Series on Critical Information Organization in LIS

Violet Fox and Kelsey George, Series Editors

Litwin Books and Library Juice Press seek book proposals and manuscripts for an ongoing series, Critical Information Organization in Library and Information Science.

Published in the series:

• Ethics in Linked Data, edited by Alexandra Provo, Kathleen Burlingame, and Brian M. Watson

Forthcoming in the series

• Platform Power and Libraries, edited by Christine Smith
• Ways of Knowing: Oral Histories on the Worlds Words Create, edited by Amanda Belantara and Emily Drabinski

The introduction of new cataloging standards (RDA) and a greater recognition of the place of cataloging data in a linked data environment have brought major changes to library cataloging. Critical librarianship has also influenced conversations around ethics in cataloging and cataloging theory by shifting the discussion away from the idea that catalogers can work towards an ideal catalog in efforts of inclusion towards a recognition that standards cannot serve conflicting worldviews and are limited by the implicit bias of their creators.

This series aims to encourage the development of works that explore cataloging and metadata from critical perspectives reflecting both theory and practice in LIS.

Possible subjects include:

• Classification challenges in respecting multiple cultural perspectives
• Open cataloging standards movement
• Privacy issues and the conflicts between information seekers and creators
• Tension between local solutions and standardization/efficiency
• Work within established systems versus the creation of new schemes
• Impacts of the white, abled, heterosexual, gender-conforming, male viewpoint of our controlled vocabularies and classification systems
• Small-scale ways that practitioners can implement critical cataloging in their daily work
• Effects of inappropriate metadata on library users
• Effects of critical cataloging or inclusive metadata on library users
• Modern issues in cataloging (vendor created-records, “community share-zone” records, libraries’ relationships to authority control and LC, etc.) and their impact on practitioners’ ability to critically catalog and how to solve those issues
• Critical cataloging in archives
• Inclusive metadata creation
• Efforts to increase accessibility and inclusion within our collections by leveraging vendor or local systems’ features
• Implicit bias in cataloging/descriptive metadata work
• Inclusive metadata creation practices on new collections versus the challenges of addressing inappropriate or selectively scarce legacy metadata
• Case-studies and theoretical applications of critical cataloging and inclusive metadata on a large-scale
• Influence of critical cataloging theory on practitioners’ work

Please submit queries, proposals, and manuscripts to Violet Fox and Kelsey George, editors, at CritCat.InclusiveMetadata (at) gmail (dot) com following the guidelines here.