives further demonstrates how this framework can be enacted through descriptive metadata practices. Jae Kim’s research points out that community-led archives, particularly those centered on marginalized identities, “have long challenged traditional archival description by prioritizing relational, political, and affective approaches to metadata.”²⁶ Kim’s case studies examining the Sexual Minorities Archives, Trans City, and the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal provide examples of marginalized communities directly participating in the description of their own community’s archival materials to ensure more accurate representation of their lived experiences and cultural histories. In these contexts, metadata functions as a form of “radical care,” one that resists standardization in favor of practices that foster accessibility, belonging, and community sovereignty. As Caswell et al. discovered in their interviews with community archive workers, the description of archival content can produce either “profoundly negative affective consequences of absence and misrepresentation” or “the positive effect of complex and autonomous forms of representation in community-driven archives,” depending on how care is enacted in descriptive practices.²⁷ Thus, metadata becomes capable of fostering not only discovery but also emotional validation, critical engagement, and a sense of belonging for users. In this way, metadata is not only descriptive but relational, shaped by and responsive to the communities it represents.

Expanding the idea of metadata as care even further, Chadha-Sridhar’s conceptualization of care as a “thick ethical concept” solidifies feminist ethics as a useful framework for understanding metadata creation as both descriptive and interpretive. Chadha-Sridhar has interpreted Williams’s theory on care as a thick ethical concept to mean that “unlike thin terms or concepts that merely evaluate something as good or bad, right or wrong in a thin sense, thick terms and concepts combine description and evaluation.”²⁸ This argument suggests that using care as a thick ethical concept means that we are not only describing what something is or what is happening, but we are also using evaluative judgments to determine what is ethical or appropriate in a situation.

Following this theoretical framework, metadata can also be understood as a practice that operates through thick ethical concepts. Like care, metadata can act as a contextual and relational device that can either reveal or obscure. Creating descriptive metadata is not just describing an object in simple terms, it is an act that requires interpretation, valuation, and critical thought about how an object will be understood. Like care, metadata functions both as a practical activity shaped by institutional constraints and as an ethical practice with consequences for representation, access, and meaning.

When metadata is understood as both a form of care and a thick ethical concept, enhanced descriptions and interpretations become especially noticeable in practice. This distinction can be seen by contrasting minimal transcription and context-rich description. For example, when writing descriptive metadata for a digitized cassette tape labeled “Memorial service for M. H. Lambright, Jr., 1999,” a minimal transcription of this label could be considered sufficient for some repository practitioners. However, when metadata is understood as a thick ethical concept, the act of description also involves evaluative judgment. The metadata practitioner can decide what contextual information is necessary for users to understand the significance of the recording. In this case, the decision to include biographical and historical context reflects an evaluative judgment about the importance of Lambright’s role in both his associated institution and the broader history of Black medical professionals. This approach results in a more context-rich description, such as the following: “Digitized audio cassette tape from the memorial service for Middleton H. Lambright, Jr., MD (1908-1999), undated but likely recorded soon after Lambright’s passing on June 14, 1999. Lambright and his father were founders of Forest City Hospital, and Lambright Jr. was the first Black physician to obtain full hospital privileges in Cleveland.”²⁹

This example illustrates how care-centered approaches to metadata creation can reshape descriptive practices. Applying a feminist care ethics framework to metadata creation can help shift descriptive practices for digital archives away from heavily standardized or efficiency-driven models toward approaches that more fully acknowledge social justice concerns.³⁰ As Jolicoeur explains, “utilizing an approach grounded in care ethics to construct a relationship between the metadata creator and the people who are the creators and subjects of the archival materials can provide better descriptive metadata.”³¹ This method not only enhances discoverability but also supports more inclusive, equitable, contextualized, and meaningful engagement with digital collections. Ultimately, digital archive users benefit most directly from descriptive metadata created with care, as richer contextual description can reduce the interpretive burden placed on users and help them better understand the relationship between a digital surrogate, the broader collection, and the historical communities represented within it.

