Ka Wai Hāpai is a project aimed at creating a framework to organize information according to Hawaiian epistemology. Part of the foundation of this work is understanding the ways that our current knowledge organization tools are unequal to this task. There is a long tradition of criticism of established knowledge organization systems, including subject heading creation. One prominent issue is the way that non-Western groups were named, and the way their material has been shuffled to the side. Though there has been improvement in how people are portrayed and the way materials are organized, changes come slowly in large, national systems. In the the case of the Library of Congress Subject Headings, the power to create or edit terms is kept in a very limited number of hands.
Incremental changes are also not adequate to address the inequalities inherent in the underlying system. These systems are a product of the place and time they were created, and continue to be bound by those conceptions of the world. The neutrality they profess to maintain, then, is an illusion. “Neutrality in knowledge organization activities is so hard to achieve that all kinds of biases permeate mainly due to socio-cultural influence” (Olson)
Arguments on the ethical side of cataloging/knowledge organization favor reparative work. This is noted in Cataloguing Code of Ethics accepted by ALA in January 2021, which asserts that all standards are biased and those who provide metadata for them must strive to negate their own biases. In Melissa Adler’s “The Case for Taxonomic Reparations” she urges that work be done to redress biases and elisions in cataloging and metadata practices.
Recently OCLC has published a community-oriented agenda for approaching this work. There are clear inequities in both the kind of information provided and the level of detail that resources receive based on the biases of systems such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings, the Library of Congress Classification, and the Dewey Decimal classification.
In more recent years, the need for different taxonomies to represent specific groups has led to the creation of many projects, including the Homosaurus, the Brian Deere Classification, and The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology Project, all interested in representing a fuller domain of knowledge and redressing the harm that traditional knowledge organization systems have caused to those that don’t fit their definitions or worldviews. Ka Wai Hāpai will, through integrating Hawaiian worldviews and ways of knowing in our system, pave the way for future reparative work for Hawaiian materials.
Bibliography:
Adler, Melissa (2016), “The Case for Taxonomic Reparations”, Knowledge Organization Vol. 43 No. 8, pp. 630-640.
Beghtol, C. (2002), “A proposed ethical warrant for global knowledge representation and organization systems”, Journal of Documentation, Vol. 58 No. 5, pp. 507-532. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410210441
Brian Deer Classification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Deer_Classification_System.
Cataloging Ethics Steering Committee (2021), “Cataloguing Code of Ethics”. http://hdl.handle.net/11213/16716.
Frick, Rachel L. and Merrilee Proffitt (2022), “Reimagine Descriptive Workflows: A Community-informed Agenda for Reparative and Inclusive Descriptive Practice.” https://www.oclc.org/research/publications/2022/reimagine-descriptive-workflows.html.
Homosaurus. http://homosaurus.org
Littletree, Sandra, and Cheryl A Metoyer (2015), “Knowledge Organization from an Indigenous Perspective: The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology Project”. Cataloging & classification quarterly, Vol. 53 Nos. 5-6, pp. 640–657. https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2015.1010113.
Olson, Hope A. (1998), “Mapping beyond Dewey’s Boundaries: Constructing Classificatory Space for Marginalized Knowledge Domains”, Library Trends Vol. 47 No. 2, pp. 233–254. http://hdl.handle.net/2142/8210.
