2022 Conference Objects

Everyone makes mistakes: Building trust and psychological safety in a shared digital object management system

Luna Lucero, Brian; Jackson, Esther M.

The Hyacinth User Group has flourished since its inception in 2018 due in large part to the trust shared amongst members. This trust has grown because the members of the group are practitioners with hands-on experience in the application. One of the hallmarks of the trust is psychological safety, a concept from the world of business and administration. People who feel psychological safety in their workplace are able to express themselves without fear of negative consequences. This is concretely observable in our regular practice of mistake and recovery sharing.

This communication around error recovery in the HUG has created a healthy culture of owning one's mistakes and calling upon collective wisdom to fix them quickly, efficiently, and without too many tears. Forgetting a semicolon doesn’t mean that someone doesn’t know how to do their job, a fact we all recognize as metadata practitioners.

While institutional and departmental culture and leadership set the strongest tone when it comes to error reporting and recovering quickly, the HUG can serve as an example for other metadata practitioners on how to fail with grace and provide guidance without assigning blame. And, perhaps equally importantly, how to document things and report them back to the group so that we all benefit from the mistakes that everyone makes.