Introduction

Abstract

Labor in academic libraries has reemerged as an area of critical interest in both academic library and archives communities. Librarians and archivists have long worked to counter the diminishment of their labor within an academy that centers the concerns of disciplinary faculty who may, in turn, see knowledge workers as a footnote to the scholarly enterprise. Recent years have seen a renewed attention to the social and economic conditions of our work, as researchers turned to topics such as affective labor in libraries and archives, attitudes toward labor unions, and information work under capitalism (Sloniowski 2016;Mills and McCullough 2018;Burns 2018). As the landscape of higher education changes dramatically after decades of reduced public investment, rising tuition, and an explosion of student loan debt, colleges and universities have sought to streamline, downgrade, and outsource labor. Workers have in turn fought back by organizing, withholding their labor, and articulating new visions of the academy and the academic workplace.To that end, we sought to collect new scholarship reflecting the broad range of issues facing information workers in the academic setting. From professional status and credentialing to emotional labor and discrimination, we saw a need for a thorough assessment of the conditions of labor in the contested terrain of libraries and higher education. The editors of this collection come to this topic as academic librarians, labor activists, and educators who have worked as union organizers, officers, staff, and rank-and-file, and as information workers in the labor movement.Library workers' associations have long been riddled with deep-seated tensions between labor and management, unionism and professionalism, that weaken their potential as vehicles for discourse and coordination. It's something of a cliché, but entirely factual, to state that the American Library Association, ostensibly the primary professional organization for librarians, is an association organized for libraries and not the librarians

Making Space for the ‘Irrational’ Practice of Anthropology in Libraries

“…Such rational motivations lie behind extractive practices in libraries, such as data extraction practices such as card swipes at service points, intended to collect student participation data to justify library budgets, and sold as "student success" data, but problematically so (Robertshaw and Asher 2019). Extractive approaches can also be seen in labour practices in libraries (Drabinski, Geraci, and Shirazi 2019).…”