Month: December 2024

New/Recent Publications

Books

Documenting Communism: The Hoover Project to Microfilm and Publish the Soviet Archives
Charles G. Palm
Hoover Institution Press, 2024

Digital Media and the Preservation of Indigenous Languages in Africa: Toward a Digitalized and Sustainable Society
Edited by Fulufhelo Oscar Makananise and Shumani Eric Madima
Rowman & Littlefield, 2024

De l’écran à l’émotion: Quand le numérique devient patrimoine [From screen to emotion: When digital becomes heritage]
Emmanuelle Bermès
École nationale des chartes, 2024

Oral History at a Distance
Steven Sielaff, Stephen M. Sloan, Adrienne A. Cain Darough, Michelle Holland
Routledge, 2024

Misfits & Hybrids: Architectural Artifacts for the 21st-Century City
Ferda Kolatan
Routledge, 2024

Inclusive Cataloging: Histories, Context, and Reparative Approaches
Amber Billey, Elizabeth Nelson, Rebecca Uhl, Core
Facet Publishing, 2024

Collection Thinking: Within and Without Libraries, Archives and Museums
Edited By Jason Camlot, Martha Langford, Linda M. Morra
Routledge, 2024

Female Agency in Manuscript Cultures
Edited by: Eike Grossmann
De Gruyter, 2024

The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives
Melanie Micir
Princeton University Press, 2024

Articles

Salse-Rovira, M., Jornet-Benito, N., Guallar, J. et al. Universities, heritage, and non-museum institutions: a methodological proposal for sustainable documentation. Int J Digit Libr 25, 603–622 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-023-00383-0

Charitidis, P., Moschos, S., Bakouras, C. et al. OAVA: the open audio-visual archives aggregator. Int J Digit Libr 25, 623–637 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-023-00384-z

Late, E., Ruotsalainen, H. & Kumpulainen, S. Image searching in an open photograph archive: search tactics and faced barriers in historical research. Int J Digit Libr 25, 715–728 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-023-00390-1

Debra Reddin van Tuyll, Thomas J. Brown, Pam Parry, Nathan Saunders, Dianne Bragg, Simon Vodrey, and Thomas C. Terry. “Roundtable: How Historians and Archivists Worked Through and Survived the Pandemic.” Historiography in Mass Communication 10, no. 1 (2024).

Ahmad, R., Rafiq, M., & Arif, M. (2024). Global trends in digital preservation: Outsourcing versus in-house practices. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 56(4), 1114-1125. https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006231173461.

Harper, Elizabeth (2024) “Listening to Ghosts in the Appalachian Mountains: The Western North Carolina Tomorrow’s Black Oral History Project as a Community Archive,” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies: Vol. 11, Article 7.
Available at: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol11/iss1/7.

Force, Donald (2024) ““What the Heck Am I Looking At?”: A User-Based Examination of the Metadata Associated with Digital Archival Objects,” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies: Vol. 11, Article 8.
Available at: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol11/iss1/8.

Oluwayemi IbukunOluwa Odularu. “Perceptions on the utilisation of archives in enhancing research in Higher Educational Institutions.” African Journal of Library, Archives and Information Science 34, no. 1 (2024).

Maimuna Janneh, Olugbade Oladokun, Tshepho Mosweu. “From crisis to continuity: Analysing the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on public records and archives management in the Gambia.” African Journal of Library, Archives and Information Science 34, no. 1 (2024).

Podcasts

In the newest episode of SAA’s podcast, cohosts Camila Zorrilla Tessler and Conor Casey speak with historians Krista McCracken and Skylee-Storm Hogan-Stacey about Decolonial Archival Futures, their new book that challenges non-Indigenous practitioners to think consciously about the histories we tell. Listen for a discussion about rethinking structures of archival provenance and ownership, community relationship building, and decentering the settler perspective in archives.

