It’s Juneteenth during Pride Month and neither of those were celebrated when I was a kid. I’m not THAT old, so it’s been a pretty swift and welcome shift in inclusion, if too hard-fought to get here with many more steps to go. Somedays it feels like that arc toward justice is being yanked back, so what can we do to help bend it along? Vote in local elections for people who value equality, spend money accordingly, expect fairness from those in your lives then call them out when they fall short, and stand up for those with less power. We can’t pretend it ends when we enter our workplaces, or when we are working in DAM.
DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) should expand from seminars in HR to best practices in DAM building. Our DAMs rely on the metadata, tagging, keywords, and structure we people provide. Just as the garbage-in-garbage-out fears we discuss when it comes to AI, the data we include in our DAM depends on the people who generate the input.
I learned a lot from other takes on DEI and DAM (from Tenevos, Acquia, and Henry Stewart) over the years along with explorations in stock photos and video that felt lacking. When you used to type in “diverse” in a photo search you’d see the same smiling faces of racially-ambiguous groups of people. Over time, there have been marked improvements as both the sources of content and those working in our field have come from different backgrounds, races, genders, and geographic areas to diversify content and give accurate naming to our assets. More voices mean more opportunities to learn and adapt our DAMs accordingly by:
collaborate with a diverse group of people and listen to others’ perspectives
maximize accessibility to ensure more users can enjoy the DAM
review past keywords and update any that now seem outdated or offensive
keep a spirit of curiosity over certainty as you build
look around the room and see what perspectives you may be missing
do research when you are unsure of the right wording
think through local diversity - racial and ethnic populations vary by region
learn about a variety of cultures’ holidays and celebrations
listen respectfully to tough feedback (feedback is a gift)
don’t minimize the importance of naming
review these resources on inclusive language: Wikipedia’s List of Perjorative Terms for People, Adelphi University’s Guide to Inclusive Language, The Conscious Style Guide, Cataloging Lab harmful content statement
None of us - or our DAMS - will be perfect, and we will continuously need to learn and grow to build systems that reflect the full experience of our users. As DAMs become more sophisticated - using AI, LLMs, Generative AI, and even long-existent tagging capability at a larger scale - we will need to make sure the information we are providing them gets more sophisticated too.
Fantastic post and perspective on DEI opportunities with DAMs. Thank you!