Case Study: Metadata as Care in the Forest City Hospital Digital Archive

To illustrate how feminist care ethics can be applied in practice, this section examines a metadata project undertaken for the digitization of the Forest City Hospital (FCH) archival collection, held at the Dittrick Medical History Center. Forest City Hospital was founded in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1957, by a group of primarily Black physicians who aspired to address the inequities in obtaining medical training and employment for doctors and nurses of color in the Cleveland area. In 2023, the Dittrick received the Ohio Local History Alliance digitization grant, which was used to fund the digitization, description, and ingest of the collection into Case Western Reserve University’s digital repository, Digital Case. Despite being an impactful and unique collection with significant importance for detailing the struggles of minority healthcare workers and the local history of Cleveland, it has been largely obscured due to a lack of virtual access, limited physical access, and a severe lack of descriptive metadata in the finding aid.

The collection was donated to the Dittrick Medical History Center around the 1980s, and consists of approximately 10 linear feet of documents, photographs, and audiovisual materials across 18 archival boxes, resulting in over 11,000 digital objects ingested into Digital Case. This collection presented both an opportunity and a challenge for staff at the Kelvin Smith Library (Case Western Reserve University’s central library) responsible for its digital description. The central question became how to create metadata that not only facilitated discovery but also honored the historical and cultural significance of the institution and the community it served.

The Limitations of More Product, Less Process in Digital Archives

One of the first lessons from this project concerned the limitations of applying “More Product, Less Process” (MPLP) principles to digital collections. While MPLP processing may have been effective for increasing access to the physical materials in the Forest City Hospital collection, it did not translate well into the digitized environment. Since multiple people across departments were working on this project within a highly segmented workflow, it was difficult for each staff member to anticipate what would be needed further down the line to produce quality work for the digital repository. Consequently, the MPLP-based organization of the collection heavily impacted how each folder was digitized, which in turn created issues later when creating descriptive metadata.

Many issues arose from the collection’s minimally processed state and the segmented digitization workflow, including a lack of chronology and deduplication, which led to inefficiencies throughout the process. Since the collection was quite large and multiple people were involved in digitizing the materials, it was not realized until the metadata creation step that many documents had been digitized multiple times. This inefficiency led to wasted staff time and increased costs for digital storage space. In some cases, the metadata librarian identified and excluded duplicates before they were ingested into the digital repository. However, when duplicates were spread across multiple archival boxes and reviewed over a long period, they were sometimes missed. The chronology of business documents was also negatively affected by MPLP processing, as documents were digitized and combined into compound objects in the order in which they were received. As a result, many compound objects—often consisting of large groups of documents from a particular period—were not arranged in strict chronological order. Although the documents were generally presented in approximate chronological order, occasional inconsistencies may frustrate users attempting to navigate these often-large compound objects, which can take considerable time to load in the digital repository.

Another issue resulting from the MPLP processing of the FCH collection was the late discovery of documents that should have been redacted or excluded due to sensitive information (e.g., Personally Identifiable or Protected Health Information). Although the donors had consented to public access, it was not possible to determine whether individual FCH patients had consented to the inclusion of their personal or health-related information in the collection. Concerns may also extend to the descendants of former patients. As a result, several digitized items later required redaction or removal before ingestion into the digital collection.

Perhaps the biggest challenge posed by the MPLP processing of this collection was the lack of accompanying folder-level or object-level metadata, aside from brief titles written on folders and boxes, and a very brief finding aid that included the names of the donors. This meant that all descriptive metadata had to be created from scratch, resulting in a much larger time commitment than originally anticipated when the library was consulted for the Ohio Local History Alliance digitization grant application. Although the grant funding did not come close to covering the staff hours needed to adequately create the metadata, the institution decided that the project would remain a high priority due to its major contributions to local history and to documenting the lived experiences of underrepresented communities. For approximately one year, the metadata librarian carefully documented the history of FCH through item-level descriptive metadata in a way that would honor the legacy of important community members and uncover the voices hidden within the archival collection.

Descriptive Decisions as Acts of Care

Applying a care-based approach to metadata required deliberate reflection on how the individuals represented in the collection described themselves and their institution, and how those perspectives might inform their representation in the metadata. This required conducting background research on the hospital by synthesizing its founding documents, news articles related to the hospital, and any accompanying information on the founders that was included in the archival collection. Despite the hospital’s historical significance, initial research revealed relatively little documentation about Forest City Hospital on the open web, which further underscored the importance of applying a care-centered approach to the creation of metadata in this collection. Care was a crucial component in documenting the significant history of this institution, which had long been hidden in the archives.