Thesis

Archival Workers as Climate Advocates
Amy Wickner
University of Maryland, 2024

Fiction

National Archive Hunters 1: Capitol Chase
Matthew Landis
Holiday House, 2024

CFP: Virtual International Conference on The Black Indian Ocean: Slavery, Religion, and Expressive Cultures (1400-1700)

CFP Virtual International Conference on

The Black Indian Ocean: Slavery, Religion, and Expressive Cultures (1400-1700)

April 2-3, 2025

organized by Dr. Janie Cole (University of Connecticut) in collaboration with

Yale MacMillan Center, Yale Council on African Studies, and Yale Institute of Sacred Music

Deadline for abstracts: December 20, 2024

https://macmillan.yale.edu/africa/stories/cfp-virtual-internation-conference-black-indian-ocean-slavery-religion-and

This interdisciplinary conference on The Black Indian Ocean: Slavery, Religion, and Expressive Cultures (1400-1700) seeks to explore new perspectives on the impact of slavery, religions, migration and displacement across the Indian Ocean on Afro-Asian communities and their expressive cultures in the early modern world (1400-1700). It aims to uncover the untold musical histories of migration and migratory histories of music around the Indian Ocean world and beyond, how these mobilities can be identified in various cultural manifestations, and how expressive cultures and ritual articulated identity, self-fashioning, community and resistance to human rights’ violations.

While scholars have written extensively on the histories of slavery, trade, religions, migration and the circulation of material culture around the Indian Ocean since ancient times, the multifaceted nature of early modern Afro-Asian entanglements and encounters that constituted these Indian Ocean worlds has posed an array of challenges for studies endeavoring to capture their multivalent intersections with cultural practices, especially intangible heritage, and local knowledge systems.

The conference is deliberately articulated under the provocative title of the ‘Black Indian Ocean’ to serve as a counter dialogue to scholarly diaspora studies on the early modern Black Atlantic and the massive impact of the Black Atlantic slave trade, religious and trade networks on cultural mobilities and their enduring impact in the Americas, which has received considerable attention, and instead to focus on parallel themes in the Indian Ocean slave trade which predated the Atlantic and Islamic slave trades by centuries, was on a scale of equal magnitude, and yet in-depth scholarly examination on early modern arts remains limited.

The conference takes its starting point from the true story of Gabriel, a 16th-century Ethiopian Jew who was enslaved in Asia and converted to Islam, to address wider themes around religion, ritual, slavery, race, agency, and migration in the early modern Indian Ocean world; musical and other artistic representations of race, lament, violence, grief, slavery and IOW cultures; and the research and processes behind recreating past slave narratives, such as Gabriel’s Odyssey, developed by the Kukutana Ensemble.

Gabriel’s Odyssey is a musical narrative that tells the incredible 16th-century story of Gabriel, a Beta Israel Ethiopian Jew, who was abducted as a young child and sold into slavery in the Arab world, and his woeful wanderings between faiths, love and persecution in Asia to his final encounters with the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa. Drawing on imaginary and sumptuous soundscapes, visuals and voices of an early modern Indian Ocean world, Gabriel’s life represents a universal story of oppression, faith, migration and self-fashioning like the experiences of countless other early modern Africans.

Scholars from African Studies and South Asian Studies, including early modern cultural historians, historians, (ethno)musicologists, anthropologists, art historians, race scholars, and practitioners are invited to submit papers that engage renewed analytical attention to the intersections between slavery, religions, migration and displacement across the Indian Ocean on Afro-Asian communities and their expressive cultures in the early modern world (1400-1700) through established or emerging scholarship, without disciplinary limitations, that address (but are not limited to) the following themes:

-the impact of religion, ritual, slavery, and migration on Afro-Asian communities in the early modern Indian Ocean world and their expressive cultures

-dynamics of enslavement, faith, and power in the IOW and how communities/individuals drew on their faiths and cultural expressions to survive/resist

– musical and artistic representations/reenactments of slavery, race, lament, violence, grief in IOW cultures.

