Alissa

This is shit news and I’m angry to hear it. Hoping you’ll soon land somewhere that values you.

Trump signs three executive orders targeting ‘woke’ AI models Crackdown on what the White House claims is bias echoes longstanding conservative grievances against tech

Encountering a near existential dissonance seeing articles like this next to articles about professors, teacher unions, and university admins gleefully adopting and promoting these systems.

[worst possible stuff happening everywhere] man why do I feel bad

Libraries as “Academic Traffic Facilities”: Interlibrary Loan Imaginations after 1945 | Critical Inquiry: Vol 51, No 4 Abstract The devastation of World War II left German libraries partly in ruins, collections and catalogs lost or destroyed, prompting a need to reconstruct and reimagine the library system. This artic...

“This article shows how interlibrary loan, conceived as a form of academic traffic, played a crucial role in postwar reconstruction efforts, facilitating the xchg of resources + info among libraries… [It] focuses on the elaborate procedures librarians developed to create union catalogs.”

Beyond provocation: Reimagining systems through care, critique, and community - Emilia C. Bell Keynote at ANZREG Conference 11th June 2025 Slides | Recording [when available] Licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY-4.0), except for any content quoted from ...

I had the pleasure of giving a keynote for the ANZREG conference earlier this week titled 'Beyond provocation: Reimagining systems through care, critique, and community.'

🔗 Talk and slides: www.emiliabell.com/2025/06/13/b...

A new memorandum from the Dept of Defense listing specific subject headings to be used within military libraries to flag books with "divisive content." #LCSH #critcat 📚 media.defense.gov/2025/May/09/...

A cataloguing-literate librarian clearly helped them write this. There are collaborators everywhere.

Carla Hayden was president of the @amlibraryassoc.bsky.social when ours was one of few organized voices opposed to the USA PATRIOT Act.

Librarians have been fired all across the federal government, gutting not just ours but the world’s intellectual infrastructure. Devastating.

A mastodon post by @hedgielib (on glammr.us server) that says There was a question about "what AI skills should librarians have" on one of my listservs. My Ideas: • Knowledge of the IP theft underlying these tools • Discerning “we just relabeled something and now are pretending it’s AI to charge you more while making the product worse”  from vendor pitches • Understanding the inherent biases, the ecological harms, the underpaid mods • Addressing loss of critical thinking and reading skills ] • Demonstrating how this is being used as labor suppression It has 354 boosts in 24 hours

So this has been an entertaining 24 hours

A flyer for a set of documents "Demonstrating the value of cataloging". Six folders are labeled "talking points for administrators, top 5 reasons why you need a cataloger, annotated bibliography, resources list & acronym cheat sheet, side-by-side comparisons of good administrators bad metadata, and introduction to metadata zine. At the bottom text reads you can find these resources at the link in the post, and they were created by the ALA SAC Devaluation of Cataloging Working Group, 2025.

Could you use help explaining the value of #cataloging & good metadata to your admin, coworkers, #MLIS students, etc.? Happy to share this set of resources put together by an ALA working group chaired by @magsjoy.bsky.social. All of these & more are available at hdl.handle.net/11213/22872. 📚

Scan of a letter from Sandy Berman to The Policy, Training, and Cooperative Programs Division of the Library of Congress. It reads: 3-22-25 Policy, Training, and Cooperative Programs Division Library of Congress Washington, DC 20540-4305 Dear Colleagues, BRAVO! Your recent conversion of DENALI, MOUNT (ALASKA) and MEXICO, GULF OF to MCKINLEY, MOUNT (ALASKA) and AMERICA, GULF OF, respectively, as both primary and subheadings was breathtakingly thorough and detailed. You are masters of your craft. Alas, you are also willful handmaidens of chauvinism, ethnocentrism and fascism. Also: Trumpism. Many weeks ago I expressed the hope that LC would resist the temptation to implement this palpably capricious, arbitrary, and baseless name-charging. That admonition appears to have gone unheeded. Our President has no authority to wantonly replace the name for international waters that abut more countries than our own. Beyond that, the Gulf of Mexico has been so known since about the 16th Century. Its renaming, totally rejected by neighboring Mexico, smacks of arrogant linguistic imperialism. It seems the whole state of Alaska prefers the Athabascan place- name, Denali, to McKinley, a U.S. President associated with American expansion who never set foot in Alaska. The widely-unwanted name change is an affront to Alaska's indigenous population, as well as its state legislature and two Republican senators. Although LC has now fully demonstrated its lock-step deference to bigoted, unjustified authority, I hope American librarians will muster the moral and intellectual strength. to ignore its dismal example. Sorrowfully, [large, sprawling, angry signature] Sanford Berman Margaret Mann Citation Recipient Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award Recipient ALA Equality Award Recipient Herb Biblo Outstanding Leadership Award for Social Justice & Equality Recipient 4400 Morningside Road Edina, MN 55416

