Critiques of hegemonic library classification structures and controlled vocabularies have a rich history in information studies. This project has pointed out the trouble with classification and cataloging decisions that are framed as objective and neutral but are always ideological and worked to correct bias in library structures. Viewing knowledge organization systems from a queer perspective, however, challenges the idea that classification and subject language can ever be finally corrected. Engaging queer theory and library classification and cataloging together requires new ways of thinking about how to be ethically and politically engaged on behalf of marginal knowledge formations and identities who quite reasonably expect to be able to locate themselves in the library. Queer theory invites a shift in responsibility from catalogers, positioned to offer functional solutions, to public services librarians, who can teach patrons to dialogically engage the catalog as a complex and biased text, just as critical catalogers do. L ibraries are spaces where language really matters. Most of what we hold on our shelves and in our electronic databases are collections of words: books, journal articles, pamphlets, and ephemeral material, such as zines. Libraries are also spaces of control, and not just controls about noise and food and when books are due. The materials themselves are linguistically controlled, corralled in classification structures that fix items in place, and they are described using controlled vocabularies that reduce and universalize language, remarkably resistant to change. In terms of organization and access, libraries are sites constructed by the disciplinary power of language. Librarians of all kinds-conducting research in library and information studies ðLISÞ programs, working in technical services, serving at the reference desk, and teaching in the information literacy classroom-work within and against these linguistic structures: we build and extend them, and we teach users how to navigate them. Critiques of these disciplinary library structures of classification and controlled vocabularies have a rich history in information studies, one that can be roughly dated to the late 1960s and early 1970s ðGilyard 1999Þ. Sanford Berman, a US librarian working at the University of Zambia, found that his Zambian users had a very different relation to the term "Kafirs"
Toward a Kairos of Library Instruction Contemporary group instruction in libraries is organized by and around the Association of College and Research Libraries' Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (the Standards). This set of performance indicators and measurable outcomes, first adopted in 2000 and currently under revision, structures the way information literacy programs are organized, delivered, and assessed in American colleges and universities. The Standards have productively enabled librarians to define for themselves a teaching location within the academy: librarians define and take pedagogical responsibility for information literacy learning outcomes and their assessment. While the Standards have animated much of the literature, organization, and practice of information literacy instruction, they have also generated significant critique. As John Buschman (2010) has usefully pointed out, opposition to the Standards has formed "a significant portion of the theoretical 'voice' of IL thinking" (96); the discourse of information literacy includes, like any articulation of an ideology, significant resistance to dominant modes of thought and practice. Much of this critique has focused on the ways that the Standards function as what Christine Pawley (2003) has called a "Procrustean paradigm," forcing the varied forms of information production, seeking, and use into an atomized set of mechanistic requirements disconnected from the concrete practice of particular students producing, seeking, and using particular information in everyday academic life. Such a paradigm fixes in place definitions of the terms information and literacy (Seale, 2010), thereby reifying hierarchies of knowledge production (Elmborg, 2006). These critiques are primarily concerned with the fixity of the Standards. Because Standards are abstract and posited as universal, they fail to account for the local and contextual
The Library of Congress (LC) and the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) interpretation of Resource Description and Access (RDA) 9.7 regarding gender when identifying persons reinforces regressive conceptions of gender identity. The rule instructs catalogers to record gender when identifying persons, and although RDA gives catalogers the flexibility to record more than two gender labels, LC limits Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO) catalogers to a binary label: male, female, or not known. In this article, the authors challenge gender as a descriptive attribute for personal names, critique how LC is instructing NACO catalogers to record elements about gender, and make recommendations to address describing persons in LC authority records.
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. Viewing librarianship through this frame allows us to imagine new and better worlds on our way to making them.
Purpose – The purpose of this research paper was to establish a replicable method of gathering and analyzing data using course syllabi to enable instruction librarians to strategically embed information literacy instruction within a disciplinary curriculum. Design/methodology/approach – A set of syllabi from the School of Business was evaluated for information literacy learning outcomes and library use requirements using a set of rubric-based content analysis questions. The questions were normed prior to coding to ensure reliability, and interrater reliability was established using two measures: the per cent agreement method and Krippendorff’s alpha. Findings – The results revealed strategic opportunities for scalable, curriculum-integrated instruction in the School of Business: a group of 28 courses that could be targeted for in-depth instruction, and eight courses whose outcomes could be met through more tailored instruction focused on information access skills. Originality/value – The reported research study provides a method for evaluating holistic information literacy outcomes in course syllabi, an improvement on prior syllabus analysis projects. Additionally, the reliability of the data means that the study design may be replicated in a variety of institutional contexts.
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