Although the founders of FCH are no longer living, their intentions in establishing Forest City as “a hospital for the medical and surgical care of persons without regard to race, creed or color” were made explicitly clear in the founding documents preserved in the archival collection.³² This led to careful consideration of which Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) would be used for each digital object record in this collection. As many scholars in the critical cataloging community have noted, LCSH can exhibit strong “othering tendencies” that present “historically marginalized people as fundamentally different from white heterosexual men.”³³ Because the founders themselves had confronted racial exclusion and marginalization within the medical community, care was taken not to reproduce similar forms of othering in the digital object metadata.

While Forest City Hospital was frequently described by news outlets at the time as a “Black hospital,” archival evidence indicated that its founders emphasized its role as an inclusive institution serving all communities.³⁴ As a result, subject headings such as Hospitals–Ohio were selected over more racially specific terms (such as African Americans–Hospitals–Ohio), except in cases where race was directly relevant to the context of the item, such as an essay documenting the need for medical care in the Black community. Similarly, when describing individuals within the collection, care was taken to avoid reinforcing white normative assumptions. For instance, the broader LCSH Physicians was used instead of African American physicians unless the object being described had explicitly addressed someone’s racialized experience as an African American doctor. This decision reflects an awareness of how descriptive choices can unintentionally position whiteness as the default and demonstrates how metadata can either reproduce or resist dominant narratives. Although much of cataloging and metadata work is grounded in standardized schemas and controlled vocabularies, that does not mean that metadata professionals need to reproduce the biases, limitations, or historical misrepresentations embedded within those systems. As Beler and Färdig explain, “information professionals also hold the potential to resist and reframe these structures through more inclusive, community-informed approaches.”³⁵

The decision to avoid certain racialized controlled vocabulary at the item level was therefore one application of care in this project. However, regardless of whether Physicians vs. African American physicians or Hospitals vs. African Americans–Hospitals were selected for each item-level record, both choices have ethical consequences that should be taken into consideration. Racializing every Black physician or hospital can reinforce whiteness as normative and contribute to othering, while omitting racial identity altogether can make Black medical history less discoverable by limiting results when researchers conduct subject heading searches.³⁶

To mitigate the potential loss of discoverability resulting from the omission of racialized LCSH at the item level, racialized LCSH were originally applied to the collection-level metadata so that the top-level FCH collection would appear in a broader range of search results. Under this approach, item-level records would not explicitly label authors or subjects as African American physicians or African Americans–Hospitals unless the individual self-identified or the item explicitly addressed racial identity or racialized experiences, but researchers could still locate the broader collection when conducting searches using these subject headings. However, after migrating to a new digital repository system, the option to include collection-level metadata was no longer available. The new repository does, however, index OCR-generated full text for keyword searching, creating additional access points that may partially mitigate the loss of collection-level subject headings. Full-text keyword access does not replicate controlled subject access, but it provides another mechanism through which researchers may encounter materials when relevant racialized terminology appears within the OCR-indexed text of the digital objects. Thus, the various metadata structures, indexing capabilities, and search features of a digital repository are additional factors to consider when performing subject analysis for a digital collection.

Because there is not a one-size-fits-all method for assigning subject headings when working with collections representing historically marginalized communities, care should be taken to evaluate the best option for each digital collection. Some catalogers use racialized vocabulary when a creator or subject self-identifies with that identity, while others develop local subject headings that may better account for identities inadequately represented by LCSH.³⁷ Metadata professionals may also engage directly with represented communities to identify community-preferred terminology or to invite direct participation in the creation of descriptive metadata. For example, the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal (PPWP) hosts a collaborative digital archive in which participating Indigenous communities contribute directly to the description and contextualization of their cultural heritage materials.³⁸ More broadly, research on community archives that represent groups “marginalized by race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender and political position” demonstrates that community participation in descriptive decision-making can have a transformative impact on how people understand themselves and engage with the histories of their communities.³⁹

Naming, Authority, and Representation

Another significant challenge in the FCH project involved establishing consistent and meaningful access points for individuals and organizations not represented in existing authority files, such as the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF) or the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF). As this was a local history collection, very few of the people and organizations had been established in existing authority files. To address this, local authority practices were developed to ensure consistent naming while remaining responsive to the identities and contexts of the individuals represented.

