March is Human Rights Month, and this month we also celebrate South African Library Week, with the theme, “Libraries: telling powerful stories.” A vital part of making these stories available in our libraries is in the way we describe and categorise them, by using cataloguing standards like Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), Sears List of Subject Headings, and the Dewey Decimal Classification System (DDC).

IGBIS, your Interest Group for Bibliographic Standards, recognises the ethical challenges in respecting the right of individuals and communities to be inclusively and respectfully described in library collections. IGBIS wants to create awareness of the actions that librarians can take to support more representative metadata in their collections, and to share information on how information professionals can effect change in the standards we use to create this metadata.

We are very fortunate to have Violet Fox as a guest speaker on Tuesday 28 March. Violet has played a visible role in the critical cataloguing movement which advocates for the acknowledgement and support of marginalised and unheard groups in cataloguing and classification practice. Violet will speak to the changes undertaken in Sears Subject Headings – a descriptive standard used in South African public libraries – and how librarians can themselves enact change in metadata.

Violet Fox is a Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at Northwestern University's Galter Health Sciences Library in Chicago. She is a previous editor of the Dewey Decimal Classification and the Sears List of Subject Headings as well as the creator of the Cataloging Lab, a resource for cataloguers to collaborate and experiment with creating controlled vocabularies. Find her on Twitter at @violetbfox.