No firm ground, but we ain't sliding

The Policy and Standards Division of the Library of Congress decided for a second time to reject white privilege as a subject heading. You can read their decision here. The part of their argument that is most salient to this blog post is: Numerous works about white privilege have been assigned the headings Race discrimination and Whites--Race identity, and the meeting wishes to continue that practise.

It is both completely understandable and completely perplexing that the PSD would reject this heading despite the fact that literary warrant exists. On the one hand, if the PSD believes that a combination of existing subject headings is sufficiently describes a concept they can make the argument against adding another subject heading to the thesaurus. On the other, it seems like the combination of subject headings that the PSD points to in their decision misses the mark.

When reading this decision, it seems like the PSD fundamentally misunderstands the concept of white privilege by deferring to the headings already being used. The idea of white privilege implicitly touches on discrimination and race identity to the extent that the privileges extended to white people as a result of their identity further margainalizes people who aren't white. But white privilege is not explicitly about either of those things. April Hathcock wrote a really great blog post about this which I think it well worth your time. In her post she writes " Privilege isn't about discrimination; it's about the automatic benefits and advantages that come from living in a system set up to value the lives, ideas, and expressions of one group over all others. You may be a staunch antiracist, but if you are white, you are steeped in WHITE PRIVILEGE. It is a reality of living in the systemic bias of our society."

Thematically related to this discussion of white privilege and systemic bias is Jarrett Drake's keynote address at the Digital Library Federation Liberal Arts Pre-Conference titled "Documenting Dissent in the Contemporary College Archive: Finding our Function within the Liberal Arts." In this address, Drake states

I doubt many of you here know about this history of black college and universities in this country, and I have that doubt for many reasons. The first is that most of you are white and can afford to be ignorant of blackness. The second is that many of our library and archive consortia--this one included--excludes our librarians, libraries, archivists, and archives at black colleges and universities, so even when you think you are immersing yourself within the field of librarianship, you remain blissfully unaware that there is a whole different world out there to which you are functionally illiterate. This unawareness is both a product and a reification of systemic racism, and it doesn't require racists whatsoever.

Both Drake and Hathcock point out that even those of us who believe that we are antiracist still benefit from our whiteness and that white privilege affords us the luxury of being able to be ignorant about aspects of blackness. Further, Hathcock argues that the decision not to name white privilege explicitly and add it to the thesaurus perpetuates systemic racism both in libraries that utilize the thesaurus and in the larger arena of subject cataloging.

Working both inside and outside of a system is important when thinking about how to create a more equitable and inclusive library catalog. While asking the Library of Congress to both change its most problematic subject headings and to add new headings to address issues of importance to our users is a key component of pushing back against the systemic racism inherent in our metadata creation standards, I would also argue that we can work outside of/around the system to add subject headings to records which both reflect the lived experiences of our users and the values to which we claim to adhere.  There are a lot of existing subject thesauri and the MARC standards allows you add a term from a thesaurus other than LCSH in field 650. Library of Congress publishes a list of source codes and has at the bottom of the document an example of how to construct a 650 field using one of these alternative thesauri. Additionally, the MARC standard allows you to utilize fields 69x for locally constructed thesauri that aren't on the source code list. So while LCSH is the (seemingly) most widely used thesaurus for published material, it doesn't have to be the only thesaurus a library uses to describe the about-ness of a resource. A particular community of practise could create its own thesaurus and use that to provide access to headings that the Library of Congress has chosen not to address.

I should note that this isn't a new idea. There's a reason that cataloger's love Sanford Berman.

I know I write a lot about how I think we should think about how much we rely on repurposed metadata and on how we should localize our cataloging practises to better meet the needs of our users. And I think that the use of alternative thesauri is a good place for us to do some thinking. As luck would have it, there are a lot of people in technical services librarianship already thinking hard about these issues. As April notes, Jenna Freedman and Netanel Ganin stand out as people whose efforts in this arena should be acknowledged. I am so, so grateful all of the people who speak so bravely and so boldly about the lived experiences of our users and who hold us accountable for the ways in which we fall short of doing right by them.

Stay positive,
Erin

Still I have a mind to think

I attended library school as a distance education learner in the mid-2000s. I had been working in libraries since high school--first in public libraries, then in a school library. I was an English major in undergraduate with a creative writing concentration, and I had dreams of becoming an academic. But, as so often happens, I didn't. After moving into a full-time paraprofessional position, I decided to go to library school.

My experience of my LIS program is that it was light on theory. I attribute this to the fact that, while most of my online classes were taught by people with PhDs in LIS, most of my in-person classes were taught by well-respected practitioners who worked in the city where I attended class. I heard a lot of lectures and did a lot of assignments that prepared me to work in libraries.

As someone who has had her degree for long enough to be considered mid-career, I often feel intimidated when I interact with people--mostly in online spaces--who have a much stronger theoretical grounding that I do. I stumble when I hear people talk about feminist, critical race, or queer theory because I haven't read any of the foundational texts upon which these theories are based. I feel ill equipped to talk about certain issues related to cataloging because I'm not familiar with Panizzi's 91 rules or the Paris Principles.

