Making Non-Western Knowledge Digitally Accessible through Community Engagement

Karim Tharani's Shifting Established Mindsets and Praxis in Libraries: Five Insights for Making Non-Western Knowledge Digitally Accessible through Community Engagement in the Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship is an interesting piece of scholarship about library engagement.   Tharani is the IT Librarian at the University of Saskatchewan who helped develop the Ginan Central digital collection.   As an initiative to digitally curate an oral tradition, the project shows how librarians can improve discoverability of non-Western knowledge materials in libraries.  In the context of the Ismaili Muslim community, the term ginan is used for the community’s collection of oral tradition of gnostic and devotional hymns.

Canada, as in most Western societies, the primary medium to codify knowledge continues to be written text, whether in print or electronic format.  Consequently, bibliographic standards and practices in academic libraries have evolved to be very efficient in managing textual knowledge materials and making them accessible.  This specialized operational efficiency, however, comes at the cost of marginalizing non-textual, and by extension non-Western, knowledge carriers, including oral traditions.  

1. Value Relationships Over Tasks - Establishing trust with community elders, leaders, and youth is vital in uncovering and understanding the needs and challenges of the community.   As this may be counter to the efficient workflows and tasks of academic institutions used to one-off projects that have predetermined timelines, librarians need to sustain relationships that are forged as part of these projects.

2.  Accept Community Engagement as a Continuum - Communities are like families and consists of individuals with different personalities, experiences, and perspectives.  Though a community may share a common history, their opinions, preferences, decisions, are not monolithic.   Librarians need to be appreciative and sensitive to these varying sentiments in order to be productive and successful in their work with communities.  

3.  Learn to Appreciate Rather than Appropriate Materials - The history of colonization is embedded in appropriation, including the practice of physically relocating materials for processing which can be a culturally traumatic process.   Librarians need to demonstrate an appreciative mindset by exercising flexibility in processing community collections, which again counters a typical operational workflow of libraries in which materials are selected, acquired, and described before being made available through discovery systems and catalogues.    For true collaboration to happen, librarians need to shift their mindset from physically gathering collections in libraries to one that prioritizes work to happen off-campus locations in the community.  

4.  Consider Oral Sources to Be As Important as Textual Ones - Libraries are used to working with tangible, text-based knowledge carriers grounded in physical convenience that is contrary to the value of orality of knowledge based on traditions that are alive and current.   Librarians need to shift their thinking that Indigenous knowledge as 'static' to one that is as continuing.  

5.  Accept Community Materials as Credible Knowledge Resources -  As Western scholarship tends to reduce oral traditions to textual renditions for research, such as prioritizing ancient manuscripts, this questionable practice is inconsistent with how communities prefer to render oral traditions to text and other media to complement rather than replace their traditional ways of transmitting oral knowledge.  Librarians need to be cognizant and respectful of these traditions when working with their communities and integrating these communal materials into scholarly discourses.

I value Karim Tharani's contribution to this area of scholarship and appreciate the best practices he's laid out when working with communities.  As I move into the deep and enriching work of library engagement with our diverse communities in British Columbia and Canada, this will be a strong reminder of the continuing evolution of programs and services and how they fit in the paradigm of community engagement.   "Outreach" is an outdated terminology that activates and transmits knowledge in a very surface-level contact with a community, community engagement continues to evolve not as a   'model' so much as by a framework of guiding principles, strategies, and approaches, one based on principles that respect the right of all community members to be informed, consulted, involved and empowered.   Things move quickly; certainly, my research and scholarship in this area has changed so much that many of my earlier thoughts as a librarian need to be updated.

Broken Publishing Gone Wild - Time for a Change

The recent shock on Wall Street amateur investors used Reddit to challenge the investment establishment, stocks in GameStop rose suddenly from about $18 dollars a share to $347 dollars within hours.   When the dust finally settles, scores of business and history books will emerge about the saga.  GameStop will forever be remembered as a 'meme stock,' a reminder that the power of social media can challenge big money corporations.  While some deny it is nothing more than a symptom of the 'infodemic' of conspiracy theories and false claims, I instead argue that this is an evolution of the deep distrust of 'elitist' capitalism.   The argument has been that these too-big-to-fail institutions have taken advantage of investors, often bilking them of fees and talking down to the so-called 'uneducated' everyday investor while reaping profits at their expense.   The GameStop incident is the 'wisdom of the crowds', and I think the financial industry is undergoing a tectonic shift, and long before GameStop happened, discount brokerages have already given autonomy to individual retail investors.    But it's not the only industry that is about to be shaken.

Currently, the current academic publishing industry is dominated by monopolies.  Academic libraries have cut subscriptions over the past two decades with journals often consuming sometimes more than half of their budgets.  While other industries, such as the news, tend to pay their staff and writers for the content they sell, academic publishers don't even need to do that and, instead, getting their articles, their peer reviewing, and even much of their editing for free.  Something doesn't quite look right with this model.  Content funded by the government and student tuition goes directly to these publishers while universities are locked into buying their products. Academic journals are published in only one place, and they have to be read by researchers trying to keep up with their research areas. 

