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This submission has been accepted for WikiConference North America 2023.

Museums, archives, galleries, and libraries have balanced their responsibility to protect the world’s most important cultural artifacts with their roles as important pillars of public education. However, these goals become increasingly at odds with each other if the institution doesn’t take a deliberately decolonial, and anticolonial, stance on the metadata that accompanies the object even to open access destinations like Wiki Commons, Internet Archive, and Curationist. Left unexamined, these records still carry the legacies of colonization, visible in the metadata of digitized collections from major institutions like the British Museum.

This presentation outlines the necessary role of decolonial practice in GLAM-field digitization projects as well as in the digital tools that make this content available to public audiences. By centering on the co-developed metadata tools of Curationist, we will offer not only an introduction to this platform and its uses to digital art and open education, but also a method of online community development that centers indigenous data sovereignty, community engagement, and decolonization practices to rebalance the power dynamic in collections-based open education.

presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1l87CLzBJSEbQWoe5FWjx1eAKUGTXPD6iLXTNlqaYxbM/edit?usp=sharing