Digital Curator Mia Ridge writes...Following a twitter conversation with Jessica BrodeFrank and Isabel Brador in mid-2021, I collaborated with them and Bri Watson on two conference panels. Our first was ' Expanding and Enriching Metadata through Engagement with Communities' for the Museum Computer Network (MCN) conference in October 2021:

'This panel discusses how cultural institutions are engaging various communities to co-create academic research and/or object metadata in order to increase representation and access to collections; highlighting how this is done in different ways to engage specific audiences and goals, i.e. graduate student assistantships, museum interactive experiences, crowdsourcing, and professional action groups'.

Earlier this year we got together again to record a panel for the National Council on Public History (NCPH) conference held in May 2022.

'As social justice movements challenge power structures, the ways in which public historians and cultural institutions create expert knowledge are also under scrutiny. Instead of using traditional top-down approaches to cataloguing, public historians and cultural institutions should be actively co-creating object metadata and research with the public. Discussion centers on how public involvement enriches the narratives we share, building transparency and trust within organizations and the surrounding communities. We hope to present various ways in which institutions are beginning this work and focus on a variety of audiences from graduate students and emerging professionals, to online citizen science communities and onsite museum audiences'.

Panelists:

"Collaboration and Citizen Science Approaches to Enriching Access to Scientific Collections," Jessica BrodeFrank, Adler Planetarium and University of London

"creating names together: homosaurus international thesaurus & the trans metadata collective," B.M. Watson, University of British Columbia iSchool; Homosaurus; Trans Metadata Collective

"Embedding Crowdsourcing in a Collaborative Data Science Project", Mia Ridge, British Library

Isabel Brador Sanz, Wolfsonian-FIU

We're sharing the video we pre-recorded for the NCPH conference so that we can include more people in the discussion: Expanding Voices, Expanding Access: Social and Community Centered Metadata.