NETSL 2023 Annual Conference

The Trans Metadata Collective (TMDC; https://transmetadatacollective.org/) is a group of dozens of cataloguers, librarians, archivists, scholars, and information professionals with a concerted interest in improving the description and classification of trans and gender diverse people, subjects, and resources in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums, and Special Collections (GLAMS) and other information systems. The Collective’s primary goal was to develop a set of concrete, actionable best practices, which was collaboratively authored, reviewed, and released by a smaller subset of the collective as *Metadata Best Practices for Trans and Gender Diverse Resources* (https://zenodo.org/record/6829167). Many members of the TMDC – and the vast majority of the report’s authors and reviewers – fall under the trans umbrella, which makes many of these issues unavoidable for us and addressing these challenges a personal, political, and professional necessity. Approaching our work with TMDC as more than passion, but as necessity, informed both our process of non-hierarchical, collaborative decision-making and our final report as something practical and actionable across institutional context and professional backgrounds.

Cornell University Library formed an Inclusive Descriptive Practice Task Force in 2021, dedicated to examining metadata practices and identifying methods to acknowledge the subjective nature of cataloging and archival descriptive practices. This session will give an overview of the formation, structure, and outputs of some of the subgroups in this task force, including examples of unexpected challenges and some successes thus far.