Using MaRMAT for reparative metadata evaluation at Indiana University

Indiana University is home to 7 campuses and over 30 unique archival and special collections. Multiply the unique collections by decades of staff-created description, and you will find many opportunities for potentially harmful language in our collections. We are amid an iterative metadata remediation project. After spending two years remediating ~4,500 duplicate name and subject records, we moved our focus to potentially harmful language.

We searched for a tool to help efficiently identify and remediate potentially harmful language without completely reinventing the wheel. A group of librarians from the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library shared a tool called the Marriott Reparative Metadata Assessment Tool (MaRMAT) at the 2025 Digital Library Federation Forum. MaRMAT is an open-source application that identifies terms against curated lexicons of problematic and/or outdated language. After attending this presentation, we eagerly downloaded MaRMAT to test it against Indiana University archival finding aid data. In this lightning talk, we will discuss our experience using MaRMAT from download to remediating metadata. We will discuss obstacles, successes, and ideas to consider within and outside of the application.