Make documentation more gender inclusive
Can we please increase inclusivity by changing to gender-non-specific language in both documentation and descriptions in coding tables?
The Primo and Alma documentation uses very gendered terms, particularly his / him. End users and library staff are mostly referred to as he / his / him, despite libraries being an overwhelmingly female workforce. We also need to recognise the increasing numbers of non-binary users within our institution.
I propose the following changes:
Him or her -> them
His or hers -> theirs
She or he -> they
As one example, a search on Alma documentation shows 3324 results for he, him or his. Searching for she or her mainly brings up German language results.
Gendered language is also in mapping and code tables e.g. Fulfilment administration > General > Other settings has the description "When user has an active loan, enable him to request the resource with a different loan period policy"
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Additional changes were made to our interface and documentation, to correct the specific mistakes found. If you do find issues please do not hesitate to report them.
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Clare commented
Great suggestion, Rachel! thank you. A small change that could make a really huge difference.
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Hi Rachel
Thanks for bringing this up. I'd like to start by saying that our guidelines and our target is indeed to be gender inclusive as you suggested below.
When looking into the numbers you posted, we believe that the actual number is much lower. The Knowledge Center search for "he" will also bring up the word "other" and "the" because they contain "he".
We did find some cases where the wording was not aligned with our guidelines and will work to correct this, both in the OLH and in the product messages and configuration tables.
Alma Product Management