No abstract

Library and information studies (LIS) has yet to see an exploration of the workings of love, as a force that both explicitly and implicitly underpins practices and rhetoric within our discipline. Understanding the "force" that is love requires analysis of social, and collective, relations. This paper draws on selected literature in order to present such an exploration for the first time. As this paper illustrates, love provides a distinctive, feminist lens onto structures and power dynamics. It can illuminate, and create opportunities to address, divergent challenges within LIS and the world at large.

This paper represents the results of a conversation between Adrienne Heavy Head, the creator and manager of the Blackfoot Digital Library (BDL), at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, and Mary Greenshields, a new librarian in Alberta.  The aim of the conversation was for Mary, a settler living in traditional Blackfoot Territory, to learn about the creation and maintenance of the BDL, and to gain insight into the organization, access, and classification of information within the library as a real life example of some of the protocols suggested by the Canadian Federation of Library Associations (CFLA). Adrienne and Mary hope that this conversation will help librarians to better understand knowledge management from a Blackfoot perspective and might inspire librarians to start such conversation with the Indigenous peoples upon whose land their libraries rest.