I write and teach about libraries: how they are built, who does the work of building them, and what happens when that work goes unseen. This site collects talks, conference notes, essays and teaching materials gathered over twenty years in the field, in jobs ranging from looseleaf legal filer to library director.
Three questions run through most of it. What does a catalogue do to the things it describes? What happens to teaching when it is measured against a standard written somewhere else? And what can library workers do together that none of us can do alone?
Description and the catalogue
Classification is not a neutral mirror of the world. It puts things next to other things, and in doing so it makes some subjects easy to find and others almost invisible. Two of the longer talks here work through that: Intersections with Power: Critical Teaching and the Library Catalogue and the WILU 2016 keynote.
Teaching and standards
Standards promise to describe teaching and end up prescribing it. What Standards Do and What They Don't is the long version of that argument; Are libraries neutral? is the short one.
Libraries and labour
Library budgets are labour budgets. When a campus locks its faculty out, the library is where that decision lands first. Those posts start at LIU Brooklyn lockout and run through Money and power and Lockout Lessons.
Where to start
Longer pieces are listed under Publications. Talks and conference notes are collected under Media. Shorter posts, newest first, are on the blog. There is a short About page with a way to get in touch.