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Student profile: The quiet power of metadata
While the main goal of the Downtown Eastside Research Access Portal (DTES RAP) is to make research materials related to the Downtown Eastside easier to find and access, it also provides, along with the Making Research Accessible initiative (MRAi) broadly, innumerable student learning opportunities.
Through class projects, iSchool Professional Experience placements, and paid Work Learn roles, the DTES RAP has become a site for learning about, and contributing to, community-oriented information work. Students have opportunities to build practical skills while engaging with larger questions about ethical research, community knowledge, access, description, and the responsibilities of higher education institutions.
Since 2016, one of the most sustained of these opportunities has been the MRAi Student Librarian Work Learn position, supervised by Aleha McCauley, Community Engagement Librarian at UBC Library’s Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, with support from the UBC Learning Exchange. As a paid graduate-student role, the position gives emerging information professionals the time and support to contribute meaningfully to the work while developing their own community-oriented professional practice.
Below, Student Librarian Kendall Wilber reflects on the importance of ethical research, partnering with grassroots orgs, and why metadata matters to accessibility
Name: Kendall Wilber
Pronouns: she/her
Role: MRAi Student Librarian, Work Learn
Faculty: Arts
Program: Masters of Library and Information Studies
Hometown: Bend, Oregon USA
How did you hear about the MRAi project?
I first heard about the MRAi project and the DTES RAP in one of my core courses for the MLIS program. It was LIBR 506: Human Information Interaction. The DTES RAP was brought up and shown to the class as an example of a website that tries to make resources easier to navigate and browse for the general public. Then, I also engaged with the DTES RAP in LIBR 507: Foundations of Research and LIBR 559L: Issues in Scholarly Communication.
What did you do as part of the project?
I first made a video for the DTES RAP in LIBR 559L: Issues in Scholarly Communication. My video was a 5-minute research summary of the article, “Identity and Survival in the Multimedia Art of Street-Involved Youth” by Jennifer Hardwick. The goal of the video was to communicate Hardwick’s research findings in a more accessible way than a written research article. After I took that class, I had the opportunity to work for the MRAi as the Student Librarian in a UBC Work Learn position. In this role, I located articles, reports, and other materials to add to the DTES RAP, and I expanded the collection by uploading them. I also wrote the metadata for these materials and reached out to the authors to let them know about the RAP. Near the end of my time, I compiled a collection report, or “snapshot” for the RAP. This report highlighted collection growth in different areas, such as the topics, genres, and categories.
How did your understanding of the Downtown Eastside change?
In learning about the MRAi’s mission, I learned how exploitative research can be for the Downtown Eastside residents. I appreciated reading “Research 101: A Manifesto for Ethical Research in the Downtown Eastside” because it calls for not only more ethical ways of doing research, but demonstrates how research can be made more effective by involving members of the community. Going off of that, a lot of the materials that I evaluated for the RAP explored community and university partnerships as well as the idea of lived expertise. There are many more grassroots organizations and peer programs involved in university research than I initially realized. I hope that more community members are given an active role to play in both research and social programs.
How did your understanding of the issues around academic scholarship or open access change?
I got to learn a lot about academic scholarship processes and different layers of information access in this role. Before working as the Student Librarian, my knowledge was pretty limited. Now, I have a good grasp on the differences between open access, restricted access, and public items. Another key piece of knowledge I gained was that there can be several pathways to making a work open access. Before this role, I only knew of a way with hefty fees for the author. However, I learned that university repositories (such as cIRcle, UBC’s open access repository where many of the items in the RAP are preserved) are a free path to making work available to the public. I wish that more university authors and researchers were aware of their institutional repositories, so that they could continue to grow. However, it was encouraging that the vast majority of the resources I added to the RAP were already open access. This communicates to me that authors and universities want to make more materials available for free reading.
What did you like most about the role?
I really like that this role gave me so much experience with writing metadata. Metadata is information about the item, such as the date, author, description, and other details. Throughout my time, I got to practice writing descriptions and presenting items on the RAP with a public audience in mind. Metadata helps with online accessibility in more ways than one. If you search for items related to the Downtown Eastside on the RAP website, you already have to know about the RAP for that to work. Metadata, however, adds descriptions to the items themselves, allowing them to show up in other search engines such as Google. Metadata is also the first information that someone sees when they go to an item page on the RAP. It’s important that this information is easy to read and understand.
I also think it’s important that universities continue to strengthen their partnerships with the public community. I’m glad that I could help uncover a lot of research on the Downtown Eastside and make it easier to find. Much of the work that comes from universities gets buried or hides in an exclusively academic space, and the DTES RAP is one way that it could become more visible and therefore aid the community. Finally, I really enjoyed making the collection report/snapshot for the RAP. It gave me some great experience with cleaning data and creating information visualizations. Visual design is something that I’ve always liked.
How would you like to see the project or role develop?
Some of the pages on the RAP are in need of updates, so it would be nice to see the Student Librarian take on more of a web editing role. For example, I would love to see the Projects and Resources pages revitalized. Right now, there is a need to help the public determine which research projects are active and which are not. I also hope that the RAP can explore preserving more community materials again. During my time, I mainly focused on adding academic research to the collection, but I know in the past the RAP included more newsletters, pamphlets, podcasts, and even zines. If the project could continue to extend its reach to these types of materials, I think both students and community members would appreciate that.