Throughout the project, a spreadsheet was maintained to establish local authority control for each person or organization identified as a creator or subject of the archival objects. Because individuals’ names appeared in multiple forms across the collection, it was necessary to use locally standardized forms in the author and subject fields to ensure that the repository’s linking functionality worked effectively, allowing users to easily retrieve all digital objects associated with a given person or organization. For example, if the name Mrs. U. G. Mason was written in the author field of one digital object, the repository would not recognize it as the same individual represented in another digital object that had been authored by Melbahu Bryant Mason (the same individual). Many of the women who contributed to the founding and administration of FCH were also wives of doctors or hospital administrators and were frequently identified in the archival materials as “Mrs. [husband’s name].” In order to bring more recognition to the work these women did for the hospital, efforts were made to identify each woman’s own name by comparing different forms of the name across multiple objects and utilizing census data when available.

With the exception of replacing the “Mrs. [husband’s name]” convention when possible, naming practices followed principles similar to those of the Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO), with the most frequently used form of a name selected as the local authorized form for this collection. In addition to utilizing these local authority practices, as a member of the Ohio NACO funnel group that creates Name Authority Records (NARs), the metadata librarian was able to create many official NARs for key individuals and corporations in the FCH collection who had authored materials in the 20th century but had not yet been established in the LCNAF. While it was not possible to create NARs for every individual represented in the collection, care was taken to establish the most prominent historical figures and organizations. This work extended standardized access points for these historically marginalized individuals and organizations beyond the local repository, increasing their potential visibility across other library catalogs and discovery systems that incorporate LCNAF authority data, such as WorldCat.

Metadata and User Experience: Mitigating Harm and Supporting Engagement

A care-centered approach to creating the FCH descriptive metadata also required consideration of the affective responsibility owed to users of the digitized collection, including how they might feel about and interpret these objects. Historical materials often contain outdated or harmful terminology, raising important ethical questions about transcription and description. In this project, the original language was preserved in the transcription of newspaper titles, thereby maintaining the historical accuracy of the article. However, when either the title of an article or the content contained language that would now be considered outdated or offensive, additional contextual information was provided by including a statement on potentially harmful content within item descriptions and repository policies. While each repository and collection may require different terminology, the statement on potentially harmful content that was first created with this collection stated the following:

Digital Case provides access to historical and primary sources that may include language or content that is outdated, biased, offensive, or harmful. When such language or content is present in our repository, it is used solely to preserve the historical accuracy of the language, culture, and time period from which the content originated. If you are concerned about the language or content displayed in this record, please contact us at: digitalcase@case.edu.

While this statement was originally created with the FCH archive in mind, it is now utilized in various other collections where potentially harmful content is displayed. This approach balances historical accuracy with an empathetic awareness of the emotional impact that outdated and offensive language may have on users, particularly those from marginalized communities. This allows the metadata to function not only as a descriptive tool but also as a mechanism for harm reduction and historical contextualization.

Metadata as Care in Practice

Taken together, these decisions demonstrate how metadata creation can function as an act of care. Rather than simply facilitating access, the metadata created for the Forest City Hospital collection actively shapes how the collection is understood, who is visible within it, and how users engage with and interpret the significance and meaning of each digital artifact. This case study illustrates that care-driven metadata is not an abstract ideal but a set of concrete practices that require time, reflection, and ethical consideration. By prioritizing context, representation, and user experience, metadata can move beyond minimal description to become a tool for amplifying historically marginalized voices and fostering more meaningful access to digital collections.

Returning to Caswell and Cifor’s work mentioned in the Metadata as Care section, the descriptive decisions made throughout this project aligned with the affective responsibilities of archivists. The metadata librarian sought to engage empathetically with the creators and communities represented in the FCH collection by grounding descriptive decisions in archival evidence of how individuals described themselves, their institution, and their experiences. This approach is reflected in the careful consideration of subject headings and other descriptive choices intended to avoid reinforcing dominant assumptions or further marginalizing the experiences of individuals and organizations within the collection. At the same time, professional interpretation cannot substitute for the representational authority of the communities being described. Because direct consultation with descendants or community members was not feasible within the constraints of the project, these descriptive decisions should be understood as informed efforts to apply care rather than definitive statements about how those represented in the collection would choose to describe themselves. Community consultation and participation would provide an important extension of this care-based approach by allowing represented communities to exercise greater authority over the language used to describe their histories.

