Emily Drabinski reports on the recent Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies Colloquium
Emily Drabinski, co-organizer of the recent Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies Colloquium at the University of Toronto, has done a nice writeup about the event for the Metropolitan New York Library Council:
DECIDING WHAT GOES WHERE AND WHY: GENDER STUDIES AND LIBRARIANSHIP
By Emily Drabinski, Coordinator of Library Instruction, Long Island University, Brooklyn
At its heart, our work in libraries is about finding a place for everything, and putting everything in its place. We usually think of this as work for the greater good, and it is: without ordering mechanisms like the Dewey Decimal System, cutter numbers, Library of Congress call numbers, and linked data, users would have to chance upon relevant materials and build archives anew every time, all by themselves. We need librarians! But the responsibility for organizing collections also reflects the power to determine how materials fit into these schemas. Someone—and that someone is us—gets to decide what goes where, and why.
Around 100 librarians, archivists, and information studies scholars gathered at the University of Toronto this past October to explore these issues. Organized by Library Juice Press/Litwin Books, the Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies Colloquium (#gsisc14) addressed a number of broad themes: queer theory and information organization, affect theory and archives, gender and sexuality in the library classroom and at the reference desk, pornography in library and archival collections, and intersections of gender, race, and class in the profession.