This book offers a timely mix of thought-provoking chapters bringing together national and global studies on critical librarianship, and conveying the kind of research which current library managers and researchers need, mixing theory with a good dose of pragmatism.
This book features original research, reflective essays and conversations, and dialogues that consider the relationships between theory, practice, and critical librarianship through the lenses of the histories of librarianship, intellectual and activist communities, professional practices, and underexplored epistemologies and ways of knowing.
Black, Indigenous, and Peoples of Color--reimagine library and information science through the lens of critical race theory. 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. They propel CRT to center stage in LIS, to push the profession to understand and reckon with how white supremacy affects practices, services, curriculum, spaces, and policies.
Taking a broadly Marxist approach, Confronting the Democratic Discourse of Librarianship traces the connections between library history and the larger history of capitalist development.
This inspiring book will enable academic librarians to develop excellent research and instructional services and create a library culture that encompasses exploration, learning and collaboration. Higher education and academic libraries are in a period of rapid evolution. Technology, pedagogical shifts, and programmatic changes in education mean that libraries must continually evaluate and adjust their services to meet new needs. Research and learning across institutions is becoming more team-based, crossing disciplines and dependent on increasingly sophisticated and varied data. To provide valuable services in this shifting, diverse environment, libraries must think about new ways to support research on their campuses, including collaborating across library and departmental boundaries. This book is intended to enrich and expand your vision of research support in academic libraries by: Inspiring you to think creatively about new services. Sparking ideas of potential collaborations within and outside the library, increasing awareness of functional areas that are potential key partners. Providing specific examples of new services, as well as the decision-making and implementation process. Encouraging you to take a broad view of research support rather than thinking of research and instruction services, metadata creation and data services etc as separate initiatives. Dynamic Research Support in Academic Libraries provides illustrative examples of emerging models of research support and is contributed to by library practitioners from across the world. The book is divided into three sections: Part I: Training and Infrastructure, which describes the role of staff development and library spaces in research support Part II: Data Services and Data Literacy, which sets out why the rise of research data services in universities is critical to supporting the current provision of student skills that will help develop them as data-literate citizens. Part III: Research as a Conversation, which discusses academic library initiatives to support the dissemination, discovery and critical analysis of research. This is an essential guide for librarians and information professionals involved in supporting research and scholarly communication, as well as library administrators and students studying library and information science.
"Examines the academic library's position as a culturally and historically situated producer and curator of knowledge and its instrumental role in driving social reproduction and the status quo"--
"A collection of articles about various ways of applying critical pedagogy and related educational theories to library instruction"--Provided by publisher.
These papers examine library policies and organizational structures in light of the literature of ergonomics, high reliability organizations, joint cognitive systems and integrational linguistics. Bade argues that many policies and structures have been designed and implemented on the basis of assumptions about technical possibilities, ignoring entirely the political dimensions of local determination of goals and purposes as well as the lessons from ergonomics, such as the recognition that people are the primary agents of reliability in all technical systems. Because libraries are understood to be loci of human interaction and communication rather than purely technical systems at the disposal of an abstract user, Bade insists on looking at problems of meaning and communication in the construction and use of the library catalog. Looking at various policies for metadata creation and the results of those policies forces the question: is there a responsible human being behind the library web site and catalog, or have we abandoned the responsibilities of thinking and judgment in favor of procedures, algorithms and machines?