Here's a banger from Sandy Berman about the #lcsh changes from Mount Denali to Mount McKinley and Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America (and The Policy, Training, and Cooperative Programs Division of the Library of Congress being "handmaidens to chauvinism, ethnocentrism and fascism."). 📚

Join me and @abelantara.bsky.social on May 5th for the online launch of Ways of Knowing: The Worlds Words Create, our new collection documenting the development and implementation of alternative cataloging & classification schemes.

mhttps://litwinbooks.com/book-launch-ways-of-knowing/

Addressing this to fellow Australians but it applies to everyone: LCSH and LCNAF are not library law. Their use is entirely optional. We can choose otherwise. We should choose better.

New issue of Critcatenate now available for those interested in critical approaches to metadata in libraries & archives. Lots of events coming up! cataloginglab.org/2025/02/28/c... 📚 #critcat

Sand Talk being second on this list speaks volumes about its power to quietly ignite and transform perspectives all over the world. It’s still one of the best books I’ve ever read and it’s great to see it included below.

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

The Process is the Point An irregular newsletter about library metadata and the forces that shape it.

I'm launching a newsletter. It's called The Process is the Point. It's about library metadata and the forces that shape it. Sign up here: buttondown.com/lissertations

proprietary software has failed: a community-driven open source security proposal This is the text of a paper I delivered at UKSG November Conference 2024 on 2024-11-20 on the theme of 'Cybersecurity and Censorship'. It has been edited from the original to incorporate the accompany...

Also a good time for libraries to rethink paying vast sums for unreliable library software from companies like Ex Libris Group owned by Clarivate. There are other ways to run our libraries.

The Process is the Point An irregular newsletter about library metadata and the forces that shape it.

I'm launching a newsletter. It's called The Process is the Point. It's about library metadata and the forces that shape it. Sign up here: buttondown.com/lissertations

I emailed LC noting, among other things, the difficulty of providing feedback by the 18th when it was 12.30am on the 19th for us when this list was issued.

LC is not my country’s library, though. I resent having to care so much about this.

Cataloging friends, consider cueing up a local authority record for "Gulf of Mexico" for when the #LCSH is changed. If you're in a consortium, start those discussions now. #critcat

$3.2M Mellon grant boosts Native Hawaiian knowledge at UH Mānoa Library | University of Hawaiʻi System News The grant will integrate Native Hawaiian knowledge into library collections, preserving cultural heritage and enhancing accessibility.

Excited for the continued work of creating a Hawaiian knowledge organization system and improving our description through the Kahoʻiwai Mellon Grant!! Honored to be contributing to this work. #knowledgeorganization #critcat #controlledvocabularies www.hawaii.edu/news/2025/01...

New issue of Critcatenate now available, featuring updates about what's happening in the world of inclusive/critical #cataloging. cataloginglab.org/2025/01/31/c... #critcat

SFPL_SubjectHeadings

Today I get to make an exciting announcement! After years of work, San Francisco Public Library's alternative headings are now live. This list represents hundreds of hours of work and I'm proud of what we've done. Here is the list if your library would like to use it: docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Want to read some great work on the intertwined histories of knowledge organization and nation-building? @hannahtrnr.bsky.social and I put together a special issue for the Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science just for you!
ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/cj...

@violetbfox.bsky.social Did anything ever happen with that LCSH external editorial committee report from a couple of years ago? (this one cataloginglab.org/externalrevi...)

ooh, got a link for that?

In my ‘spare time’ I enjoy atmospheric black metal, learning Finnish, long train journeys and doing crazy things that scare me. 😝

If we haven’t met yet: I’m Alissa, metadata strategy librarian from Victoria, Australia. I work to make library catalogues less racist and culturally safer, and help build cataloguing culture change. I think a lot about how standards and infrastructure support or hinder these goals.