-new perspectives on archives/research methodologies and the characterization/telling of the long history of Africans in the Indian subcontinent

-theories of ontology, religion and violence

-intercultural encounters in religion in the Afro-Asian soundscape

– the Indian Ocean as an early modern African diasporic site and notions of oceanic “cosmopolitanism”

-Habshi life around the IOW basin and links to slave trading in the Horn of Africa and the Arab world

-how early modern social categories such as gender, religion, caste, ethnicity and origin intersected with relations of slavery and servitude

-religious persecution in 16th-century Portuguese India

-impact of gender: women in early modern IOW slavery and their cultural manifestations

-questions of narrative, representation and positionality in re-telling and/or reconstructing slave histories or past narratives, especially those involving race, violence, lament or grief.

-the circulation of early modern musical cultures and objects as linked to African and/or Asian cases of displacement or mobility

-documenting and conceptualizing music and materials that moved or were moved across the Indian ocean

***

The 2-day international conference on The Black Indian Ocean will be held online on April 2-3, 2025. This will be followed by an in-person live performance by the Afro-Asian Kukutana Ensemble of Gabriel’s Odyssey at Yale MacMillan Center on April 4, 2025, free and open to the public. We strongly encourage all delegates in the greater New Haven region, who are able to travel to Yale, to attend the US première of Gabriel’s Odyssey.

A selection of conference papers will be published in an edited volume (press to be confirmed), together with the 16th-century slave narrative and musical and visual artworks of Gabriel’s Odyssey by the Kukutana Ensemble.

A short documentary film by Music Beyond Borders about Gabriel’s Afro-Asian slave story in the wider context of the Black Indian Ocean world of slavery, religion, violence, race, identity, persecution and agency, and the making of Gabriel’s Odyssey, is under development (subject to funding).

Deadline for abstracts: December 20, 2024

Please submit proposals for 20 mins papers in WORD document, with a paper title, abstract max. 300 words, author name, contact email, phone number, institutional affiliation, and any A/V requirements, to Dr. Janie Cole: janie.cole@uconn.edu, with subject line “The Black Indian Ocean Proposal”. Selected participants will be contacted shortly thereafter.

Call for Nominations: Phyllis Dain Library History Dissertation Award

The Library History Round Table (LHRT) of the American Library Association (ALA) sponsors the biennial Phyllis Dain Library History Dissertation Award. The 2025 award cycle opens for submissions in January.  Applications are due by January 31, 2025.

The award, named in honor of a library historian widely known as a supportive advisor and mentor as well as a rigorous scholar and thinker, recognizes outstanding dissertations in English in the general area of library history. The author of the selected dissertation will receive a certificate and five hundred dollars.

Dissertations completed and accepted during the preceding two academic years are eligible. Dissertations completed in 2023 and 2024 will be considered for the 2025 award cycle.

Dissertations must be original research on a significant topic relating to the history of libraries during any period, in any region of the world. Entries are judged on clear definition of research questions and/or hypotheses, use of appropriate primary resources, depth of research, superior quality of writing, and significance of conclusions. The LHRT is particularly interested in dissertations that place the subject within its broader historical, social, cultural, and political context and that make interdisciplinary connections with print culture and/or information studies.

Submissions for the next award cycle will open in January 2025. Applicants will be asked to submit one electronic copy of the approved and signed dissertation and a signed letter of support from the doctoral advisor or dissertation committee chair at the degree-granting institution.

For more information, please visit: https://www.ala.org/lhrt/awards/phyllis-dain-library-history-dissertation-award

CFP: Fashion/Media: Power and Possibility

The Fashion Media Program in the Division of Journalism at Southern Methodist University is now accepting submissions for paper presentations at an upcoming two-day, transdisciplinary symposium, Fashion/Media: Power and Possibility, to be held Feb. 28 and March 1, 2025.

We seek research papers and critical analyses that investigate fashion, style, dress and appearance within media and power hierarchies in both historical and contemporary contexts. We are particularly interested in exploring how media can create spaces of resistance in order to expose and reimagine existing power structures. Through sharing diverse perspectives on how fashion and media can serve as both oppressive and emancipatory forces, this symposium encourages a deeper examination of how the fashion industry at large can be more equitable and inclusive.

