Beyond Exploitation: Metadata Justice and Prison Labor
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Large-scale digitization projects require enormous amounts of resources and labor, both of which are frequently in short supply in libraries and archives. How, then, has Oklahoma’s Yearbook Project been able to scan and process high school yearbooks at no cost for schools, libraries, museums, and historical societies? As a service of Oklahoma Correctional Industries, a state-level prison industry program, the Yearbook Project relied on the penal labor exemption of the Thirteenth Amendment which allows for involuntary servitude to occur behind prison bars. Although the Yearbook Project is currently on hiatus due to an ongoing investigation, metadata specialists, cataloguers, and the wider memory work community must still grapple with the legacy of this and other exploitative and unethical programs that have contributed to the resources and services we offer patrons. This presentation sheds light on the issue of exploitative prison labor on behalf of libraries and archives, and offers a solution grounded in metadata justice: labeling items, collections, and databases that benefit from exploitative labor
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".