hree  stars that's what's that is what's supposed to be   verbatim right so that's what an annotation  looks like in 1953 on five by seven cards 

because she is the first person person she labels  her annotation with the following hashtag tag   consensus one signifying her support and that she  is the first person to weigh in

so um instead of me needing to 00:16:13 remind them in a lecture um it is delivered just in time right so they're reading there and then they see it and then um i could then make a note that remember this when you'll be writing your paper this is a feature you want to note

“maintains objectiv-ity; does not interject value judgments about the subject matter or the nature of the question into the transaction” (2

T- shirt

tells patrons of color that their safety in the library’s community is not as important

his response is underpinned by a lie— that all viewpoints are equal and valid, including viewpoints that compromise the safety of People of Color.

Historically, it is in collection development that morality conflates with neutrality.

Worship of the written word

sub-stantive discussion about equity in collection development.

contrary to public belief,

We argue that subjective policies loosely followed in a racialized space are neither neutral nor equitable. Claiming that the profession provides unbiased service using the neutralityframework is false and prevents the profession from doing actual equity- based work.

property itself tends to be governed by “custom,” or social norms; the process of dispossessing people of their right to use and enjoy something is rarely recognized as anything other than a neutral act because it upholds what the dis-possessors see as just, normal, and right. Thus, inconsistencies in enforcement of poli-cies about who can access library spaces are commonly justified as neutral.

Unconsciously, many see this neutral state as whiteness, which leads to a belief that Black and Latinx patrons should be removed.

convince ourselves that because we have a policy and because we believe in neutrality, we are protected from being accused of discrimination. Yet, those very policies, written for subjective interpretation, give staff, library security, and police the opportunity to decide whether or not someone appears as if they are utilizing the library properly and the way it was intended to be used

LIS profession have a historical legacy of complic-ity and participation in racism and segregation,

(1997, 41)

assumption that all points of view on all issues are equally fixed in formats that libraries collect and that publishers equally publish

no part of the Library Bill of Rights or its official interpretations attempt to enforce or ensure support for libraries and library workers in upholding its principles. Because of this lack of infrastructure to uphold its highly aspirational prin-ciples, the entire document essentially acts as organizational fictions about library workers’ ability to generate positive social outcomes in the dissemination and use of information.

does not state whose rights it guarantees, and it largely reads as a bill of responsibilities for library workers;

“criticism of library policies, service, and personnel should be offered only to the proper authority for the sole purpose of improvement of the library.”

Excluding “unsuitable” library workers was posed as an act of protect-ing the purity of the profession from negative influence.

should discourage the continuance

this root of neutrality as organizational fiction is particularly harmful because it remains pervasive in library hiring processes today. It is weaponized to uphold implicit biases in hiring, and the rhetoric of neutrality in hiring merely allows white supremacist ideologies to stand in as “unbiased” (Hathcock 2015). This is evidenced in demographic statistics of the profession, which indicate that librarianship is roughly 87 percent white (American Library Association 2012)

bias manifests itself everywhere,

how library workers are to cope

give equal weight and equal space to all viewpoints.

acts to weaponize vocational awe in library workers attempting to live up to an aspirational code.

codification and intertwining of neutrality and vocational awe in both documents makes them organizational fictions.

we lose the intended purpose of the neutral ideology, which is equity

obfuscate the experiences of the patrons we serve (as well as our workforce) and aids vocational awe

debate

debate

definition of neutrality within the library context has, for some, become synonymous with intellectual freedom and antonymous to censorship. Those who believe it is the duty of the library to carry out policies and practices in a neutral man-ner also invoke the right to free speech as written in the First Amendment.

This principle also helps to reinforce the “racialized power- dynamic status quo” (2016, 274).

neutrality will not yield equitable results and will always fall short because it relies on equity already existing in society.

it can be perverse, for example, when it stands in the way of taking account of difference in order to help people in need” (2017, 27). The admirability of neutrality bolsters vocational awe by averting critique.

intentions may be good and yet yield harmful results that may not be immediately apparent to the white majority of the profession

impossible task of providing a one- size- fits- all service to the pub-lic with subjective guidelines, which actually works to perpetuate harmful behavior

ack of bias.

bypass all forms of implicit and explicit bias

legacy of a homogenous profession has given power to this position. Oppression is seemingly overlooked for its lack of impact, whether direct or indirect, not only by the individuals who make up the profession, but also by the profession itself. Neutrality is seen as “fair” and therefore “good,” playing into vocational awe.

