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Cultural Competence

"Cultural competence is the ability to participate ethically and effectively in personal and professional intercultural settings. It requires being aware of one’s own cultural values … and their implications for making respectful, reflective and reasoned choices..."

(NCCC, 2018)

To provide a brief explanation on what Cultural competence is, it’s essentially a set of behaviors, attitudes, and policies that enable a person or group to work effectively in cross cultural situations. The concept itself is rooted in social work and psychology as far back as the 1980s however it has been popularised in nursing, medicine and education.

It’s also important to mention that when we talk about culture we often think of it in terms of race religion or nationality. However we can also consider culture to cover shared attitudes and beliefs with any groups of people, for instance social or organizational groups.

To provide some context of cultural competence at the University of Sydney we have our own National Centre for Cultural Competence, which addresses cultural competence at the University level by providing training, advice and support to staff, students and the community. Likewise the University of Sydney Library also has it’s own community of cultural competence who focus on similar aims within the library. Both the NCCC and the Library’s own cultural competence community of practice both focus on interfacing between the University, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as a priority.

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Cultural Competence Review

So what does a cultural competence review look like?

A simple model for cultural competence, taken from “Diversity standards: Cultural competency for academic librarians” by the Association of College and Research Libraries looks like this.

Cultural competence requires that for us to examine our own cultural backgrounds and identities as well as increase our awareness of personal assumptions, values, and biases. So the first step in any review is to shine the mirror on ourselves and examine our own identity.

We then examine how our cultural beliefs and background may influence the content and delivery of resources. And examine needs from a number of cultural angles. What things work or don’t work? How do they impact on other cultures? What assumptions to we have that may influence the resources that we create? What practices and behaviours that we write in our recourses might not be suitable in other contexts?

You then may discuss internally how to over come biases in services and resources and improve upon them so that they are culturally relevant and competent. This might be reaching out to colleagues from a diverse range of cultural backgrounds. Likewise at this stage, it is important to reach out and bring to other communities or groups to the table and allowing input and feedback to guide the development of resources.

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Cultural Competence Review in Practice

https://libguides.library.usyd.edu.au/datapublication

To put this into practice I would like to share a small project that we did in 2017 on Data Publication. This project we wanted encourage researchers to publish data, in preparation for the implementation of a new institutional repository.

Using a Design Thinking approach, we identified a number of gaps, particularly the lack of a practical step-by-step guide that researchers could refer to when they are ready to publish their data as well as something to complement our training sessions that we were running at the time. The result was a step by step guide that give researchers practical information that they can refer to when publishing research data, as well as complement our training sessions.

We decided to review our resources for two reasons; firstly we wanted to ensure our researchers understood their obligations when working with data from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and secondly, one of the Library’s own strategic goals is to ensure that researchers are equipped with the knowledge to work with data from intercultural sources, in our context Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural knowledge. Many guides that are available do talk about accessing data etc. but no so much about when researchers need to share or publish this data.

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Cultural Competence Review in Practice

Reviewed our data publishing guide through a cultural competence lens.

Found gaps in addressing culturally sensitive research data.

Reached out to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Researchers to find out what they require in terms of research data support.

Made changes to the resources based on their feedback.

The process we took was first to identify our own cultural backgrounds. We brought a diverse cultural perspective to the table with members identifying as English and Ashkenazi Jewish, Canadian and Aboriginal.

With an understanding of our cultural perspectives we identified how these might bring bias into the material. An example of this was that we identified that our resources focused on proper management of medical data; often emphasised in the data management and curation field. In addition the University’s largest Faculty is Health and Medicine. Because of this we found that our resources that were created, overlooked other kinds of sensitive data such as culturally sensitive data.

Feeding back into the design thinking process, we went back to the emphasise and define stage to identify gaps and to prototype appropriate solutions to address this. This was either to integrate culturally appropriate content into the resource or create an entirely new resource. Initially, most resources where either left as is or were integrated with new content, we were aware that these might change after consultation and feedback gathering.

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Conversations with Researchers

Community benefit

Data sharing… or data sharing?

Repatriation and archiving is practised

Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property education

After this internal review we then needed to go and talk to people who would actually make use of the resources in real life or had a lot of experience in supporting researchers who use data from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. We spoke with 8 people with the main aim of learning how we could improve the resources, or what we missed. There were a few main themes that really came through in our conversations, the first being community benefit

When we support researchers, our focus is often consumed by impact- so highlighting how to publish in respected journals, how to measure usage through altmetrics and getting a DOI to make impact more measurable. We gear our resources to be about the researcher and what the researcher can do to get the most benefit to their career. Our discussions regarding our phase 1 resources really brought forward that when we create resources for data from first nations people in Australia, the community benefit needs to be at the forefront; for example not “How can I publish my data widely enough that it gets heaps of citations” but “how can I publish my data while ensuring that the wishes of the community are respected?”

The next thing that we realised was that even though we know it’s not safe to assume, we often do assume that everyone has the same understanding of various phrases. Our team has always worked with the definition of Data publication as the process where the data is made available through a repository and data Sharing as being sharing data between other researchers without making it available through a repository. Tying in closely with having a community focus, one of the first things we realised through the interviews was that researchers working with first nations people understood data sharing to mean “giving the data back to the community or individual participants”.

