Critiquing the Machine

Abstract

Libraries are […] desiring machines that seek to collect everything for everyone for all time, making knowledge universally accessible through cataloging and classification schemes from which nothing escapes… Knowledge organization structures are also about power, the power to produce both order and excess… our catalogs and classification structures are themselves technologies of power, facilitating some ways of knowing and not others, representing certain ideological ways of seeing the world, and, crucially, not others.

“Our Metadata, Ourselves”: The Trans Metadata Collective

“…According to Watson (2023), summarizing nearly a century of literature, critical cataloging refers to practices deeply rooted in the history of technical work in cultural heritage institutions, librarianship, archivy, and museology whether those practices are called alternative, radical, reformative, or critical (Watson, 2023) Critical cataloging literature recommends:…”