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Emma Booth (she/her)

@emmabooth.bsky.social

990 followers 680 following 820 posts

Manchester Metadata Maven UK Librarian & Open Access supporter. Discovery drives the Collection; Metadata drives Discovery; #MetadataMatters Opinions my own. https://linktr.ee/emmabooth https://orcid.org/0009-0008-1

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Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · Sep 11

📢 @cilipmdg.bsky.social Practical Cataloguing Webinar Series starts Wed 24th Sept! 🐈📚📖

#Webinars will showcase #library #metadata experts & practitioners discussing & exploring everyday #cataloguing challenges to support development of your metadata skills.

www.cilip.org.uk/events/Event...

Reposted by Emma Booth (she/her)

Open Access Books Network @oabooksnetwork.bsky.social · 10h

OA WEEK: Next week (20-26 October) is #OAWeek!

At the OABN, in collaboration with @copim.bsky.social , we've gathered as many online events as we can find that relate to OA books or open infrastructures & shared the details in this post:

👉 openaccessbooksnetwork.hcommons.org/2025/10/15/i...

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Reposted by Emma Booth (she/her)

Copim @copim.bsky.social · 1d

[EVENT] We'll be joining @openlibhums.org to celebrate #OAWeek

👉 Mainstreaming Diamond: Regional perspectives, Shared Futures

Hear key voices from the diamond #OA community to share what their respective organisations are doing to support and advance #DiamondOA

Register now 👉

Webinar: Mainstreaming Diamond: Regional perspectives, Shared Futures

Date: Friday 24 October 2025 Time: 1:00 - 2:30 pm BST | 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm CET. Check your timezone here. Registration: Free. Please register here. Reflecting on this …

buff.ly

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Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 1d

All of this takes time, expertise, and technical skills across a variety of specialist teams across the Library.
Maybe our user communities don't really care about the labour that goes into managing Library collections. But it doesn't mean we should hide it from them when we promote our collections.

Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 1d

Reality is that Library staff:
- evaluate content to identify relevance to our users
- negotiate the best possible licences for access
- enable seamless authenticated access
- upgrade metadata to ensure that the content is as discoverable as possible
#LibrariesMatter #MetadataMatters #HiddenLabour

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Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 1d

... I would also like to see clear acknowledgement that "the Library" doesn't just "acquire access" - as if all we do is pay some money to the provider and then the collections are just available and discoverable as if by magic.

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Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 1d

One piece of constructive feedback: announcements in the passive voice such as "Our newspaper coverage has also been updated" and "Many of our digital thematic clusters have been supplemented" can erase the work of those involved in making these collections available and discoverable...

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Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 1d

I was pleased to see this news story shared by my institution to promote the work we have been doing to expand our access to digital archival collections: www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/n...

New collections: widening the range of our digital archives

Significant developments include the completion of a number of online portfolios, notably the high-quality reference material of the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia series and the wide-ranging Global Is...

www.manchester.ac.uk

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Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 1d

A recording of this Reimaging Descriptive Workflows webinar is now available at: oclc.wistia.com/medias/u1ues...

Next up: Transformative Practices at @wellcomecollection.bsky.social & @tcddublin.bsky.social
15:00 (BST) on Wed 22nd Oct
connect.oclc.org/en/uki-reima...

#metadata #cataloguing #ethics

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Reposted by Emma Booth (she/her)

Anna Hughes @anna-r-hughes.bsky.social · 2d

Settling in with a cuppa to read this 🍵🍪👇

Open Book Collective @openbookcollective.bsky.social · 2d

🧵 The Open Book Collective is pleased to announce publication of our new report: Collective funding models for open access books: Librarians’ experiences and barriers to participation across six European contexts openbookcollective.pubpub.org/pub/report-o...

Report on librarians' barriers to participation in collective funding models for open access books

Announcing a new report published by the Open Book Collective exploring librarians’ experiences and barriers to participation in collective funding models for open access books across six European con...

openbookcollective.pubpub.org

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Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 6d

And a reminder that @cilipmdg.bsky.social are engaging with the UK cataloguing & metadata community about subject headings via a WorldCafe event on 26th November: www.cilip.org.uk/events/Event...

Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 6d

In the Q&A section of the webinar, we are addressing Subject Headings, LCSH in particular, and the impact that the terminology and language used in these headings can have on diverse audiences. Always worth mentioning the 'Change the Subject' documentary www.library.dartmouth.edu/digital/digi...

www.library.dartmouth.edu

Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 6d

Special Collections curators and Cultural Institutions are often leading the way in engaging with EDI as regards their collections, both in terms of the content that is included and the content that has historically been omitted or is missing.

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Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 6d

In order to create an inclusive spaces for diverse audiences to engage with collections, libraries need to be aware of and address that they are making available potentially harmful content.

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Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 6d

UK academic libraries have a responsibility to acknowledge the colonial legacy of their collections, & that historic collection-building has been informed by the biases of time period.

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Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 6d

Add now there's the challenge of AI-generated metadata entering the ecosystem as content providers and aggregators use Generative AI to produce content descriptions and apply subject headings and keywords.

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Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 6d

There is the added challenge of metadata derived from or directly delivered to libraries from external sources, whether this is from content providers, central indexes, or external bibliographic agencies. The volume of this metadata is immense; we cannot have eyes on every record!

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Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 6d

Legacy metadata posits a real challenge in this context - large research-intensive libraries with centuries of collection-building have a lot of data in different states, standards, schemas and formats. Much of the metadata requires remediation, but many libraries lack the resourcing to do this.

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Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 6d

In many cases, the items or collections brought to the group have not had a content warning applied to them directly; instead the subject terms and other descriptive metadata has been updated or enriched in order to provide greater context for users encountering these items.

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Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 6d

Various case studies have been brought to the group for discussion, including digital collections created by the Library via digitisation projects. It was important to consider potential harms of sharing harmful images as open digital collections that are readily discoverable online.

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Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 6d

The group considered best practices for the application of Content Advice Notes or Warnings at collection or item level across physical, electronic and digital collections. The later included images in Manchester Digital Collections and Manchester Digital Exhibitions.

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Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 6d

The library's metadata team is also committed to inclusive cataloguing principles, including changing subject headings and adopting more inclusive terminology wherever possible and practical. This covers a huge variety of content across numerous platforms.

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Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 6d

...it also acknowledges its duty of care towards library-users in contextualising potentially harmful language and content, in line with the CILIP Ethical Framework www.cilip.org.uk/page/ethics and the Cataloguing Code of Ethics sites.google.com/view/catalog...

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Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 6d

It also provides a form for contacting the library about potentially harmful content - this is not a complaints reporting mechanism. The library maintains its role in supporting the University's commitment to providing access to a broad range of material, however...

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Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 6d

This is not about censorship or discouraging people from engaging with library collections, it simply seeks to provide important contextual information about potentially harmful language, terminology, images or other content that they may encounter, and why that content is part of the library

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Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 6d

The group developed a series of webpages that launched in March 2025 to provide library-users with information about how the library manages and presents its collections, acknowledging and raising awareness regarding the context of library collections and collection-building.

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