Volume 4, Issue 1

Over the past few years, tensions between two core values in U.S. librarianship, intellectual freedom and social justice, have roiled the profession. This conflict was most recently seen in the insertion and subsequent removal of “hate groups” to the list of entities that cannot be denied access to library meeting rooms in the American Library Association’s Meeting Rooms Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights. This paper is intended to provide context for this conflict. It begins by situating its arguments within ethical philosophy, specifically the study of values or axiology. It then provides an overview of the theoretical foundations of the values of liberalism. Next, the paper discusses the values of truth and freedom from harm in librarianship. Finally, it suggests that a fuller understanding of the library’s place within the public sphere is a possible model for mitigating the tensions currently found in American librarianship. The paper is intended to provide a theoretical foundation for further research.

Intellectual freedom is a cornerstone value of library and information studies (LIS) in the twenty-first century. However, LIS institutions have not always held intellectual freedom with the significance it has today. Historic analysis situates the development of intellectual freedom in the context of the European Enlightenment. This systematized review analyzes the use of the phrase “intellectual freedom” in primary sources from the mid-eighteenth century until the American Library Association (ALA) published the Library’s Bill of Rights in 1939 in order to examine the historic origins and development of intellectual freedom as a shared cultural value prior to 1939. I consider the development of intellectual freedom from two perspectives: as a shared value that developed in Britain and the United States during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries and as a meaningful phrase found in primary sources regarding religion, politics, and education. By contextualizing the origins of intellectual freedom with Enlightenment values and discourse, it is hoped this study will illustrate the fundamental nature of intellectual freedom as a value within LIS philosophy and contribute to the conversation about intellectual freedom as a continually negotiated concept that must be held in balance with social responsibility.

Access to information encourages innovation and leads to participation in society of individuals. The emergence of Open Access supports the inclusion of all, including the voices of the traditionally marginalized, yet access alone is insufficient to enable consumers to effectively use information. Power structures can influence the information available and silence opposing viewpoints. Industry disinformation can influence viewpoints and shape policy in ways that can be detrimental to individuals and the community. Information consumers may not possess the competence required to navigate the complex information ecosystem to find the accurate, high-quality, resources required to meet their need. Libraries have a role in assisting consumers develop the critical evaluation capabilities essential to the exercise of informed skepticism when evaluating truth claims. Access is essential; however, without the knowledge to determine the quality and validity of information, a consumer can be misled in ways that can cause harm to themselves and society.

Drawing on and expanding previous graduate course research, this paper investigated and analyzed public libraries’ policies regarding patron use of legal, visual Internet pornography on public computers. Pornographic imagery that falls within legal boundaries is protected by the First Amendment. Incidents of, and library responses to, pornography viewing are not a new issue and have caused turmoil across the field of library and information science. In an attempt to understand the problem, the research question asks: how do public libraries respond to patrons viewing legal Internet pornography, while upholding First Amendment rights as well as the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) and other legal requirements? Libraries tread a fine line to protect First Amendment rights, respect community laws, and uphold CIPA. Research indicated that responding to Internet pornography use in public libraries is heavily dependent on individual, community and library values. Policies are more likely to prohibit patrons from accessing Internet pornography, and most libraries have at least some Internet filtering software restricting what content may be accessed on public use computers. However, evidence also suggests that regardless of policy or filters, library staff will at some point encounter a patron accessing Internet pornography.

African American women are 39-44% more likely to die from breast cancer than white women. This stable racial disparity in mortality rates has persisted since the 1980s and is unlikely to improve unless specific factors leading to disparities are discovered. Racial health disparities should be understood in the context of stable racialized social structures that determine differential access to information. The purpose of this study is to consider how recent quantitative studies using HINTS data might benefit from a critical race agenda to capture the nuances of African American women’s information behaviors, genetic testing awareness, and testing for BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations.

