[Metadatalibrarians] Announcing the Collective Responsibility Labor Forum White Paper

[Ruth Kitchin Tillman]

On behalf of the Collective Responsibility project team, we are pleased to
announce the release of our white paper, Collective Responsibility: Seeking
Equity for Contingent Labor in Libraries, Archives, and Museums. You may
download the paper at: http://laborforum.diglib.org/white-paper/ and view
it and more project documents in our OSF repo: https://osf.io/af9hz/

The Collective Responsibility project seeks to address the specific
problems of precarity that grant-funded positions in digital library,
archive, and museum work create and reproduce, and how those positions
impact the lives and careers of workers, particularly workers from
marginalized and underrepresented populations. The project’s work consists
of two phases:


   -

   Developing a collective understanding of worker experiences
   -

   Constructing best practices, recommendations, and benchmarks appropriate
   to participating institutions and funders


This white paper presents the outcomes of the first phase. It draws worker
experiences from a pre-forum survey and outcomes of Meeting 1: Experience,
which took place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, over 1.5 days, April 24-25,
2019. Goals for this forum were:


   -

   To provide a space for workers to share their experiences and thoughts.
   -

   To better understand each other’s experiences and build solidarity.
   -

   To identify commonly-shared negative experiences and reflect on the
   structures and systems that perpetuate them.
   -

   To identify structures that promoted wholeness or minimize harm.
   -

   To reflect on how we may use what we’ve learned to create structural
   change.


This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and
Library Services LG-73-18-0236. We are deeply grateful for the assistance
of our advisory board, the engagement of the participants and white paper
reviewers, and those at our institutions who made this project and paper
possible. Page 2 of the white paper contains a fuller acknowledgment of
this work.

In solidarity,

Sandy Rodriguez & Ruth Tillman, Co-PIs

Emily Drabinski, Amy Wickner, & Stacie Williams, Co-Investigators