We welcome scholarly and creative submissions that address fashion, style, dress, appearance and personal adornment at the intersection of structure and agency.

Potential topics include (but are certainly not limited to):

  • Social significance of fashion, dress and personal adornment
  • Expressions of subcultural and countercultural identities
  • Fashion and consumption
  • Materiality and sustainable production and consumption
  • Fashion advertising and branding
  • Costume and dress in fictional works
  • Curation, archives and cultural memory
  • Historical aspects of dress and fashion media
  • Dress codes as cultural capital
  • Educational practices in fashion and media

Location: Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX

For consideration, please submit abstracts of no than 300 words via this form by 11:59p CT Dec. 15, 2024.

Questions can be directed to Ethan Lascity, director of fashion media, at elascity@smu.edu.

Contact Email

elascity@smu.edu

URL

New Issue: Records Management Journal

Records Management Journal Volume 34, Issue 2/3
partial open access

Editorial: The carrot and the stick: the impact of legislation and regulation on records management best practice, change and innovation
Elizabeth Jane Lomas

Searching for a smoking gun: access to information and release of the John F. Kennedy assassination records
Amy Howard

Presidential prerogative, congressional inaction, and the problem of presidential libraries
Abigail Guay

The Public Records (Scotland) Act 2011: creating a culture that values public records
Hugh Patrick Hagan

Local regulations for the use of artificial intelligence in the management of public records – a literature review
Proscovia Svärd, Esteban Guerrero, Tolulope Balogun, Nampombe Saurombe, Lorette Jacobs, Pekka Henttonen

Strategy for auditing investigation records and information: a case study of records and information management in the Royal Malaysian Police
Widura Abd Kadir, Umi Asma’ Mokhtar, Zawiyah M. Yusof

Enhancing transparency and accountability in public procurement: exploring blockchain technology to mitigate records fraud
Danielle Alves Batista

Participatory and proactive: real-time rights-based recordkeeping governance for the alternative care of children
Joanne Evans, Moira Paterson, Melissa Castan, Jade Purtell, Mya Ballin

Accountability as a mechanism and a virtue in Irish public sector recordkeeping
Mark Farrell

Hidden stakeholder views in Finnish archival act law drafting: a recordkeeping perspective
Tuija Kautto, Virpi Hotti

The historical development and implementation effect of Chinese village-level archival legislation
Xinxin Xu

Creating a Research Agenda for the Archival Profession: Open Call to Participate

In late July of 2024, the Society of American Archivists received a $150,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Grant program to establish a prioritized research agenda for the archival profession that builds upon SAA’s recently adopted Research and Innovation Roadmap. Spearheaded by the Committee on Research, Data, and Assessment (CORDA) and with funding from IMLS, SAA will convene 35 archival experts, educators, community leaders, and grantmakers—archivists from across key sectors and professional positionality as well as relevant non-archivist stakeholders—to be part of a professionally facilitated two-day forum to take place in Chicago on May 1–2, 2025. Travel, lodging, and food for participants will be covered by grant funds. The participants will transform the recently adopted SAA Research and Innovation Roadmap into a research agenda and develop a framework for its implementation and adoption.

Establishing a prioritized agenda is too important to too many stakeholders to consider developing it within CORDA alone, or even within SAA or the larger archival community. This agenda must be the collaborative work of stakeholders representing diverse perspectives in the archival endeavor. It is for this reason that the 35 participants will be selected from an open call application process to form the Research Agenda Advisory Collective.

To ensure the success and thoughtful design of the 2-day in person forum, CORDA in consultation with SAA leadership and funding from IMLS have hired a professional facilitator, RMC (Research Making Change). RMC Research Corporation was our top contender for this project as they worked with the National Endowment for the Arts on a similar project turning a complex strategic plan into a Research Agenda and engaging a diverse group of 46 participants in 7 focus groups. RMC works across education, healthcare and arts industries. Their clients include local, state, and federal agencies; philanthropic foundations; creative services organizations and other nonprofits; higher education institutions; and private businesses. Their research profile, track record of conducting research and program based evaluation, and capacity building across industries, many of which deliver public benefit, is well aligned with the focus and intent of this effort.