By virtue of their privileged position, librarians of the status quo can afford to remain neutral toward issues that don’t affect them personally.

mythologies are perpetuated in trade and professional literature, they are accepted as truths.

began as a good story became the only story

well- known biblical phrases,

not be limited to public policy

ibrary workers’ vocational awe leads them to gloss over this fault of American conceptions of freedom of speech, because protecting the First Amendment is seen as right and democratic.

use the assumption

protects racist speech broadly and penalizes it narrowly

espouse

Vartan Gregorian

agree that the library is one of the few truly democratic institutions.

equal opportunity, individual choice, liberty, and meritocracy, underpin the American identity,

tying an occupation or vocation to the narrative of democracy is ostensibly the highest honor and praise.

situate librarianship fully within the nation- state– sponsored, systemic, and institutional racism prevalent in the United States of America.

Color blindness posits that taking race into account at all, even to acknowledge past wrongs, is wrong and that those who believe that race is important are in fact racist. This equates white supremacists and racial advocates, ignoring the severe underrepresentation of People of Color in systems and institutions and prioritizing abstract elements of liberalism above the reality of multiple nation- state– sponsored and systematic inequalities.Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/edited-volume/chapter-pdf/1909235/c000200_9780262363204.pdf by New York University user on 26 May 2021

we are demanding from our profession, is a full paradigm shift.

reality of multiple nation- state– sponsored and systematic inequalities

affirmative action, which has historically benefited white women most

equity to mean customs based on general principles of fairness

“individual choice” and “equal opportunity” as cures for all social inequality

integration, assimilation,

it shouldn’t be acknowledged lest it spread.

not as a shark, but as the very water (Blackwell 2018).

revise the history that has so long comforted the white majority of our profession

forestalls meaningful critique of the field

our very marginality allows a clearer view of the disconnect between the espoused values of librarianship and the reality of the field.

racism is an ingrained feature of our landscape, it looks ordinary and natural to persons in the culture”

neutrality and vocational awe is “critique of liberalism,” which pushes back against the idea that “equal treatment for all persons, regardless of their different histories or current situations,” yields an equitable social structure, and that “with the election of Barack Obama, we arrived at a postracial stage of social develop-ment” (Delgado and Stefancic 2017, 26). Specifically because the value of neutralityin libraries relies on these misconceptions, we italicize this term throughout the rest of this chapter to highlight the fallacy in the goals of neutrality- framed library work

White Suprem-acy culture underlies the landscape of librarianship, and vocational awe and neutralityare arguably two of its most important mainstays, the assumptions, beliefs, and poli-cies born from these values are seen as the norm rather than things to be challenged and ultimately transformed

are embedded within librari-anship, as well as the myriad ways they intersect to uphold White Supremacy throughout various types of work and service in librarianship.2 Finally, the chap-ter will demonstrate how vocational awe and neutrality continue to disenfranchise librarians, particularly librarians of color

library workers should continue to build their own ongoing anti-information capitalism organizing efforts. The most important organizing effort is for library workers to support the organization (union and otherwise) of information laborers of all types. Organized workers can use their power to oppose the commodification of information and support alternatives, and pressure surveillance capitalists to stop extracting personal data.

They have paid for expensive textbooks and hit paywalls for scholarly articles; they produce value through social media and databases search activity; and they have heard about personal data surveillance or experienced intrusive advertising.

two primary components of an anti-information capitalism pedagogy that library workers can use moving forward. First, teaching about information capitalism, and second, organizing against information capitalism for what Char Booth calls information justice.

the competition and the level of data gathered by companies have morphed into what Zuboff (2019) calls surveillance capitalism, which is an economy that relies on the secret production of data profiles of individuals to urge them to act in certain ways. This enables tech companies and other elites to manipulate behavior in massive and alarming ways. One example of this was the Cambridge Analytica scandal in which a political firm accessed comprehensive data on 87 million Facebook users in order to manipulate their vote in the 2016 US election. Sarah Lamdan’s (2019) work demonstrates that surveillance capitalist logic applies to library resources as well. For example, Thomas Reuters sells user data to United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This form of information capitalism raises an alarm about human autonomy as companies and governments can have unprecedented sway over individuals. And for this reason, and reasons raised above, library workers need to undermine information capitalism.