Demand is inelastic and competition non-existent because different journals can't publish the same material. In many cases, the publishers oblige the libraries to buy a large package of journals, whether or not they want them all.   They refer to this as journal bundling, and no one really knows who is paying what.  The monopoly of for-profit publishers Routledge, Elsevier, Springer, Elsevier, Emerald, Sage, and Wiley-Blackwell have a dominant grip on even the open-access market, as Shaun Khoo's piece in Liber Quarterly argues that article processing charges (APC) have opened up huge opportunities for big publishers by "going gold OA" to grow their revenue base even more.    This is unsustainable, but faculty and researchers are complicit as they need the publishing houses to secure tenure and promotion.   Academic libraries are on their own for the most part to resolving this, and it's happening one way or another.    The publishers know timing is running out, but they're prolonging the inevitable fall of this vicious cycle as long as possible.  

Critical Race Theory and Academic Libraries - Opening the Pandora's Box of Bureaucracy

Kudos to the Canadian Journal of Academic Libraries for its most recent issue Special Focus on Academic Libraries and the Irrational (Volume 6, 2020) -- it's in my view a top journal in LIS.   This article is one of the best I've come across about critical race theory (CRT) in regard to academic libraries.  Do you find these points chillingly on par at your bureaucratic institution?  Let me know if this resonates with you.  

Here are some highlights:

• "when it comes to many common practices in academia such as meetings and structured group work . . . these meetings are “ritual performances in which explicit rules are enacted through tacit knowledge . . . and formal transparency is intertwined with relational and informational withholding” [and] is applicable to academic libraries where meetings manifest as part of what [is] a culture of conformance . . ."

• "Although supposedly meetings are used to ensure that “all voices are heard,” they are often the venues in which conformance is visibly displayed through the tracking of performance targets and regular progress reports."

• "Strategic decisions are already made by administrators, but absurdly (or perversely), middle managers are forced to convene working groups and committees to give the appearance of democratic decision-making, which can be demoralizing for all actors involved in the process. Library administrators and/or managers promise that if library workers will just participate in these meetings, then the library mission will be accomplished, but often the participation in bureaucracy becomes the product itself and the mission is never fulfilled."

• "adoption of bureaucratic practices is supposed to be a way towards equity and efficiency, it is in fact a tool to maintain power structures . . . Sometimes, these groups are formed to hide fait accompli, top-down decisions under the guise of group decisionmaking and stakeholder consultation "

• "bureaucracy within academic libraries functions to provide the appearance of work being accomplished while simultaneously keeping library workers occupied, without enabling the actual accomplishment of work that might upset existing and historically oppressive power structures."

• "In academic libraries, Eurocentric collegial and teaching practices (e.g., using Robert’s rules in meetings, centering quantitative assessment practices) sustain norms of assumed neutrality, objectivity, and meritocracy, while simultaneously delegitimizing the epistemologies and cultural capital of communities of colour"

• “Bureaucracy has invented the concept of the ‘official secret’ which means the information can be gathered and exact commands transmitted in a secretive way . . . a way of gatekeeping, where information is used to dominate marginalized groups. . .”

• "Historically, LIS co-opted technical and managerial language to overemphasize pragmatic administrative concerns while failing to cast a critical eye on how these bureaucratic systems marginalize a good number of library workers . . . BIPOC lack the agency to reject roles or responsibilities that are considered absurd"

• "Libraries maintain an outward appearance of “inherent goodness” and egalitarianism . . . while enacting bureaucratic processes that undermine such aims. "

• "BIPOC must absorb meeting expectations, figure out to whom one should direct questions or delegate tasks, and also adopt white academic jargon"

• "the professional performance of BIPOC vis-à-vis visual representation and intellectual contributions to the group are informed by and judged against white norms . . . performing whiteness requires invested time and wealth; it’s an involved enterprise ranging from hair styling to attire to eliminating accents, and so on, that conceals marginalized librarians’ authentic selves"

• "To survive and thrive in librarianship, BIPOC must remove, or at the very least downplay, all markers of intersectional identities in order to embrace a paradigm of whiteness. These actions are part of what Kaetrena Davis Kendrick (2018) terms deauthentication, where BIPOC preempt microaggressions in order to navigate and be accepted into primarily white workplaces."

• "racial microaggressions are acts of everyday, subtle racism (e.g., questioning phenotype and/or immigration status) that serve to remind BIPOC of their marginalized status in a society where whiteness is the default."

• "microaggressions, CRT argues, repudiates the belief that “racism only manifests in egregious and blatant acts of exclusion . . . [rather it] is instead shrouded in discourses of merit, fairness, and personal responsibility”

• "This toll is exacerbated when BIPOC workers attempt to identify and name absurd practices within the white supremacist culture that they are expected to navigate, and voicing these concerns out loud may not be in their best interests. Indeed, BIPOC may be perceived as unprofessional and ignorant if they state that something is absurd"

• "BIPOC risk being cast aside, picked on, terminated, and even chastised publicly and on a wide scale when directly challenging administration or the dominant culture. They are meant to look down or away."

• "the most ‘rational’ type of domination is found in the bureaucracy simply because it aims to do nothing more than calculate the most precise and efficient means for the resolution of problems by ordering them under universal and abstract regulations.”