Practicing Care: A Look at the Application of Care Ethics to Metadata Creation and Remediation

Abstract

The process of creating and stewarding descriptive metadata is often approached with a focus on standardization. However, 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. The improvement is focused on allowing digital archives to give people appearing in the archive the respect and attention they deserve, as well as providing important historical information to users. This paper details a concept-in-practice discussion of the employment of an approach grounded in care ethics on the remediation of a collection with harmful legacy descriptive metadata.