Sharing Information Literacy Concepts through Sound : Sounding the Radical Catalog #LILAC22

My (Sheila's) final liveblog post from the LILAC conference is Sharing Information Literacy Concepts through Sound: Sounding the Radical Catalog, presented by Amanda Belantara and Emily Drabinski. The usual caveat of this being my impression of the session applies.

They started by talking about the Catalogers at work project, which aims to "capture the complexities and decision making processes of cataloguing; amplify the invisible labour of cataloguing; make the power of knowledge organisation audible & understand how decisions are made as cataloguers attempt to organise the world's knowledge" This is framed as part of exploring & developing critical cataloguing.
The project asked cataloguers to think-aloud as they catalogued. They said that this sound recording surfaced counternarratives, and the compromises that cataloguers had to make. It also revealed how cataloguers pushed back against constraints of the system (e.g. quotas, local guidelines) and made time for cataloguing. 

The recordings of the cataloguers was used to make a composition Sounding the radical catalog: catalogers at work. The presenters then played this work - so you can pause and do that now! There is a transcript at: http://tinyurl.com/soundingcatalog and the audio is at https://soundcloud.com/kinokophone/sounding-the-radical-catalog 

After this we were asked to think about questions: What did you learn about how information is organised in libraries? how might this change your perspective of information literacy in libraries? what questions surfaced? what do you think students would learn from listening?
Some of the comments made by the audience at this session included: the issues of the "decisions" made by algorithms; the humanisation of cataloguing in this soundscape; the engagement of the cataloguers; the loss of expert humans doing cataloguing; the usefulness of creating similar resources/narratives/soundscapes localised to different places and disciplines; the beauty of the soundscape; being informed about the biases present when you are searching the catalogue; using a dialogue about zines when engaging with students. (Also, it is something that I think we'll be using on our Information Organisation module.)

The presenters continued by emphasising that it was valuable to teach students that information is organised and described by people (this ties in with the ACRL frame Information creation is a process). The presenters highlighted issues concerned with knowledge organisation & epistemic justice: that there are constraints in the system; building understanding in the learners and build capacity for people to change the system (as well as break the system). They are currently working on an oral history project - in particular they are interviewing people who have created alternative classification systems. Paired with that is advocacy for this work, and advocacy for change in the ingrained systems.