Up until recently, I have used this feeling of intimidation as an excuse to not engage in some interesting conversations about librarianship both in published literature and in online spaces. I recently wrote about how I've allowed imposter syndrome to keep my from adding my voice to the scholarly conversation happening in LIS research. And since I wrote that post, something inside me flipped.

I am trying to give myself the orientation to the theory behind knowledge organization that I didn't get in library school.

— Erin Leach (@erinaleach) March 3, 2016

It started when I read Emily Drabinski's great article, "Queering the catalog: queer theory and the politics of correction." I enjoyed how much I was challenged by the argument in the article and I mined its bibliography for other articles to read. And I mined the bibliographies in those articles for other articles to read.

Around the same time, I started reading Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom by bell hooks. I read a chapter or two each day while I eat lunch. I've been deliberate about the slow pace at which I make my way through this book, spending quiet time with hooks each day. And when I finish Teaching to transgress, I'll pick up another book.

By devoting time each day to reading something, I am giving myself the theoretical grounding in librarianship that I didn't receive in library school. You've probably noticed that many of my recent blog posts have been my interactions with something I read, taking my own ideas and looking at them through the lens of something written by someone else in the field. I have even taken one of those blog posts and started a document that is the very beginning of an article.

I wanted to tell you this story, not to pat myself on the back for a job well done but because I hope that it resonates with you. If you want to learn more about something, do it. Find a book or an article on a topic that interests you and allow yourself to be moved and changed by what you read. Investing in yourself is really important. And, if you're like me, it helps you see yourself more clearly.

Stay positive,
Erin

You've got to go and get for yourself

Last week, I wrote about whether MOOCs are viable tool for building skills. And, while I think it's an interesting question, I think it speaks to a bigger question: What does professional development look like in the DIY age?

DIY, or do it yourself, is making or doing something without the help of someone who is considered an expert in the field. In a 2011 article titled "Understanding the do-it-yourself consumer: DIY motivations and outcomes," Marco Wolf and Shaun McQuitty define DIY as:

Activities in which individuals engage raw and semi-raw materials and component parts to produce, transform, or reconstruct material possessions, including those drawn from the natural environment (e.g., landscaping).

If you're curious about traditional DIY skills, Lifehacker has this great list of ten essential DIY skills that includes things like coding and working with electronics.

This self-sufficiency has lead to the DIY ethic which essentially says that people don't need the help of experts to make or do things. This way of thinking suggests that people can (and should) acquire the skills and knowledge they need to complete a task and, by doing so, they become experts in a particular field.

We've seen the DIY ethic become a more mainstream way of thinking and acting with the rise of urban homesteading, the growing interest in MOOCs, and the more widespread adoption of crowdfunding as a way of financing artistic endeavors.

There is, I think, a certain tension between the DIY ethic and the expectation that librarians engage in professional development. I wrote last week about how the longer I am a librarian, the less relevant my skills become and the more I'm required to build my skills to remain relevant. Librarianship seems to give more legitimacy to certain forms of skills building (e.g., conferences, workshops, and classes) than others (e.g., MOOCs, self-taught coding courses, and unconferences). But as the DIY ethic becomes more mainstream, librarianship will have to examine the biases that make that true.

In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) this tendency to prefer certain types of skill building over others, certain pockets of librarianship are embracing DIY skill building and the DIY ethic. Twitter chats have grown in popularity over time with chats like #critlib, #libchat, and #mashcat serving as vehicles for communication and acting as matchmakers for research and writing projects.

But it's not just Twitter chats. #critlib has held two unconferences and #mashcat is scheduling an unconference for 2016. This unstructured nature of the unconference means that each attendee is equally responsible for developing content and participating in the conversation to the best of their ability. In short, the unconference format suggests that everyone is an expert about something.

Librarianship is obsessed with the idea of professionalism. We believe that we have to carry ourselves in a certain way and develop our skills in a certain way in order to be taken seriously in the world. And part of this obsession with professionalism is using the words "professional development" to describe they way in which we develop our skills. Inherent in the idea of professional development, I think, is the notion that someone else will always be better at something than we are and that the only way for us to get better is to take a class or attend a conference.

I'm as guilty of it as anyone at buying into this notion of professionalism and professional development. I use the words "professional development" all the time when what I really mean is building my skills in a particular area. What would it mean if I changed how I thought (and talked) about this? What would it look like if I took pride in the Twitter chats in which I've participated and the self-directed coding classes I've taken? What if I took a MOOC and listed it on my CV? What if I gave a lightening talk at an unconference and didn't think of it as something I did in my spare time?

I think we, as librarians, need to build our skills in an intentional way in order to change ourselves in step with the ways in which librarianship is changing. But I think we learn can accept DIY methods of skill building as legitimate means of developing our skills alongside the more traditional forms like conferences and workshops. And I think it's worth considering what it means to be a professional and why we, as librarians, are so obsessed with it.

Stay positive,
Erin


Reference:
Wolf, Marco and Shaun McQuitty. "Understanding the do-it-yourself consumer: DIY motivations and outcomes." AMS Review 1:3 (Dec. 2011): 154-170. Online.