Application Evaluation

To select 35 applicants for the 2-day in-person forum, CORDA and RMC have developed an online application that takes approximately 30–45 minutes to complete. The application consists of 9 demographic questions, CV upload, and 2 open-ended questions regarding engagement, experience, and expertise, as well as a positionality statement asking applicants how their lived experiences and/or DEIA-related work connects to the development of the roadmap into a research agenda for the profession.

To ensure an inclusive and diverse group, we have developed a weighted rubric, aligned with the Statement on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, to guide the selection of applicants to participate in the 2-day forum, based on the following criteria:

  • In and outside of the profession. Practicing archivists will form the majority of the Collective, including archivists affiliated with allied professional groups including the American Library Association (ALA), COSA, Regional Archival Associations, foundations and funders, as well as international organizations including either IFLA or UNESCO, grant makers, and educators.
  • Geographic location. Participants will primarily represent the United States of America, (West, Midwest, Northeast, South, Pacific, Caribbean). We will also allocate space and budgetary funds for one international participant (e.g. IFLA, UNESCO).
  • Socio-cultural factors. The Collective will represent different race/ethnicities and gender, related to individual and community identity, including the attributes mentioned in SAA’s Equal Opportunity/Non-discrimination Policy.
  • Employment seniority, status, and level. (1) We seek to include archivists that are individual contributors/solo archivists, managers, and senior administrators/executives in the profession. Archivists that are both contract/limited term vs. permanent. Archivists that are entry level (0-5 years), mid-level (6-14 years), and senior (15+ years) in their respective careers.
  • Archives sector. Participants will represent all sectors of the field including: Academic, Government Agency, Non-profit, For-profit, Self-employed, Community Archives, and Religious Archives.

How to Apply

Potential participants will have one month to apply and express their interest, as applications are due on December 20, 2024. Invitations to participate with further details will be sent by late January / February 2025.

Submit Your Application

(1) Classification based on the A*Census II survey and findings, see: https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/acensus-ii-all-archivists-survey-report/

Call for Participation: Research Survey about Copyright

Dear Colleagues, 

I am part of a group of authors that are co-authoring a book on U.S. copyright that explores how copyright has evolved over the centuries and in what types of ways authors, users, and libraries and archives are impacted by it. As part of the project, we are conducting surveys of each of these groups. The survey for libraries, archives and other cultural heritage organizations asks what copyright issues you have encountered and how you’ve managed them. The surveys for general users or users of ephemera ask about how users perceive copyright and use copyrighted works.

I am writing with the hopes that you will: 

1) complete the survey for cultural heritage organizations, and 

2) share the survey for users with your researchers. [I can provide QR codes to the surveys for easy distribution.] 

Note:researchers may fill out either survey, but the ephemera survey is targeted explicitly at those researchers who are utilizing archival collections containing unpublished works. 

A standard disclosure page at the start of each survey provides more information for respondents. The surveys have been evaluated by an IRB and are determined to be exempt. The survey(s) will run through December 9, 2024.

Many thanks to J. Christine Park, Law Librarian in Residence at Gallagher Law Library (University of Washington School of Law) for leading the empirical team handling the survey design, implementation, and analysis. 

