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Cultural heritage organizations around the world continually reevaluate their practices in order to foster inclusion and more accurately describe the people and cultures represented in their collections. We acknowledge that the language we use to catalog and describe our materials needs improvement. Standardized vocabularies, such as those managed by the Library of Congress or the Getty Research Institute, are constantly reviewed and updated to correct blind spots and biases. But we still sometimes lack authorized terms to accurately capture the experiences of women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, or artists from non-Western countries. And some existing terms might use outdated language that we now understand to be harmful. 

Many of our records are missing information about an artist’s race, gender, and culture. This makes it difficult for us to determine which or how many of our resources pertain to underrepresented groups. It is our responsibility to prevent artists from marginalized cultures from being misrepresented, overlooked, or forgotten in our collections.

We are keeping abreast of ethical cataloging practices within the scholarly community and confronting and rectifying problems in our records when they arise. We commit to maintaining transparency regarding our policies and procedures. We invite community input and welcome your feedback. Please let us know if you encounter offensive or harmful language or if you have concerns about representation in our finding aids, catalog records, digital collections, exhibitions, publications, social media, or elsewhere. Email us at library@philamuseum.org or call 215-684-7650. 

Statement as of June 11, 2020