At a time when academic departments are often pressured to compete for limited funding and status in both the public and institutional eye, one thing every discipline has in common is metadata. At the same time, it is through the often underexamined (by non-librarians) information infrastructures within academia that inequities are perpetuated: troublesome subject headings and taxonomic practices, exorbitant vendor pricing and dubious data privacy practices, the ongoing insinuation and commoditization of generative AI, and so on.
Library workers are uniquely positioned to call out the political aspects of information infrastructures—and many of us try to do so but are limited by time constraints and competing priorities in information literacy one-shots, for example. Drawing from Nicole Starosielski’s work on communications and media infrastructures as well as Sofia Leung and Jorge López-McKnight’s Knowledge Justice and providing examples from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, this talk would illuminate how collaborations across public services, technical services, and departmental faculty can promote a deeper understanding of the component pieces of research and scholarship and of how to combat the biases that structure them.