Thank you for your time. If you have any questions or problems, please do not hesitate to contact me at hbriston@ucsd.edu

With all best regards,

Heather Briston 

Call for Nominations: Book Prize, Research Society of American Periodicals

Deadline: December 20, 2024

Contact: Cynthia Patterson (cpatterson@usf.edu) or Jim Berkey (jhb5255@psu.edu)

The Research Society of American Periodicals invites submissions for its 2023-2024 Book Prize. The prize is awarded to the best scholarly monograph on the subject of periodicals of the Americas published between January 1, 2023 and December 31, 2024. We understand “the Americas” as a geopolitical region to encompass more than the fifty US states and we welcome submissions with local, regional, national, international, transnational, transatlantic, and/or hemispheric archives, methodologies, and orientations. We also consider serial publications that might not reflect the conventional form of periodicals like newspapers, scholarly journals, and magazines; therefore, books about publications like zines and comics as well as digital publications may be eligible for this prize. Please note that submissions from all fields and disciplines are welcome, though at this time we are only able to consider books written in English.

The prize winner will be awarded $1000. The prizewinner and two honorable mentions will also be provided with a one-year membership to the Research Society of American Periodicals, which includes a subscription to the society’s journal, American Periodicals. The winner and two honorable mentions will be invited to participate in an RSAP Book Prize Roundtable held at the 2025 American Literature Association conference. If the conference is held in person, all roundtable participants will be reimbursed for travel expenses related to the conference (up to $1000). In order to alleviate costs as much as possible and allow for an international panel of scholars to review submissions, we ask that all monographs be submitted in electronic form. 

To apply, please email Cynthia Patterson at cpatterson@usf.edu and Jim Berkey at jhb5255@psu.edu with the completed  registration form (attached below) as well as an electronic version of the monograph.

In order to be considered, all submissions must be received by December 20, 2024, 11:59 p.m., and award recipients will be notified by the end of January 2025.

For more about the Research Society for American Periodicals, visit https://www.periodicalresearch.org/ and follow on Twitter @RSAPeriodicals.

Contact Email

jhb5255@psu.edu

Call for Book Chapter Proposals on the History of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions

Call for Book Chapter Proposals on the History of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions

Key Timeline

  • Deadline for Proposals: December 15, 2024
  • August, 2025, IFLA Library History SIG Sponsored Author’s Symposium to workshop and discuss chapter drafts
  • Full chapters will be due in April 2026
  • The book will be published in 2027 by De Gruyter academic publishing

Editors:

  • Steven Witt, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
  • Peter Lor, University of Pretoria, South Africa
  • Anna Maria Tamaro, University of Parma, Italy
  • Jeffrey Wilhite, Oklahoma University, USA

Inquiries: Steve Witt, Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign swwitt@illinois.edu.

To mark the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions’ (IFLA) centenary, the IFLA Library History SIG seeks proposals for book chapters that investigate IFLA’s history. We seek broad and interdisciplinary perspectives that draw upon established historiographical methods and primary source materials. We encourage and welcome chapters that take regional perspectives while also seeking submissions focused on topics and themes of both information and transnational/global history as they relate to the impact and activities of IFLA on society, culture, and the information professions. Authors are encouraged to adopt analytical and critical, as distinct from annalistic and celebratory, approaches.

IFLA was founded in 1927 during a period marked by intense interest and development in the potential for organized knowledge to advance individuals and societies, accelerate science and technology, develop economies, and promote international peace and cooperation. Efforts in the library and information science field spawned ambitious projects to catalog human knowledge, standardize practices, and promote access to information through the proliferation globally of public libraries and information bureaus. In the ensuing 100 years, IFLA weathered economic depression, world war, the Cold War, regional conflict, and the continuing information revolutions. At the same time, libraries as institutions, cultural touchstones, and places of refuge played an important role in societies, advancing development, spreading literacy, and supporting governance at all levels. Libraries and the LIS professions have also served as cultural symbols that both inspire hope for social change and engender debate about the role of information and books in advancing contested values.  In short, libraries and organizations such as IFLA have helped to shape both individuals and societies throughout the past 100 years.

Submissions

Chapter proposals of no more than 1,000 words exclusive of the cover page and references are welcome.

