Gender and Race in Carolina Digital Repository Content Methodology Review

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Kati, Rebekah
- ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3497-8432
- Affiliation: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. University Libraries

Abstract

In 2021, I conducted a review of subject area, gender and race representation in three Carolina Digital Repository (CDR) projects. The goal of the review was to determine if the content produced by the three projects were representative of the demographics of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). I used a publicly available, widely distributed list of faculty members who self-identified as Black, indigenous or a person of color and compared the list to CDR deposits. Also, I used a frequently cited API tool to determine author gender, based on recommendations from several bibliometrics studies. At the end of the review, I recommended further research and reflection on ways to identify gender and race of CDR authors in an accurate and ethical manner. This report represents the first step in that reflection, and it will be an ongoing and iterative process. For this assessment, I first looked at studies which estimated race and/or gender composition of their subjects. I then categorized the methodologies to determine the most used. In this follow-up review, I will report on the results of my investigation into alternate methods to identify gender and race of authors, provide an evaluation of the previous study based on my findings and provide a recommendation for future work.

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