Our policies embrace the fiction of neutrality, while our spaces, practices, and culture are not neutral entities (Sadler and Bourg, 2015). The idea of library-as-neutral is seductive because of its usefulness and minimal intellectual effort required from white librarians: neutrality is the safest position for libraries because it situates whiteness not only as default, but rewards and promotes white cultural values.
—Angela Galvan, "Soliciting Performance, Hiding Bias: Whiteness and Librarianship," 2015
For many years, the library profession articulated a value and ethic of neutrality through organizations like the American Library Association. Neutrality was sometimes a placeholder word for other, more radical concepts such as intellectual freedom and borrower privacy -- but more than that, the concept of "neutrality" claimed that libraries and librarians were impartial in collecting, preserving, and providing access to knowledge and culture. Historically, and today, librarianship has also been an overwhelmingly white profession (Espinal, Sutherland, and Roe, 2018). As Galvan's quote above states, librarian "neutrality" situates whiteness as the default while also endorsing dominant white cultural values. Influenced by the theoretical foundations of critical race theory, feminist theory, and critical pedagogy, librarians (especially led by librarians of color) began to question the language and politics of neutrality, naming the structural oppressions present in libraries. Some scholars call this work critical librarianship (or #critlib). Related and continuing work is also framed as knowledge justice.
Library work structures intellectual worlds as library workers collect, organize, make accessible, and preserve materials for use. This work is not neutral. Libraries, like all institutions, are produced in and through systems marked by racism, patriarchy, and capitalist modes of production. Critical librarianship offers a framework for thinking about our work that asks how library structures came to be and what ideologies underpin them.
—Emily Drabinski, "What is Critical about Critical Librarianship?" 2019
In Knowledge Justice, Black, Indigenous, and Peoples of Color scholars use critical race theory (CRT) to challenge the foundational principles, values, and assumptions of Library and Information Science and Studies (LIS) in the United States.
Over the past fifteen years, librarians have increasingly looked to theory as a means to destabilize normative discourses and practices within LIS, to engage in inclusive and non-authoritarian pedagogies, and to organize for social justice.
Exploring the diverse terrain that makes up library and information science (LIS), this collection features the work of scholars, practitioners, and others who draw from a variety of theoretical approaches to name, problematize, and ultimately fissure whiteness at work.
Academic librarians are exploring critical information literacy (CIL) in ever increasing numbers. While a smattering of journal articles and a small number of books have been published on the topic, the conversation around CIL has mostly taken place online, at conferences, in individual libraries, and in personal dialogues. This book explores that conversation and provides a snapshot of the current state of CIL as it is enacted and understood by academic librarians.
Most academic libraries utilize the Library of Congress Classification System (LCCS) and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) to organize and describe books on our shelves and in our catalogs or databases. In the 1970s, librarian Sanford Berman critiqued the LCSH and particularly those subject headings that serve to categorize human beings according to their race, ethnicity, language, sexuality, gender, dis/ability, class, religion, or other marker of identity. Often, these headings used/use outdated or offensive language, or take as default the identity of white, heterosexual, cisgender and male, describing any different identities as other.
“In the realm of headings that deal with people and cultures—in short, with humanity—the LC [Library of Congress] list can only ‘satisfy’ parochial, jingoistic Europeans and North Americans, white-hued, at least nominally Christian (and preferably Protestant) in faith, comfortably situated in the middle and higher-income brackets, largely domiciled in suburbia, fundamentally loyal to the Established Order, and heavily imbued with transcendent, incomparable glory of Western civilization.”
—Berman, Prejudices and Antipathies: A tract on the LC Subject Heads concerning people, 1971)
Some librarians have worked to change subject headings to be more reflective of current language and culture. Some of these projects are linked below:
When searching for books in the CU Libraries, you may also notice that books are organized according to call numbers, which are related to the LCCS. This system traditionally locates books by subject, effectively organizing books into silos where authors of non-Western identities or nationalities are classified by their nationality rather than their scholarly and artistic contribution.
For a basic example, writers who are writing during the same time period will be classified in the following major categories:
You can see how British and American writers are privileged with entire subclasses of literature in this system, whereas writers from other whole continents may be grouped together in one subclass. This also means that studying the literature of a time period but across cultures may be challenging as the books are not located in the same area of the library (interdisciplinary research can likewise be difficult in this way).
Similar to librarians interested in critical librarianship and knowledge justice, archivists are also writing and organizing in support of a more critical and inclusive archival practice. While the methods of collecting, preserving, and organizing the knowledge housed in archives and special collections differ from those of libraries, many of the principles remain remain similar, with associated oppressive structures and policies. Some archivists are concerned with those voices who have been left out or silenced in the archive.
Archival Silences by 