Pam McKinney live blogging from the Lilac conference, at the final keynote with Rosie Jones hosting a discussion with Emily Drabinski. Emily spoke about how library structures affect the way we can engage with collections, and her experiences as a union activist, expressing solidarity with union members at the conference. Emily spoke widely about the impact of power structures on libraries and librarians. It’s important to open up conversations with learners about the nature of their searching, and encouraging them to reflect on the interfaces they use and what their behaviours are. It much easier for al of us to under and the content and structure of information in library databases, but impossible to understand what google is searching, and how results are retrieved, and what information is excluded - capitalism prevents us from having this understanding. There’s a tension between educating students to do what they need to do to engage with university structures (like the library) while still giving them agency to express themselves in the ways they want to. This is why it’s important to have conversations about power so that students are aware of the environment they are engaging with. Critical information literacy is hard when students just want to know the “right” answers, but learning is more compelling when the teacher can open up discussions with students. It can be easy to illustrate power structures to students using searches on contested topics e.g. native peoples and discussing the subject headings associated with these. Giving people a sense that structures can be changed, e.g. by building alternative information structures - and by lobbying library of Congress to change their subject headings. We need to share positive stories with each other about how to move forward positively.
Post COVID we have a space problem, and we need to reflect on what our physical and digital spaces are and how they should be used. There’s such a spread of opinions about the correct behaviours for public spaces, e.g. around mask wearing, that it’s a real struggle to accommodate everyone.
Lecturers are really happy to engage with conversations about power structures in the library, and are interested in how information is classified and organised. Often these issues dovetail with their own research areas. Academics “know” the information in their discipline, what librarians bring to the table is understanding of how that information is organised, and the power structures that are behind that organisation.
It was a really thought provoking conversation which I enjoyed immensely
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