Critical librarianship, or critlib for short, is a term that has emerged in the last few decades in reference to the application of critical social theory to the practices of librarians, cataloguers, archivists, and others concerned with the storage, classification, and accessibility of knowledge. The spread of the term critlib has also been popularized across social media, specifically Twitter with #critlib, to connect a community of librarians with a particular set of values they bring to their professions. But regardless of whether one actively engages with that online community directly, critlib largely represents the process of problematizing librarianship through theoretically informed practice. Critlib as a term encompasses both the critical theory informing it and the varied practices of rethinking the role and organization of the library.
The emergence of critlib was accompanied by valid criticisms of the uses of critical theory; some argue that it is inaccessible, elitist, and is too convoluted to provide a framework to work from in the day-to-day profession.[1] Others argue that the library needs to be an objective place and that the role of the librarian is to help students learn “information literacy concepts and how to apply those concepts to their tasks… we are not paid to subscribe to some abstraction about oppressive power structures or to apply our skill sets to an ambiguous and amorphous idea of ‘social change.’”[2] However, this stance fails to recognize the already non-neutral position of the library in regard to how its structure makes certain resources accessible or not accessible, the implications of its classifications, and the mainstream emphasis on practicality in the library.
Lua Gregory and Shana Higgins look at the history of the organization and expansion of librarianship and its relationship to the rapidly industrializing and competitive characteristics of the Gilded Age (1870-1900) and the Progressive Era (1890-1920). Melvil Dewey, one of the primary founders of the library system and director of the American Library Association from 1887-1905, often used language to describe librarianship that indicated he saw “business practice as the ideal for the organization and practice of librarianship.”[3] The business practices in mind during this time placed emphasis on efficiency (increased mechanization) and saw the intensifying power of corporate entities.
However, even at these early stages of the organization of the library system, resistance to the proposed corporate model of the library was pushed by the Vice Director at the time, Mary Salome Cutler Fairchild. Fairchild’s design of the class “Reading Seminar” at the New York State Library School “inspired women training to become librarians to think more deeply about the implications of their work for their communities, and the historical and cultural contexts of their work.”[4] Despite many responses to a survey dispersed to alumni that indicated the value and importance of theoretical and philosophical training in librarianship, Dewey’s Handbook of the New York State Library School focused largely on practical matters and efficiency. Here, theory is cast aside for practice, specifically practice that is unengaged with looking carefully at the machinations of the corporate model that standardizes library work into a mechanical process, disconnecting the profession from the communities it is meant to serve.
Considering this legacy of the commodification approach to librarianship and the concurrent response of certain librarians arguing for more attention to theoretical work, the modern American library system has been faced with the dilemma of reconciling theory and practice since the early formations of its aims and organization. This dilemma, as Emily Drabinski explains, is to be expected:
“If we understand action and discourse as both produced by and productive of the present, the coincidence of critical and compliance perspectives makes analytic sense. The kairos of contemporary critical approaches is not generic, but emerges from and alongside a kairos of compliance that it contests and resists…Critical perspectives on information literacy instruction represent a reaction against a kairos of compliance.”[5]
Drabinski uses the Greek term Kairos here to refer to qualitative time, marrying ordinal time with social, political, and historical context to a sense of the present.
In 2014, the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (Framework) was offered as a critical alternative to the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (Standards), which were in place since 2000. The Framework aimed to emphasize the importance of local and contextual learning outcomes measured by local and contextual tools, where the Standards provided a general set of performance indicators and data reporting tools. Though the Framework has been lauded for making room for the specificities of community context, providing flexibility in the assessment of a library’s value, the actual implementation of the Framework has been a complex process fraught with uncertainties. The Standards, with its generalized approach, provided certain tools that librarians made use of to show the importance of the library in its community in order to secure funding for maintenance.[6] Furthermore, as Alison Hicks points out in “Making the Case for a Sociocultural Perspective on Information Literacy,” the Framework in its effort to provide a contextually based approach has “positioned all disciplinary thinking as emerging from the same core and overarching information literacy concepts rather than, as is the case with a sociocultural perspective, recognizing the individuality and uniqueness of each discipline.”[7] By vaguely alluding to the importance of community knowing without specifying how to engage with it, the Framework also works to homogenize the value of collective and varied experiences in a hazy catch-all.
Critlib as an engagement with both theory and practice is not to be understood as some ideal harmonious meeting of the two, as it clearly comes with its own dilemmas surrounding implementation and engagement. Rather, critlib enables us to consider the way librarianship has been embedded in these dilemmas in the formation of its foundational structure through to the contemporary processes of rethinking the library. Considering the general concern of librarians with accessibility and engagement, critlib aims to meld the self-reflexive thinking of theory with the implementation of effectual practices responsive to community needs.
[1] Karen P. Nicholson and Maura Seale, “Introduction,” in The Politics of Theory and the Practice of Critical Librarianship, ed. Karen P. Nicholson and Maura Seale, Sacramento: Library Juice Press (2017): 8.
[2] Eamon Tewell, “The Practice and Promise of Critical Information Literacy: Academic Librarians’ Involvement in Critical Library Instruction,” College and Research Libraries (2017): 37.
[3] Lua Gregory and Shana Higgins, “In Resistance to a Capitalist Past: Emerging Practices of Critical Librarianship,” in The Politics of Theory and the Practice of Critical Librarianship, ed. Karen P. Nicholson and Maura Seale, Sacramento: Library Juice Press (2017): 26.
[4] Gregory and Higgins, 29.
[5] Emily Drabinski, “A Kairos of the Critical: Teaching Critically in a Time of Compliance,” Communications in Information Literacy, 11(1) 2017: 83.
[6] Drabinski, 85.
[7] Alison Hicks, “Making the Case for a Sociocultural Perspective on Information Literacy,” in The Politics of Theory and the Practice of Critical Librarianship, ed. Karen P. Nicholson and Maura Seale, Sacramento: Library Juice Press (2017): 73.
Works Cited
Drabinski, Emily. “A Kairos of the Critical: Teaching Critically in a Time of Compliance.”Communications in Information Literacy, 11(1) 2017: 76-94.
Gregory, Lua and Shana Higgins. “In Resistance to a Capitalist Past: Emerging Practices of Critical Librarianship.” in The Politics of Theory and the Practice of Critical Librarianship. ed. Karen P. Nicholson and Maura Seale, Sacramento: Library Juice Press (2017): 21-38.
Hicks, Alison. “Making the Case for a Sociocultural Perspective on Information Literacy.” in The Politics of Theory and the Practice of Critical Librarianship. ed. Karen P. Nicholson and Maura Seale, Sacramento: Library Juice Press (2017): 70-81.
Nicholson, Karen P. and Maura Seale. “Introduction.” in The Politics of Theory and the Practice of Critical Librarianship. ed. Karen P. Nicholson and Maura Seale, Sacramento: Library Juice Press (2017): 1-18.
Tewell, Eamon. “The Practice and Promise of Critical Information Literacy: Academic Librarians’ Involvement in Critical Library Instruction.” College and Research Libraries (2017).
