Key Takeaways:
- The Hispanic American Periodicals Index is being updated to include more accurate Indigenous names in Latin American and Caribbean communities
- Director of HAPI, Orchid Mazurkiewicz, describes her team’s work to better reflect and accurately represent the data
- The updated thesaurus in the database enhances discoverability for researchers
Accurate, respectful terminology plays a critical role in how researchers discover and understand scholarly content. For the Hispanic American Periodicals Index (HAPI), that responsibility has led to a focused effort to review and update Indigenous names across its thesaurus.
To explain the process, we talked with HAPI Director Orchid Mazurkiewicz about how the project took shape, the principles guiding the work, and how these updates are improving both representation and searchability for librarians, students, and researchers working with Latin American and Caribbean studies.
Can you give an overview of what this project is and how it began/what sparked its inception?
The project involves us researching indigenous names – we focused on Latin America and the Caribbean – to update our subject thesaurus. We apply subject headings to the article records that are in our database, and we index journals about Latin America and the Caribbean from all over the world. We use a modified version of the Library of Congress subject headings as our basis for our controlled vocabulary or thesaurus. So, while we look to the Library of Congress subject headings to start, we will modify those terms or even use a different term if we feel it’s not the correct term.
While doing our indexing work, we often come across articles noting that a commonly used term for an Indigenous group — often given by colonizers — is outdated, and that the group prefers another name. When we see that, we review our own headings and change X to Y.
But you don’t want to rely on just coming across those notes, so we decided to do a more systematic review of our Indigenous names. With our small team, we were lucky that the Latin American Institute at UCLA received Department of Education Title VI funding, which allowed us to hire a grad student to help with the research.
How does this project connect to HAPI’s broader mission as a bibliographic index?
HAPI is multidisciplinary, but we certainly have a ton of content that's related to the indigenous peoples of the region, whether that's history, anthropology, languages, literature, politics, or the economy. It's important that we have appropriate terminology in the database, and it also helps with findability as well. But it's important for us, as a database, to be respectful of the communities that we are trying to reflect in our content.
There are two guiding principles that are clear and that we wanted to adopt in our process as well. One of them is that you defer to endonyms – the name that the people call themselves. Even if that's a less commonly known name or less common in the literature, you defer to that name, rather than the name that an external group has imposed on the indigenous group. And the second principle, is a phrase that came out of the disability rights movement and it's “nothing about us without us.” It's been taken up by other groups to reflect that idea that you should be consulting with a group if you're going to be writing about them or representing them. We tried to prioritize these when conducting the work.
How do you identify and reach out to representatives of indigenous groups to confirm their preferred names? What challenges have you faced in this process?
Yes, there are challenges. With this project, we really had to rely on what we could find online. Our graduate student was trying to reach out to people and find groups that seemed connected to the community. By reaching out to them and trying to start a conversation, we were able to explain who we are, what the project is, and what our goals were. From there, we asked if they'd be willing to give us input on this. If we didn't have any opportunity to get that input, then we would rely on more secondary sources.
How is HAPI managing technical challenges related to search functionality when names change? How do you preserve discoverability for both historic and updated names?
We thought about this a lot, and we ended up creating a new field in our database that's basically an invisible field. It's attached to the subject record heading and it's a place where we can put more terms, but those terms are not displayed in the public record. We can put those outdated terms in what we're calling our invisible field, so if someone searches for that term, it returns the records that have the new, preferred term. This has been great because this allows us not only to make sure that there's findability for older terms that still might be in use but also spelling variations.
We're able to use that field in a lot of different ways now and it's not only improving discoverability for indigenous names, but it's going to improve searchability overall with our database which has inspired us to continue to push for this change.
What has been the most rewarding part of working on this project?
When you’re doing the work and you come across an article in the database that has a name that’s considered inaccurate and there’s a different term that’s preferred – it’s discouraging but knowing that we’re making an effort to change these terms, it feels good to be on the right track with that.
It’s been very satisfying to have opportunities to connect with people as well. They are giving us lots of valuable information and are so happy to be sharing their thoughts with us. Also, having this opportunity to reach out and tell people about our project has been quite rewarding as well.
Was there anything else you wanted to add or speak to?
We are a part of the Latin American Indigenous Peoples of the Americas Funnel Project, which is connected to making recommended changes to the Library of Congress subject headings. These funnels are groups of librarians and catalogers who are making recommendations for changes to a subject, and there’s a particular one that is making recommendations related to Latin American studies and indigenous peoples of the Americas. So, we are trying to get the work that we’ve done filtered back into the Library of Congress since it obviously impacts a lot of catalogs, libraries, and researchers.
We’ve also been sharing this information with EBSCO so that some of the content can be put into the EBSCO thesaurus. When people are doing searches in EBSCO, it's reflected in there as well.
