Abstract
The Sacramento Movimiento Chicano and Mexican American Education Oral History Project preserves 125 oral histories from Chicana/o movement elders and documents their crucial firsthand accounts of civil rights activism in Sacramento and surrounding communities from 1965-1980. During the Spring of 2024, the Sacramento State University Library initiated a project to catalog these records, applying human-centered digital practices to provide robust access to these underrepresented histories.
In this project, we were very intentional about how these records were cataloged; there was a pre-existing need to repair relationships with the Chicano community, and thus we had an obligation to handle these stories with the utmost care and consideration. Claude AI was used as a trial run for metadata enhancement and support, which led us to establish a framework of best practices to help ensure that records were cataloged accurately and respectively. This framework included local best practices for describing and providing access to multilingual collections, the ethical implications of using AI for oral history metadata creation, as well as just a “how to!” (some of the contributors had never used any AI tool previously).
This presentation offers practical insights for institutions seeking to implement human-centered digital practices while navigating the ethical considerations of emerging technologies in cataloging historically significant, and/or underrepresented narratives. At the end of the session, there will be an open discussion about other ethical or human-centered considerations for using generative AI.