With this, we also noted that repatriation and archiving data was being practised some of the researchers we spoke to. When repatriating data back to the community or to community members who were involved in the study, things seem a bit tricky. Availability of technology can vary depending on the location or socio-economic status of the community and researchers need to provide the technology on something that can be accessed. This can mean that data is put on USBs or CDs and either given directly to the participant or to a knowledge centre if there is one in the community. This brings sustainability issues as access to data can easily be lost when it’s on a USB or CD, and handing data over to a knowledge centre means relying on that knowledge centre to provide continuing and ethical access to the data. On top of this, some researchers highlighted the

Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

(AIATSIS) as the reliable and trusted place that they archive their data, however this wasn’t mentioned by everyone.

In learning this we realised that there is a gap in support for assisting researchers working with data from First Nations people in Australia to repatriate data in a sustainable but flexible way that will also cater for the needs of different communities. Included in this support would also need to be best practice for archiving data using facilities that are both trusted and cater for specific requirements that the data may have, for example access conditions for study participants and their relatives.

Another important theme that filtered through is the importance of Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) education. ICIP rights aren’t always well known and understood, particularly when people are used to working with data that only falls under western IP laws. Our interviews helped us understand that education on ICIP is necessary for anyone who may end up collecting or re-using data relating to first nations peoples. ICIP education is also essential for repository staff who may end up handing and providing access to the data. Education is this area will hopefully help prevent misuse and provide researchers and support staff with a greater understanding of the significance of data collections and the respect needed when handling them.

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Based on this feedback gathering and internal review of our resources we made a few changes to our guides.

Firstly, based on feedback and identifying gaps around Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property rights. We updated our pages to include this information and embedded it within our guidance around what researchers should consider when making their data available.

Based on the other gap identified around cultural sensitive data, we also made a decision to include this into the guide for sharing sensitive data.

The sample text here describes considerations researchers need to make if they are working with culturally sensitive data and we also included examples where researchers may consider using mediated access such as when community approval is required for reusing data collected from them.

We also include information here about taking into consideration community access to the data. For instance a linguist recording language classes as part of a project to revitalise First Nation Languages, would be of particular interest to the community.

It was therefore important for researchers to consider two forms of access to this material, in this case researchers who may want to access the data but also the participants or their families.

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Projects

Institutional Repository
Digital Asset Management System
Digital collections priorities

CULTURAL COMPETENCE

Applying what we learned in the cultural competency modules to create more culturally competent data publication resources was greatly beneficial to the team. Not only did we all expand our knowledge of appropriate practices when publishing culturally sensitive data, we have been able to take our experience and what we learned and apply a cultural competence lens to other projects. Two examples of this are the Institutional Repository and Digital Asset Management System projects we are currently working on, and our future digital collections priorities.

So far, ideas for this include using integrated vocabularies that cater for aboriginal languages and looking at the procedures needed to help staff working on the system ensure that good practice is followed when dealing with culturally sensitive information. We are also investigating using Traditional Knowledge labels by US based research group Local Contexts. TK Labels are icons that can be applied to digital records to indicate that an object contains culturally sensitive or community-specific information. The Labels can help educate non-community users of the significance of the object or show that access is restricted to a certain group of people or to highlight that information may be missing from the record; for example, that the record is missing attribution of Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property. TK Labels are currently being tested with institutions in the USA and once this has been completed the team will have further discussions with Local Contexts to consider the application to our repository systems.

In working out what to prioritise for our next digital collection projects, our Digital Collections Manager undertook a review of the collections that have been digitised and made available. To help assess these, she included whether or not the collections that had already been digitised had a balanced representation of different cultures and genders. Unsurprisingly, she found that our digitised collections largely represent one cultural perspective and one gender. This helped her form a list of priorities that will help to balance this out and hopefully lead to digital collections that are more representative of our diverse university community.

Another benefit we found from this project was that it got us talking. Custodianship, preservation and ethical access to culturally sensitive collections is a growing area of concern for the galleries, libraries, archives and museums sector, and the scale of the problem means that collaboration is essential. This project got us talking to other people at the university and people from other institutions which helped us to establish new relationships with researchers, educators and research support staff. Making these connections will hopefully help us work with a network of people to create sustainable and scalable support that is relevant and useful to both researchers and communities.

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Thank you!

Creating services, support and resources that are truly culturally competent takes extensive work and it can seem to be a completely overwhelming task. There are so many different cultural groups, and our team offers different services based around digital collections, the repository and research data management. To try and manage this, we focused in on just one aspect of our service catalogue, data publishing, and also specifically choose to focus on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples rather than addressing other cultural groups. While this is still a big area with lots of complexities it was a whole lot more manageable than looking at everything all in one go. We found that starting small has enabled us to grow our knowledge without being too overwhelmed. It has also empowered us to gradually expand what we learned to other services and incorporate other cultural perspectives.

Thank you

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References

The Association of College and Research Libraries Racial and Ethnic Diversity Committee report. (2012). Diversity Standards: Cultural Competency for Academic Librarians: Approved by the ACRL Board of Directors, April 2012. College and Research Libraries News, 73 (9), pp. 551–561. https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.73.9.8835

National Centre for Cultural Competence (NCCC). (2018). Culturally Competent Leadership Program (CCLP) Overview. March 2018. Retrieved from http://sydney.edu.au/nccc/leadership/cclp.shtml