NASIG 2025

In this keynote address speaker Amy Tureen imagines what libraries and librarianship could look like if employee wellness was as sacrosanct as other professional values such as access, equity, intellectual freedom, and privacy.

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.