Communications and Workflows

Executive Summary 

In an effort to address the potential for harm and distress to users and staff resulting from use of PUL's digital collection content, the following documents existing endeavors and offers recommendations to help develop best practices for communication and workflows across the Library. This document also highlights areas where active cultivation of specific competencies is recommended, especially as workflows become more distributed across the Library.

Stakeholders

Staff who are primarily involved in digitization workflows span multiple units and departments within the library, including: 

• Scholarly Collections and Research Services
• Special Collections
• ADAPT
• Preservation & Conservation
• Curators
• Public Services
• ITIMS
• CaMS
• IT
• Digital Studio

For collections that may contain materials with harmful content, library units involved in the digitization workflow should develop and document the work staff within those units should engage in at each step.

Current Practices 

While there may be practices at other branch libraries of which this Working Group, made up of staff based in Firestone and Mudd Libraries, is unaware, practices around flagging and addressing harmful content, where they exist, are currently largely unstructured and ad hoc, which puts staff at risk for inefficiencies and duplication of effort. These include:

• Staff member reports to supervisor when content is encountered during digital projects work; the manager then works ad hoc to get the item evaluated for risk 
• A library user reports content to a PUL staff member, particularly public services or reference staff, who then triages the request and refers it to a governing party in the Library; this may be their manager, and/or primary stakeholder(s) for the content or its method of discovery (example: DPUL stakeholders if the content is first discovered in http://dpul.princeton.edu/; Library Communications if the content is presented in advertising materials). 
• The Digital Projects Operations Group (DPOG) evaluates materials at a high-level when digitization project proposals are brought to them for review.

• The ADAPT team currently has a formal workflow, which focuses on providing a means for staff and users to report harmful language and optionally suggest a correction.  Staff and users are encouraged to use the Suggestion a Correction form to submit feedback about description. Feedback is routed to a LibAnswers queue that is managed by members of the ADAPT team.

Recommendations

These recommendations apply to all personnel, internal and external, doing quality control throughout the digital projects process.

Workflows

• Streamline, synchronize, and document the workflows.
• Develop a space in Confluence with a comprehensive list of documentation across departments.
• Consider making some public-facing documentation in Confluence for reference by PUL staff and to share with other institutions doing this work.
• Ensure that staff who work with vendors for digitization have established avenues to engage with them about assessment of content for potential harm if possible.
• Ensure that all teams are aware of workflows around the library and relevant staff categories /points of contact.
• Those who manage digital projects/create digital collections should indicate whether materials include or may include harmful content if known, for example, noting this in the digital proposal form. This will give staff who will be involved in the project more awareness of the risks associated with the content, and can inform workflows.
• Digital project proposal forms should include a question/section about the potential for harmful content.

Communication

• When harmful content is identified by staff or users: a unified feedback form described in the Statement on Harmful Content, which goes to an appropriate LibAnswers queue based on the source of the content, should be used. The expectation is that specific teams, particularly those who manage description, will actively monitor these queues and address feedback as appropriate.  
• If redundancies or gaps in workflow or communication are identified, this should be reported to the Digital Projects Operations Group as well as other library-wide groups such as DSSG identified as appropriate, for evaluation and correction.
• Content types, which include existing digital content and pre-digitized content, and appropriate groups to respond and triage this feedback are identified below. The groups identified should consult with selectors and curators as appropriate.

Considerations 

• The following areas of knowledge/skill/competency have been identified as necessary for comprehensive evaluation:
• Knowledge of the scope and purpose of the collection to which the content belongs
• Cultural competence (for example, training) for learning from harmed individuals about the issue, in order to better understand and learn to reduce harm in the future 
• Individuals for language fluency to assist in review
• Cultural awareness and empathy
• Understanding of options for protected access
• Consider developing a statement of recommendation for the Library to provide training to staff in these areas.
• Consider developing cultural competency training as part of PUL onboarding requirements for new staff.