Please include the following to facilitate the peer review process:

Cover Page that includes:

  • Author’s Name
  • Contact Information
  • Institutional Affiliation
  • Names of additional authors

Proposal with following elements:

  • Chapter Abstract (up to 1000 words) and with following elements:
  • Significance to both the history of IFLA and history of information and libraries
  • Temporal and geographical scope
  • Theme and topics covered (with reference to below organization and themes)
  • Archival and primary source materials to be used to support research
  • Bibliography containing relevant secondary source materials

Authors may submit proposals that are derived from historical research projects that have been completed or that are still in progress.

All proposals will undergo peer review.  Decisions will be communicated after the editorial committee’s review of the proposal and a full timeline and guide for authors will be provided to authors at that time.

Upon acceptance of the proposal, authors will be asked to provide a draft chapter for presentation, review, and comment at an author’s invitational symposium of the IFLA Library History SIG to be held in August of 2025.  Revised and complete chapters will be due for final review in April of 2026 to enable publication of the book in 2027.  Following review, chapters should range from 4,000 to 10,000 words inclusive of titles, abstract, manuscript, and references.  These will be submitted using the Chicago Manual of Style notes and bibliography system.

Although the final book will be published in English, the Library History SIG would like to encourage authors from diverse linguistic backgrounds to submit proposals.  The editors will work with authors who wish to write in a language other than English to facilitate translations.

Please send all submissions to the following address: IFLALIBHISTSIG@gmail.com with the following subject line: Chapter Proposal

Organization and Themes

The book aims to include both transnational and regional perspectives on IFLA and the history of libraries and the information society over the past 100 years.  The editors plan to organize the volume under the following broad themes:

  • Informational utopia – networks, knowledge organization, and the global rise of libraries
  • Cold War and the dawn of information technology
  • Information for All – access and information justice amidst globalization
  • The future of libraries in an era of ubiquitous information

Within these broad themes, regional perspectives are encouraged from the IFLA Regions:

  • Asia Oceania
  • Europe
  • Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Middle East and North Africa
  • North America
  • Sub-Saharan Africa

In addition, themes and topics to consider with this broader framing include yet are not limited to IFLA’s history as it relates to:

  • Free Access to Information Movement
  • Cultural Heritage
    • Disasters
    • Climate change
    • Committee of the Blue Shield
    • Memory of the World and UNESCO
  • Impact on social, economic, and/or political development
    • Libraries
    • Associations
    • Civil society / governance
  • Post-colonial societies
  • Globalization of information
  • Global political economy of libraries and information
  • Global governance of information and technology
  • Development of public libraries, school libraries, and other library types
  • Public library politics program
  • Relations with international Organizations or associations: League of Nations, UNESCO, WIPO, FID, etc.
  • Relations with foundations and national funding bodies: Carnegie, Bill and Melinda Gates, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) etc.
  • IFLA sections, units, and programs
  • Leadership development – related to grants and funding for conference attendance
  • Building strong library associations initiatives
  • IFLA during periods of war and social strife
  • Expansion of IFLA as truly global organization inclusive of global south etc.

During various planning sessions and presentations over the past several years, a number of themes have been identified and suggested for the centenary book.  These have been compiled by Peter Lor, one of the book editors, and are available in “Sources and themes for the historiography of IFLA”.

Contact Information

Steve Witt, PhD
Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Convenor, IFLA, Library History SIG

Contact Email

swwitt@illinois.edu

URL: https://www.ifla.org/news/call-for-book-chapter-proposals-on-the-history-of-the-international-federation-of-library-associations-and-institutions/

Call for Proposals: Critical Pedagogy Symposium: Decentering the West

Introduction 

The 2025 Critical Pedagogy Symposium (CPS), now in its 3rd iteration since 2021, seeks to provide space for library workers and information professionals of all kinds to collaborate in critical pedagogical thought and critical practice. We want to build community, and to imagine new ways of doing our work by naming and dismantling oppressive systems and imagining new worlds. In this biennial symposium, our overarching aim is to collaborate in growing creative, generous, and mutually supportive intersectional and anti-oppressive work within Library and Information Science (LIS) so that we hone a sharp language for interrogating and dismantling inequities of all kinds and for doing justice work together. 

