UBC ISCHOOL HOW TO
UBC ISCHOOL PROFESSIONAL

Part of it, I have to say, was Allan Cho, because I’ve been working with him on the UBC iSchool Equity, Diversity, Inclusion Committee. Q: Why did you want to participate in the EDI Scholars-in-Residence program? It’s very exciting to be in this place where libraries, museums and cultural institutions are finally starting to engage in a way that hasn’t happened before. Now we’ve moved on and created the Queer Metadata Collective, and that is almost a thousand people. That was one of the very first times that I’ve led a big organizational effort, and it was really wonderful to see it work and have people come together and produce this report in that way. If you’re doing a psychological survey on a trans community, here’s how you should label your data and talk about people. And not just catalogs, but information systems.

UBC ISCHOOL HOW TO

It’s a group of catalogers and archivists, from libraries, archives, museums, who all came together and created a set of recommendations on how to catalog. The Trans Metadata Collective just released a report. “It’s very exciting to be in this place where libraries, museums and cultural institutions are finally starting to engage in a way that hasn’t happened before.” So this award is part of that validation.

UBC ISCHOOL PROFESSIONAL

You want go to a big professional committee, and say, “Let’s talk about subject headings!” But you can’t, because they don’t know, so you have to walk them through it, starting with like names.

Sometimes it’s hard to explain what exactly libraries do. Winning the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship was a big a validation for me because I haven’t seen the sorts of things that I’m doing get that sort of recognition. Q: What has been the highlight of the last couple years for you professionally? Thankfully, over the course of the past five or six years, disability studies have become much more common, and there’s been a lot more built out around that, and that’s wonderful to see. Those things become professional challenges because they become part of the infrastructure around you when nobody else is in a position of power and authority who can tell you what it’s like to be a disabled person, and you’re the first one, in your life, to experience it. In my case, I was the only disabled person in my school, so that was also a very hard thing. In some ways, the personal challenge becomes a professional challenge.Ī lot of the time, when you are a student, you don’t have anybody to look up to, or a teacher that is familiar with your struggles. I’ve had a lot of professional challenges just being a disabled, queer and neurodivergent person-in life, in general, in school. Q: What have been your biggest professional challenges?

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