LPP has created an advisory panel of authors, metadata librarians, publishers, and collection development leaders to guide our effort in establishing author-led standards for identity metadata.

Lived Places Publishing (LPP) was born in the summer of 2020. The global pandemic was raging, citizens were protesting racial injustice across the world, people of all sexual orientations and gender expressions were asking for fair and equal treatment, and readers were crying out to their libraries, bookstores, professors, and their preferred book purchasing platforms seeking a deeper understanding of the background and personhood of the authors of the books they were turning to for insight into the moment.

Lived Places Publishing provides a platform for authors to tell their stories, and the stories of others, from the perspective of identity and place. LPP offers collections across interdisciplinary studies and fields such as Black Studies, Queer and LGBT+ Studies, Forced Migration Studies, Latinx Studies, and Fashion & Personal Style Studies. Our collection editors and authors represent every continent and more than 30 countries, including Nigeria, Taiwan, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Ghana, China, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, India, Bangladesh, the UK, and many more. And our authors represent many gender and sexual orientation expressions, religious beliefs, ethnicities, places of origin, life stages, and more important expressions of identity and the intersectionality thereof.

With this context in mind, we set out in early 2023 to see if we could develop author identity metadata to help our readers know a lot more about the authors of each LPP book. We quickly learned that author identity metadata is an intensely personal and self-referential marker. Publishing industry efforts to identify anything about author identity have been fraught, we contend, because the establishment of and naming of identity has not begun with the authors themselves. Therefore, at LPP we created an advisory panel of authors, metadata librarians, publishers, and collection development leaders to guide our effort in establishing author-led identity metadata.

The first step in the journey of our advisory panel was to establish the top-level categories for which we will endeavor to collect author responses. This list of top-level categories we are beginning to test was developed in conjunction with the LPP author community and reflects their values. We now are ready to present these categories to the wider world and gather unput. That's where you come in.  

We invite you to participate in the brief survey below. 

Please share this survey so that our advisory panel can gather deeper and broader insight to guide our selection of AIM categories:

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