The Digital Initiatives & Scholarly Communication team is pleased to share our Core Principles of Access, Equity, and Intention. These Core Principles are the ideals that underscore our work within our team, with colleagues in ZSR and the Faculty Commons, and with Wake Forest faculty, staff, and students. At our team retreat in February 2020, we began writing team-specific mission, vision, and values statements. This work evolved into a set of holistic and unifying Core Principles. Our process involved identifying our individual and collective areas of work, brainstorming nouns and phrases that apply to and define our work, and individually drafting statements for each principle. We then harmonized and edited these descriptions to become our Core Principles. Our hope is that our shared commitment to Access, Equity, and Intention is visible in our work, and we invite our colleagues to engage with us around these Principles.
Access
Access enables our community to engage with, respond to, and expand the scholarly record and materials for teaching and learning. We actively work to remove barriers that hinder use and reuse. We commit to transparency in our processes, practices, and documentation. We facilitate projects with openness and access as core features, and we consider how audiences and users vary in their needs for a wide range of access points. Acknowledging that there are differences between what can and should be open, we work to make information as comprehensive as it ought to be while making considerations for fiscal sustainability, project scale, privacy concerns, cultural respect, and reducing harm.
Equity
Equity is how we embrace a full range of inquiry and human expression through the projects we support. Recognizing that equity is a practice, not an end goal, we invite a critical open exchange that guides a continual conversation. Ever mindful of our power and positionality, we work to ensure fair labor practices, decolonize knowledge, and confront inequities in systems of scholarship and teaching. We have an obligation to support projects that may not already be well-resourced or privileged, and we will actively create space for projects and ideas that might seem messy or unorthodox.
Intention
Intention describes our efforts to thoughtfully design projects that remain discoverable, accessible, and usable well into the future. We will implement practices that reduce the risks of information loss and prioritize technologies and preservation strategies that are most likely to support future use. We encourage project designs that meet current users’ needs while not predetermining what future users may need. We design with sustainability in mind and acknowledge that time or financial constraints may preclude indefinite project support.
3 Comments on ‘Core Principles of Access, Equity, & Intention’
This is fantastic work! Thank you for sharing it. Well done!
This is a really strong statement of Core Principles. Thanks for sharing them. I hope we can all live up to these ideals.
Thank you for sharing these!