Finally, the affective experiences of users were also addressed through the inclusion of contextual statements regarding harmful or outdated language and the creation of metadata intended to support meaningful access without requiring specialized knowledge. Altogether, these practices demonstrate how descriptive metadata can serve as a site of care while also illustrating the limits of professional interpretation. Ethical description requires attention not only to what is described and how it is made meaningfully accessible, but also whose knowledge and authority inform the descriptive process.

Implications for Practice amid the AI Zeitgeist

The tension between scale and meaningful access in digital repositories creates a difficult set of competing pressures for digital repository practitioners to navigate. On the one hand, the administrative goals of an institution may pressure workers to expand rapidly what is available in the digital environment. On the other hand, the inability to find time for the creation of item-level metadata that fosters meaningful access can pose both an operational constraint and an ethical concern.

In the current zeitgeist, in which many GLAM institutions are rapidly exploring ways to utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to replace or supplement human descriptive work, the idea of slowing down to enact a care-based approach to digital object metadata may seem counterintuitive. However, the push to utilize AI in digital archives should be approached with caution. While AI-assisted tools may help with metadata tasks such as extracting text through optical character recognition (OCR), generating keywords or potential controlled vocabulary terms, and brainstorming classification options, they cannot entirely replace the contextual, relational, and interpretive labor needed to create historically accurate and ethical descriptions for digital archives.⁴⁰ As Emilie Hardman states, “AI is often framed as a backlog solution, and it is easy to understand why, in a field shaped by scarcity and deferral, that pitch lands. But if ‘efficiency’ becomes the primary story, the field will lose control of outcomes. The core question is not how quickly repositories can generate more description. The core question is whether users can locate, understand, and responsibly interpret primary sources at scale.”⁴¹ If we turn to generative AI to replace human metadata labor, we risk perpetuating the issues identified with MPLP-based workflows while placing trust in technologies whose training data, design priorities, and embedded assumptions may not reflect the expertise of archivists, librarians, or metadata practitioners.⁴²

Furthermore, many archivists and metadata professionals have serious concerns about the use of generative AI in archival collections, particularly those containing information on historically marginalized communities.⁴³ Researchers Abdulhalik Pinar and Andrew Cox analyzed fifty-four case studies on the use of AI in libraries and archives from 2018 to 2024 and identified several practical and ethical limitations for the use of AI. These include algorithmic bias in large language models, historical inaccuracies caused by biased or incomplete datasets, the decontextualization of sensitive historical events, inconsistencies in metadata standards, interoperability barriers, and the ongoing need for human oversight of AI-generated work.⁴⁴

Generative AI can also hallucinate, overgeneralize facts, and use incorrect or outdated language.⁴⁵ This can be particularly detrimental in collections representing marginalized groups, as reliance on outdated terminology may obscure their histories and identities. Even when AI-generated metadata appears consistent with dominant descriptive frameworks, human intervention remains necessary to identify colonial, racialized, or politically driven narratives that may obscure the experiences of marginalized communities.⁴⁶ For example, research on cataloging choices in Palestinian digital archives has shown that cultural heritage repositories may need to resist dominant controlled vocabularies, such as Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), in order to “resist Israeli erasure of Palestinian history and provide evidence in support of the ongoing Palestinian struggle for liberation.”⁴⁷

Thus, while generative AI may be helpful in assisting metadata work, it cannot replace the human expertise needed to create good, human(e), and thoughtful metadata that is contextual and adapted to the needs of the community it represents.⁴⁸ As Nicole Coleman states, “we need to bridge the chasm between engineering technology and humanistic values.”⁴⁹ In addition to bridging the technical gap, we also need to bridge the gap between digital repository practitioners and institutional leadership in order to explain the importance of care-based metadata work. Practitioners of slow librarianship emphasize the importance of institutional support in providing a workplace culture that provides the time and space for reflection, contemplation, relational work, and intellectual exploration.⁵⁰ The pertinent question, then, is whether institutions will use AI to support human expertise within care-based workflows or to further devalue the labor required to make access meaningful.