2025 Critical Pedagogy Symposium 

The 2025 Symposium will examine global barriers and their impact on library and archival pedagogy. This year’s Symposium is inspired by the pedagogies and practices of those thinking about colonialism, imperialism, transnationalism, epistemic injustice, and other frameworks for Decentering the West. With this in mind, we have created three broad tracks through which to consider Decentering the West in our critical pedagogy and practice.

Knowledge practices (diasporic, Indigenous, or ancestral): this track focuses on the ways libraries, archives, and their workers are pulling from historical knowledge banks to provide new ways of knowing, learning, and disseminating knowledge. Prompts for this track may include, but are not limited to: 

  • How can traditions, folklore, artifacts, etc. be integrated into information skills programs, our services, and courses in a critical way?
     
  • What are methods for teaching that engage users with ancestral connection?
     
  • How do we decenter Western or Global North perspectives in our instruction, collections, cataloging, and/or archival work? What does it mean to decenter these perspectives? 
     
  • How do we source collections with materials that are not available via mainstream publishers?
     

Community Building (as Critical Pedagogy): this track focuses on the co-creation or re-creation of knowledge with communities both inside and outside the formal library, archives, or institution. Prompts for this track may include, but are not limited to: 

  • How do we work in community with those facing challenges to their communities and materials, ie, censorship, funding, institutional access, etc.? 
     
  • How do libraries further anti-oppressive work given their relationships with oppressive (corporate, imperialist, etc.) institutions including vendors and parent organizations (universities, municipalities, etc.)?
     
  • What would “successful” community building look like?
     
  • What are examples of community-engaged art and/or service work, and what are the implications of the library’s roles in these often under-resourced projects?  

Information Access (and Global Capitalism): this track focuses on the issues surrounding information access, the commodification of information, and the role of libraries in pedagogy. Prompts for this track may include, but are not limited to: 

  • How have digital inclusion and open access projects been successful in providing access to information, services and technology in different countries or geographic regions?
     
  • How does the conglomeration of publishers and the shift from owning to renting information impact librarianship? 
     
  • How does the proliferation and expansion of generative AI and related AI tools impact access to information? 
     
  • How does the use/collection of Big Data and surveillance impact information access? 
     
  • How do we teach in the classroom in a way that is critical of global capitalism?

Call for Proposals

We invite imaginative thinking with no boundaries that may focus on prefigurative, thought-provoking, and imagined worlds. Proposals may be panels, individual presentations, workshops, peer-review sessions, or facilitated discussions that consider ideas you are working through (and want to discuss), and/or encourage community building. Review the 2023 and 2021 symposium schedules to get a sense of previous offerings.

Submit your proposal! Complete this form by the dates below with the option for a preliminary submission for feedback prior to the final deadline. You may send any questions to criticallibrarysymposium@gmail.com.

Timeline:
Early deadline for feedback on your proposal – December 4th, 2024
Final deadline for proposals – January 15th, 2025
Notification of acceptance – February 15th, 2025
Symposium Date – Week of June 9th – 13th, 2025

We invite proposals from the perspective of reference, instruction, technical services, library administration, leadership, collection development, design, digital scholarship, open education, and archives. Additional areas of interest include work that extends to other parts of the information community, related to outreach, liaison work, research dissemination, scholarly communications, and programming. We are excited to hear from people from countries outside of the West, specifically outside of the United States, to present in English. Proposals will be accepted for presenting during the following times: 7am – 9pm EST (New York); 3pm – 5am in UAE (Abu Dhabi); 7pm – 9am CST (Shanghai).

To submit your proposal, complete this form by March 21st (or Feb 21st for feedback which is encouraged). If there are any questions, email criticallibrarysymposium@gmail.com.

The Critical Pedagogy Symposium is co-sponsored by: Barnard Library, NYU Libraries, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Library Information Library Council of CUNY, Metropolitan Library Council, Association of Library and Information Science Educators Innovate Pedagogies Special Interest Group, The Faculty Resource Network, and growing.