The purpose of this study is to probe biased library and information science (LIS) presumptions of digital divides among U.S. immigrants. The stance of the foreign-born as “digital immigrants” departs from migration and population research which hold that gaps in immigrant Internet and technology access are rapidly closing, even when accounting for immigrant type. The research is based on analysis of the 2016 U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey data. Black immigrant households’ ICT device and Internet access were determined and then compared to those of the general population. Findings suggest that Black immigrant households primarily access the Internet through smartphone and laptop devices along with mobile and at-home hi-speed Internet plans. When compared to the general population, Black immigrant households demonstrate significantly greater smartphone access, and they maintain comparable levels of hi-speed Internet and computer/laptop device access. This study adds to a growing body of research on the narrowing digital divide gap among U.S. immigrants. Immigrants rely on the Internet to transition and integrate into U.S. society.

This article presents the results of a preliminary study to examine the cataloging and classification schemes and ideological factors that play out in book discovery platforms for children’s and young adult books. Using Critical Race Theory and a Rapid Contextual Design approach to exploring the curatorial behaviors of school librarians when searching for diverse books, the study offers design ideas for retooling discovery platforms in ways that bridge the cultural disconnect that young adults from historically marginalized racial backgrounds experience in their libraries. The article concludes that in order for school librarians to find, recommend and teach about books that reflect race, equity and inclusion themes, they need more sophisticated and user-centered features that reflect critical race and multicultural analytic frameworks. This includes the need for a common vocabulary around issues of race, equity and inclusion that can simultaneously cut through the ambiguity of social tagging and yet subvert the status quo of entrenched liberalism and/or racially biased ideologies embedded in traditional classification schemes and hierarchies, such as those used in Library of Congress subject headings. The findings further suggest that school librarians would benefit from enhanced education and training in the intersections of cataloging, classification and critical race scholarship.

This paper examines how informational processing drove new structures of racial classification in the Third Reich. The Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen Gesellschaft mbH (Dehomag) worked closely with the government in designing and integrating punch-card informational systems. As a German subsidiary of IBM, Dehomag’s technology was deployed initially for a census in order to provide a more detailed racial analysis of the population. However the racial data was not detailed enough. The Nuremberg Race Laws provided a more precise and procedural definition of Jewishness that could be rendered machine-readable. As the volume and velocity of information in the Reich increased, Dehomag’s technology was adopted by other agencies like the Race and Settlement Office, and culminated in the vision of a single machinic number for each citizen. Through the lens of these proto-technologies, the paper demonstrates the historical interplay between race and information. Yet if the indexing and sorting of race anticipates big-data analytics, contemporary power is more sophisticated and subtle. The complexity of modern algorithmic regimes diffuses obvious racial markers, engendering a racism without race.

Using critical archival studies as a methodological frame, this paper applies theories of the carceral archive to two historic legal cases: the Ala Moana Boys and the Central Park Five. Through these two cases I demonstrate that engaging the three primary underpinnings of the carceral archive—documentary records, narrative construction, and Foucauldian conceptions of “the carceral”—can critically expose, complicate, and unsettle carceral narratives, providing a new theoretical framework for troubling what Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie calls “the danger of a single story” in the historical record. Finally, I argue that it is through disrupting carceral narratives and centering more liberatory counter-narratives that archives might envision and promote themselves as sites replete with emancipatory impulses and ripe with liberatory potential.

Library and information science (LIS), as a whole, has not prioritized the information access of people inside of jails and prisons as a central tenet of library practice At the moment, there is growing attention given to states’ attempts to curtail book access for people inside of jails and prisons. Groups that provide free books to incarcerated people -- such as the numerous Books to Prisoners programs across the United States -- have been central to the discussions around access to information and resistance to censorship. These groups have drawn particular attention to the ways that Black, Indigenous, and people of color, as well as LGBTQ people, in prison experience ongoing oppression during incarceration because of limited access to materials relevant to their experiences. By identifying the types of information that are banned or limited, the difficulties people who are incarcerated face in seeking to access information, and the impact that access to information has in the lives of people who are incarcerated, this article explains prison censorship as a form of state-sponsored oppression, which is largely being combated by Books to Prisoners rather than LIS. The article ends by explaining LIS’ lack of attention to information access for people who are incarcerated.

This pilot study presents a collection-centered quantitative analysis of Black history resources available at the Billups-Garth Archive in Columbus, Mississippi. The Archive’s inventory lists for its record series and control files for its manuscript collections were assessed in order to determine the percentage of extant Black history resources in relation to the collection’s total holdings. Relevant collections were then evaluated to determine their mediums, subjects, and provenance. The results showed a dearth of collections related to Black history and indicated that very few were created by the Black community. Results also showed that most relevant resources were made up of textual documents as well as documents relating to everyday life and education. Overall, this study demonstrates how collection analyses may be undertaken to identify collection biases and collection deficiencies, especially deficiencies in representing the histories of marginalized communities.