Ultimately, this article argues that GLAM institutions must intentionally invest in skilled metadata labor as a necessary foundation for meaningful access to digital collections. As this paper has demonstrated, the persistence of minimal, collection-level description in digital repositories is not solely a functional limitation but a reflection of institutional priorities that undervalue the work of creating and sustaining meaningful engagement with digital collections. Becker, Kumer, and Langer argue that digital collections labor is often positioned as secondary to the stewardship of physical collections, resulting in inconsistent and unsustainable digitization practices, as well as precarious labor conditions for those responsible for this work.⁵¹ Their concept of “access is people” underscores that meaningful access depends not simply on technological infrastructure but also on the expertise, collaboration, and sustained labor of archivists, metadata specialists, and digital collections staff.

Addressing these challenges requires a shift toward shared stewardship models in which metadata work for digital collections is recognized as core archival labor rather than supplementary support.⁵² This includes investing in staffing structures that allow metadata practitioners the time and capacity to engage in thoughtful, item-level description, as well as fostering collaborative workflows that bring together archivists, metadata practitioners, administrators, and community members to support more inclusive and reflective descriptive choices. When supported by their institutions, metadata practitioners have real agency in shaping how users interact with digital archival collections. Without such institutional support, efforts to expand access through digitization risk reproducing the limitations identified throughout this study, in which collections are made available online but remain insufficiently described and therefore difficult to discover and interpret meaningfully.

Conclusion

This article has argued that the prioritization of scale in digital repository workflows, shaped in part by MPLP-informed practices, often limits meaningful access by reducing descriptive metadata to decontextualized technical data. Drawing on literature in archival practice, critical cataloging, slow librarianship, feminist care ethics, and a reflective case study of the Forest City Hospital digital archive, it demonstrates that metadata creation is not a neutral or primarily technical task but an interpretive and ethical practice that shapes how digital collections are discovered, understood, and valued. When metadata is treated as an afterthought, digital objects may be technically accessible yet remain difficult to locate or interpret, obscuring the historical and cultural significance of the materials and the communities they represent. Reframing metadata as an act of care highlights the importance of context-rich, intentional description that supports not only discovery but also equitable and meaningful engagement. Ultimately, meaningful access to digital archives is not achieved through digitization alone but through institutional support and investment in the labor, expertise, and ethical decision-making that make digital collections interpretable and relationally connected to the users and communities they serve. By giving metadata practitioners the time, support, and agency to practice metadata as care, institutions can demonstrate their sustained commitment to preserving the histories and cultural heritage currently hidden beneath collection-level metadata. After all, more product, without meaning, is not access—it is absence in another form.

