Session 704: Question 2 by

Immediacy

2026-08-01 17:58:05 UTC

Obvious point, but I think that one special consideration with potentially offensive VM is just the immediacy of visual materials. It's much easier to slow down reading a text & impossible to "unsee" an image.

2026-08-01 17:58:29 UTC

I think we started conversations in the room around additional privacy concerns, as well as the difference in perception between visual and textual materials.

Good question

2026-08-01 17:58:54 UTC

We still haven't come up with a good way to warn people that the video or audio will have potentially offensive language. We mean because it is from the 1960s and there are racially charged comments or words that were acceptable then but not now are being used.

Yikes. I’d take a look at what the federal African American Museum and National Holocaust Museum have in place to handle this subject.

2026-08-01 17:58:55 UTC

I learned a whole bunch of stuff no one ever taught in school from the Holocaust Museum. :(

Sensitivity - in the eye of the beholder

2026-08-01 17:58:59 UTC

how to share respectively, meaningfully, and when to include the image

2026-08-01 17:59:00 UTC

There was a great session on Thursday that talked about this exact issue! Let me find the name of it—their slides were helpful even without the session

knowing your audience and who is able to access

2026-08-01 17:59:17 UTC

Coming from a security perspective, more than an offensive materials one, I think knowing the constraints of your users and who is able to access sensitive materials will inform the description for use.

Consent

2026-08-01 18:00:59 UTC

Photographs, in particular, can pose challenging questions about what it means to take into account a subject's consent (or lack thereof).

Selective digitization

2026-08-01 18:03:26 UTC

when to prioritize publishing or digitization potentially offensive images over other parts of collections?

2026-08-01 18:07:44 UTC

There's also a lot of conversation about click-throughs/trigger warnings for digitized materials (or thumbnails) to mediate access to potentially problematic images in the room. I'm personally not a fan of a warning because I don't feel it's my place to say what is harmful - I think our description should be providing context to understand what people are going to see, but I do like the blurred thumbnail approach for a digitized image so that one can understand that context before confronting an image.

2026-08-01 18:13:50 UTC

how to catalog titles that are offensive? and when it's an offensive term used against a targeted group - the context of it being used against them.

nhaving generic language but not using it

swastika flags - page that comes up to contextualize the images as being from WW2 -- as we get further away from historical events they have new associations

disgraced corporate ceo

list of controlled vocab what words needs to be disclaimed - what words will trigger you seeing a difficult image?

not assuming gender and designating race for everyone - white is not the default

Distinctive Considerations

2026-08-01 18:18:14 UTC

One issue I run into is that sometimes harmful language is part of the original caption provided by the creator. Then the choice is between using the creator's description or a modified one, and whether that change might impact discoverability in some cases.