Intelligence has always been an aspect of organized warfare. It was not until 1873, however, that the British Army recognised this formally by establishing an explicitly named unit, under the auspices of the War Office, dedicated to the development of strategic intelligence: the Intelligence Branch. Based on documents held in the National Archives (UK), this study explores the ways in which the work of the Intelligence Branch developed before the First World War in response to imperial and foreign military challenges and the growing awareness of the importance of strategic intelligence and planning. The Branch’s steam-age origins should not disguise the intensity and sophistication of the information management that underpinned its operations. Attention is paid to the type of information management methods that were employed. The existence of a rational system of information management is revealed, consisting of planned phases for the collection, processing, storage, organisation, analysis and dissemination of information.

Since the 1970s, the Publications Office of the European Union, the official publisher of all the institutions and bodies of the EU, has had to adapt to a fast-changing situation as the number of EU Member States has grown and the number and nature of publications has evolved (including publishing public tenders of EU institutions and Member States in 1978 through a supplement to the Official Journal of the European Union and handling CELEX, an interinstitutional and multilingual automated documentation system for community law, in 1992). These changes occurred over several ages of computing. The computerisation of the Publications Office was primarily a response to the need for rationalisation and productivity, but the aim was also to gradually adapt to new types of document publication and consultation. These different stages of digitalisation required the constant transfer of information to a multitude of media. Supports, such as punched cards, optical discs and CD-ROMs, had varying life expectancies and are all evidence of attempts to digitise information before the Web. This evolution not only illustrates the need to constantly harmonise a large amount of information, it also highlights some continuities. It affects the management of information systems but also meets regularly updated standardisation, interoperability and sustainability needs within a complex ecosystem.

The YouTube algorithm is a combination of programmed directives from engineers along with learned behaviors that have evolved through the opaque process of machine learning which makes the algorithm’s directives and programming hard to understand. Independent tests to replicate the algorithm have shown that the algorithm has a strong bias towards right-leaning politics videos, including those racist views expressed by the alt-right community. While the algorithm seems to be pushing users towards the alt-right video content merely in an attempt to keep users in a cycle of video watching, the end result makes YouTube a powerful recruiting tool for Neo-Nazis and the alt-right. The filter bubble effect that this creates pushes users into a loop that reinforces radicalism instead of level-headed factual resources.

Making decisions regarding data and the overall credibility of research constitutes research data governance. In this paper, we present results of an exploratory study of the stakeholders of research data governance. The study was conducted among individuals who work in academic and research institutions in the US, with the goal of understanding what entities are perceived as making decisions regarding data and who researchers believe should be responsible for governing research data. Our results show that there is considerable diversity and complexity across stakeholders, both in terms of who they are and their ideas about data governance. To account for this diversity, we propose to frame research data governance in the context of polycentric governance of a knowledge commons. We argue that approaching research data from the commons perspective will allow for a governance framework that can balance the goals of science and society, allow us to shift the discussion toward protection from enclosure and knowledge resilience, and help to ensure that multiple voices are included in all levels of decision-making.

Creativity is a crucial factor in finding novel and useful visualization and interaction techniques, but its emergence is contingent on the right conditions. The focus of visualization research has traditionally been on techniques, and to a lesser degree on the process of creating them with domain experts and end users. This paper focuses on the collaborative design of visualizations for information seeking and knowledge management. The difficult, yet common challenge in any visualization project is to find meaningful visual representations and useful interaction techniques to carry out complex analysis tasks. The unique difficulty for preparing co-design activities for visualization lies in the gap between the abstract nature of data and the concrete form of visual representations. To bridge this gap, our co-design framework for visualization places particular emphasis on actors, activities, and artifacts as categories that expand the focus of visualization design beyond the traditional triad of users, tasks, and data. Drawing from general co-design principles, the framework is developed and validated during the course of two case studies in the context of information management systems and library collection databases. Based on observed patterns during the case studies, practical tactics provide advice on carrying out co-design in information visualization.