All posts tagged with decolonialisation

In the first part of this blog series, I explained a portion of the analyses I performed during my time as an intern for the Biodiversity Heritage Library (July-August 2021). These analyses revolved around metadata patterns in BHL’s collection that highlight shortcomings in terms of diversification in the Library’s catalogue. In that post, by focusing on comparative metadata and the case of BHL México, I argued that an outreach plan that included the establishment of global partnerships between BHL and institutions in the Global South was a solid strategy to diversify the Library’s collections. This same argument is sustained by the second portion of the analyses I performed during my internship and that I present here, which deal primarily with patterns of associations and representation in the subject lists of BHL’s materials and the specific case of Central America and Panama.

The goal of the second part of my internship was thus to identify semantic patterns in subject lists that highlight the diversification—or lack thereof—in materials about Latin American biodiversity contained in BHL.

During my time as an intern for the Biodiversity Heritage Library (July-August 2021), I worked on a project, I hope, will help engender important and critical conversations around the Library’s work and responsibilities vis-á-vis the sometimes harmful and problematic origins of its materials, as well as around the possibilities for the decolonization of its collection and archival practices. By focusing on the case of Latin America and her biodiversity, the main goal of this project was to identify patterns in the metadata of BHL’s collection that can inform decolonial policies and strategies for the diversification of the Library’s catalogue.

To identify such patterns, I extracted and analyzed the metadata of materials that include a subject related to Latin America in their subject lists. These analyses shed important light on diversification issues, specifically in the case of this region.

Lidia Ponce de la Vega is a Ph.D. Candidate in Hispanic Studies at McGill University. As part of her dissertation, she is analyzing the BHL collection from the perspective of Latin America to understand how the region produces and engages with biodiversity knowledge and how knowledge of Latin American biodiversity produced elsewhere represents the region and its nature. As part of this process, she has conducted a critical study of the BHL México program to understand how users in Latin America engage with BHL’s collections as well as how the program can help decolonise biodiversity knowledge and help inform best practices for decolonising digital archives more broadly.