Collective responsibility: seeking equity for contingent labor in libraries, archives, and museums

Abstract

The Collective Responsibility project seeks to address the specific problems of precarity that grant-funded positions in digital library, archive, and museum work create and reproduce, and how those positions impact the lives and careers of workers, particularly workers from marginalized and underrepresented populations. The project’s work consists of two phases: (1) Developing a collective understanding of worker experiences, and (2) Constructing best practices, recommendations, and benchmarks appropriate to participating institutions and funders. This white paper presents the outcomes of the first phase. It draws worker experiences from a pre-forum survey and outcomes of Meeting 1: Experience, which took place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, over 1.5 days, April 24-25, 2019.