This journal aims to showcase innovative research that queries and critiques current and prevailing paradigms in library and information studies, in theory and practice through critical approaches and perspectives that originate from across the humanities and social sciences.
An open access journal publishing high quality, rigorously reviewed and innovative scholarly work in the field of radical librarianship. It also publishes non-peer reviewed reports, commentary, and reviews. The scope of the journal is any work that contributes to a discourse around critical library and information theory and practice.
Librarianship has always had links with critical theory. As a public service, libraries cannot be separated from the society they exist in, and investigating the aspects of the culture they exist in is an important responsibility for all library and information professionals.
Written primarily for professionals in library and information science but with applicability to archives and other information management industries, this handbook provides an overview of metadata work that focuses on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). DEI metadata work has several goals: enhancing diverse representation in descriptive metadata; improving discovery of diverse resources; and mitigating negative effects of inaccurate, outdated, or offensive terminology. Readers will gain a broad awareness of DEI-related issues in metadata creation and management; learn techniques for retroactively reviewing and updating existing metadata to address these issues; and develop strategies to create metadata that better meets DEI needs.
First published in 1971 (by Scarecrow Press), Prejudices and Antipathies marked the opening salvo in the fight to rid the Library of Congress Subject Headings of bias. In the ensuing decades, many of its recommendations have been embraced. Progress has been made but problems persist. The McFarland edition of 1993 includes corrections, a new foreword by Eric Moon, a new preface and an index.
This collection of critical and scholarly essays addresses the state of cataloging in the world of librarianship. The contributors address topics ranging from criticisms of the state of the profession and traditional Library of Congress cataloging to methods of making cataloging more inclusive and helpful to library users.
Media
Documentary from Dartmouth University where students teamed up with librarians to challenge anti-immigrant language in Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH).
What does it mean to include social justice principles in our work as metadata specialists? How can we apply diversity, equity, inclusion, and access to metadata creation? Join us as we address these and other questions in a roundtable discussion with four experienced catalogers whose work attempts to address shortcomings in traditional cataloging vocabularies and practices.
For more episodes in the Organizing Chaos: Bias in the Library series, please visit: WYNC STUDIOS
The Cataloging Lab is a website of resources on cataloging issues, which includes a list of statements on bias in library descriptions that helped us as we wrote our statement.
Critlib is short for “critical librarianship,” a movement of library workers dedicated to bringing social justice principles into our work in libraries.
Progressive Librarians Guild was formed in New York City on January 1990 by a group of librarians concerned with our profession's rapid drift into dubious alliances with business and the information industry, and into complacent acceptance of service to an unquestioned political, economic and cultural status quo.
Alternative Vocabularies
A selected list of controlled vocabulary thesauri that can supplement or act as whole alternatives to Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)
This paper contends that systemic violence is fundamentally a classification problem. The interrogation of the production of racialized library subjects in relation to one another and in relation to political and social conditions may shed light on the intensely complex problems of racism in the United States today.
Classification and the organization of information are directly connected to issues surrounding social justice, diversity, and inclusion. This paper is written from the standpoint that political and epistemological aspects of knowledge organization are fundamental to research and practice and suggests ways to integrate social justice and diversity issues into courses on the organization of information.
This paper examines the addition of “asexuality” to the Library of Congress Subject Headings as a case study from which to examine the critical cataloging movement.