The Université Laval library decolonizes even its research tool. For the past few months, a vast project has been working to dust off the lexicon that allows you to browse the institution’s catalog to introduce terms that are more respectful of the First Peoples.
Gone are the days when you had to write “American Indians” to find a document on indigenous peoples in the university database.
The lexicon is modernized to respond to contemporary sensibility. “First Peoples” and “Aboriginal Peoples” have therefore recently entered the subject headings directory (RVM), the document indexing tool that lists terms and expressions useful for research.
It is a way, explains Susanne Brillant, librarian of the UL and responsible for this initiative, to make the repertoire evolve at the same pace as society “to remove, little by little, the colonial and Eurocentric biases that remain . »
This updating process is carried out in close collaboration with the first parties concerned. The library team collects the point of view of various partners from the First Nations and Inuit of Quebec before implementing the changes.
“I bring problematic subject headings to workshops to submit them to our First Nations partners who have their say,” says Susanne Brillant. I would like that for all the subject headings which concern the First Peoples, we use this methodology to validate them. »
UL’s RVM has some 339,000 subject headings and grows by some 7,000 new entries per year. Since April, around 1,500 corrections have taken place – a first milestone among many more to come.
“This is the first step of a first phase, insists the manager. There are still disrespectful expressions, but much less than before”. The changes will multiply at the rate of consultations, she continues, and will take effect on the first day of each month.
“For the moment, the project is limited to subject headings related to the First Peoples who inhabit the territory of Quebec, specifies Susanne Brillant. Secondly, the revision will affect those related to the other Canadian provinces, then to the countries of America. »
Here, there is no question of doing tabula rasa of the past: the corrections do not eliminate the terms deemed disrespectful since it is rather a matter of adding a vocabulary more suited to contemporary reality to broaden the search lexicon. “Our famous ‘American Indians’ will stay there, concludes Susanne Brillant. We do not erase anything: we add and enrich ourselves. Researchers who work with an old corpus, there are certain vocabulary words that date and must remain. »
Created in 1946, Université Laval’s RVM became the standard for Canadian indexing in French in 1976. Its modernization goes far beyond the Quebec campus since more than 180 libraries in Canada and around the world rely on its directory to guide their research tools.