Notes

• 1. Karen Snow, “A Study of the Perception of Cataloging Quality Among Catalogers in Academic Libraries” (PhD diss., University of North Texas, 2011), 157, https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc103394/.
• 2. Karin Hansson, “Metadata as Imaginary Demands: Exploring Metadata Markets in Digital Heritage with Speculative Design,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 76, no. 2 (2025): 415, https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24806.
• 3. Kate James, “Exploring AI Uses in Archives and Special Collections: Integration, Entities, and Addressing Need,” Hanging Together, October 14, 2025, https://hangingtogether.org/exploring-ai-uses-in-archives-and-special-collections-integration-entities-and-addressing-need/.
• 4. Melissa Adler, Cruising the Library: Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge (Fordham University Press, 2017), 2, EBSCOhost.
• 5. Kathleen Fear, “User Understanding of Metadata in Digital Image Collections: Or, What Exactly Do You Mean by ‘Coverage’?” The American Archivist 73, no. 1 (2010): 27, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.73.1.j00044lr77415551; Barbara Lewis and Melanie Griffin, “Special Collections and the New Web: Using LibGuides to Provide Meaningful Access,” Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship 23, no. 1 (2011): 26, https://doi.org/10.1080/1941126X.2011.551091.
• 6. Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner, “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing,” The American Archivist 68, no. 2 (2005): 214, 237, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.68.2.c741823776k65863.
• 7. Greene and Meissner, “More Product,” 212.
• 8. Stephanie M. Luke et al., “Changes in Digital Collections and Their Metadata: A Longitudinal Study of UIUC Digital Library,” Journal of Library Metadata 24, no. 3 (2024): 153, 156, https://doi.org/10.1080/19386389.2024.2338015.
• 9. Emilie Hardman, “Like It or Not, AI Has Arrived in Archives. Now Is the Time for Archivists to Take the Reins,” Katina Magazine, March 19, 2026, https://katinamagazine.org/content/article/open-knowledge/2026/like-it-or-not-ai-has-arrived-in-archives.
• 10. Grace Therrell, “More Product, More Process: Metadata in Digital Image Collections,” Digital Library Perspectives 35, no. 1 (2019): 2, https://doi.org/10.1108/DLP-06-2018-0018.
• 11. Therrell, “More Product,” 4.
• 12. Anne J. Gilliland, “Questions of Age, Questions of Evidence: Contemplating the Complexities of Archival Metadata for Historical Korean and Korean American Materials,” paper presented at the DCMI 2023 Conference, Daegu, South Korea, November 7, 2023.
• 13. Emilie Hardman, Bridging Capacity and Care: A Field Report on Archives and Special Collections (JSTOR, 2025), 2, https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep70507.
• 14. Brian M. Watson, “‘There was Sex but no Sexuality*:’ Critical Cataloging and the Classification of Asexuality in LCSH,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 58, no. 6 (2020): 548, https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2020.1796876.
• 15. Richard Gartner, Metadata: Shaping Knowledge from Antiquity to the Semantic Web (Springer International Publishing Switzerland, 2016), 4, EBSCOhost.
• 16. Adler, Cruising the Library, 2.
• 17. Emily Drabinski, “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction,” Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 83, no. 2 (2013): 102, https://doi.org/10.1086/669547.
• 18. Bailey Hoffner, “Slow Metadata and the Paradox of Human(e) Systems,” in Slow Librarianship: Reflections and Practices, ed. Ashley Rosener (Library Juice Press, 2026), 391.
• 19. Meredith Farkas, “What Is Slow Librarianship?” Information Wants to Be Free, October 18, 2021, https://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/2021/10/18/what-is-slow-librarianship.
• 20. Farkas, “What Is Slow Librarianship?”
• 21. Farkas, “What Is Slow Librarianship?”
• 22. Julia Glassman, “The Innovation Fetish and Slow Librarianship: What Librarians Can Learn from the Juicero,” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, October 18, 2017, https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2017/the-innovation-fetish-and-slow-librarianship-what-librarians-can-learn-from-the-juicero/.
• 23. Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives,” Archivaria 81 (2016): 24, https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13557.
• 24. Caswell and Cifor, “From Human Rights,” 33–37.
• 25. Caswell and Cifor, “From Human Rights,” 38–39.
• 26. Jae Kim, “Metadata as Radical Care: How Community-Led Archives Reimagine Descriptive Practices,” The iJournal: Student Journal of the Faculty of Information 10, no. 2 (2025): 138, 142, https://doi.org/10.33137/ijournal.v10i2.45416.
• 27. Michelle Caswell et al., “‘To Be Able to Imagine Otherwise’: Community Archives and the Importance of Representation,” Archives and Records 38, no. 1 (2017): 5, https://doi.org/10.1080/23257962.2016.1260445.
• 28. Ira Chadha-Sridhar, “Care as a Thick Ethical Concept,” Res Publica 29, no. 3 (2023): 407, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-023-09580-9; Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1985), 143–45.
• 29. “Memorial service for Middleton H. Lambright, Jr., MD,” metadata record, described by Lisa M. Longenecker, Digital Case, accessed April 9, 2026, http://hdl.handle.net/2186/ksl:2006228070.
• 30. Caswell and Cifor, “From Human Rights,” 23.
• 31. Kiley Jolicoeur, “Practicing Care: A Look at the Application of Care Ethics to Metadata Creation and Remediation,” Libraries’ and Librarians’ Publications 208 (2022): 1, https://surface.syr.edu/sul/208.
• 32. Ulysses G. Mason, Jr., “Beginning and Development of Forest City Hospital,” February 5, 1953, transcript of speech, Forest City Hospital Archival Collection, box I, part 1, folder 3, Dittrick Medical History Center, https://hdl.handle.net/2186/ksl:2006227695.
• 33. Sara A. Howard and Steven A. Knowlton, “Browsing Through Bias: The Library of Congress Classification and Subject Headings for African American Studies and LGBTQIA Studies,” Library Trends 67, no. 1 (2018): 77, https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2018.0026.
• 34. “Editor Cites Need for Black Hospital,” Cleveland Press, March 25, 1972, Digital Case, https://hdl.handle.net/2186/ksl:2006229845; Mason, “Beginning and Development of Forest City Hospital.”
• 35. Katherine Knox Beler and Malin Färdig, “Metadata as Resistance: A Case Study on Language, Power, and the Cataloging of Palestinian Cultural Heritage” (master’s thesis, University of Borås, 2025), 3, https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1989266/FULLTEXT01.pdf.
• 36. Tammie Busch et al., “Liaising the Catalog: Collaborating Across Library Departments to Promote Successful Discoverability Through Enhanced Cataloging,” College & Research Libraries 84, no. 2 (2023): 281–82, https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.84.2.280.
• 37. Eric Willey and Angela Yon, “Applying Library of Congress Demographic Group Characteristics for Creators,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 57, no. 6 (2019): 351, https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2019.1654054; Peter Spyers-Duran et al., “Juvenile Biography Collection: EDI Analysis and Enhancement,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 60, no. 8 (2022): 836, https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2022.2134246.
• 38. Kim, “Metadata as Radical Care,” 146.
• 39. Caswell et al., “‘To Be Able to Imagine Otherwise,’” 5–6.
• 40. Alireza Noruzi, “The Use of Artificial Intelligence in Knowledge Organization and Subject Indexing,” Informology 3, no. 1 (2024): 2.
• 41. Hardman, “Like It or Not, AI Has Arrived in Archives.”
• 42. Lise Jaillant et al., “How Can We Improve the Diversity of Archival Collections with AI? Opportunities, Risks, and Solutions,” AI & Society 40 (2025): 4457, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-025-02222-z.
• 43. Abdulhalik Pinar and Andrew Cox, “An Analysis of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Capability in Libraries and Archives,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 63, nos. 6–7 (2025): 580, https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2025.2539790.
• 44. Pinar and Cox, “Analysis of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Capability,” 580–83.
• 45. Manon Reusens et al., “Large Language Models to Make Museum Archive Collections More Accessible,” AI & Society 40 (2025): 4485, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-025-02227-8.
• 46. Beler and Färdig, “Metadata as Resistance,” 33–34.
• 47. Roxy Moon, “Outside the Locus of Control: Palestinian Digital Archives Resist Israeli Settler-Colonial Erasure,” Journal of Palestine Studies 52, no. 4 (2023): 37, https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2024.2304322; Beler and Färdig, “Metadata as Resistance,” 33.
• 48. Farkas, “What Is Slow Librarianship?”
• 49. Jaillant et al., “How Can We Improve the Diversity of Archival Collections with AI?”, 4457.
• 50. Robbyn Lanning, “Indigenizing Citations at the Camosun College Library: A Case Study for the Convergence of Slow Librarianship and Goodness Theory,” in Slow Librarianship: Reflections and Practices, ed. Ashley Rosener (Library Juice Press, 2026), 281; Melanie Griffin, “Slow Strategic Planning: Encouraging Relational Work in Archives and Special Collections,” in Slow Librarianship: Reflections and Practices, ed. Ashley Rosener (Library Juice Press, 2026), 163; Elizabeth Rivera and Laura Semrau, “Building Collaborations and Connections Through Slow Librarianship,” in Slow Librarianship: Reflections and Practices, ed. Ashley Rosener (Library Juice Press, 2026), 60.
• 51. Stephanie Becker et al., “Access Is People: How Investing in Digital Collections Labor Improves Archival Discovery & Delivery,” in The Lighting the Way Handbook: Case Studies, Guidelines, and Emergent Futures for Archival Discovery and Delivery, ed. Mark A. Matienzo and Dinah Handel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Libraries, 2021), 32, https://doi.org/10.25740/gg453cv6438.
• 52. Becker et al., “Access Is People,” 29.

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