Mosco (2009) calls this process of commodifying personal information, which is spurred by the necessities of market competition, immanent commodification. 

alternative forms of value, since value is created through everyday activities of everyday people. Here, the autonomist Marxist tradition argues that value is created through human social relations, highlighting one of Marx’s concepts outlined in the Grundrisse: the general intellect. This is the notion that human knowledge is collective and there are contradictions involved in privatizing it.

industrial-era gendered labor arrangements, women performed the daily tasks of taking care of men so that they could fill the factories and produce commodities. This is called reproductive labor. Their care work was not paid, but was essential for producing value. While there is a qualitative difference between the experiences of reproductive work in these two eras, the industrial era being associated with hard physical labor and the facebook era being associated with entertainment/leisure, the arrangement is comparable. Both groups were/are essential to the process of producing profit through social interaction and care, and both did/do not get directly paid for their work

using a particular app or platform produce value without receiving payment. For example, Facebook users do not get paid, but if all users decided to stop using the platform,  the company would be unable to make money. Some scholars point to the similarity between this labor relationship and Marxist feminist critiques of gendered labor (Terranova, 2000).

There are laborers in this category that work across the range of jobs available in the information capitalist job market. For example, there are miners in regions of Africa who extract minerals that are essential for modern computing (coltan, cobalt, etc). Without them, many of our mainstream information technologies like cellphones and computers would not function. There is extensive documentation showing that these workers are super-exploited (Exposed, 2016). There are also programmers that work for companies like Amazon and Facebook who make well over $100K per year and have a relatively privileged lifestyle. Despite their relative privilege, these workers are paid less than the amount of value that they produce and are by definition exploited. Tech companies appropriate the surplus profit these workers produce through software development. 

There are two primary forms of exploited labor in information capitalism: waged labor and unpaid prosumer (someone who is simultaneously a producer and consumer) labor.

Cooke (2018) describes the ways in which media concentration over the last several decades led to the weakening of information vetting practices and altered the construction of truth.

Noble (2018) additionally demonstrates that information oligopolies can have devastating results for cultural content and reproduce racialized and sexist stereotypes (i.e. racist search results in Google).

Hence a potential result is an increasing dependency on commodities produced

Labour standards (especially concerning wages) in their industry sector.

oligopolistic system are severe. Political economy of communication scholar Christian Fuchs (2016) provides a non-exhaustive

First, markets tend toward concentration of ownership as Marx observed, but info markets are particularly vulnerable because media is a public good and, in order to commodify it, a significant amount of legal and social effort must go into building the infrastructure that prevents copying and distributing it freely. For this reason, any market advantage is crucial because power players get to set the parameters that ensure their survival in the market (Garnham, 2000). Also, when a company gets a majority of advertising market shares, they can use the power of advertising to direct more traffic to themselves. This makes it very difficult for new companies to enter into competition. The barriers to entry are vast. (Herman and Chomsky, 1994)

e top 5 publishers increased dramatically over the last 30 years in the social sciences.  For example, The top 5 publishers published 10% of psychology publications in 1953 and that number steadily grew to over 70% in 2014 (Larivière et al, 2015). 

80% of total textbook sales in 2016 went to 5 companies (Senack and Donoghue, 2016). The top 3 companies are currently Pearson, Cengage, and McGraw-Hill. In 2018, according to their respective annual reports, these three companies controlled a combined 68% of the higher education textbook market with Pearson at 36%, McGraw-Hill at 21%, and Cengage at 11%. Furthermore, in 2019 McGraw-Hill and Cengage embarked on a bid to merge

Political economists of information have documented the tendency for information markets to produce monopolies and oligopolies (Mosco, 2009; Fuchs, 2015; Hardy, 2014).

But abundant goods do not have high exchange values, therefore information capitalists have to develop an artificial scarcity in information markets in order to increase exchange values. Copyright laws and paywalls are erected around all types of digital information.

Information is a “peculiar” commodity in that it does not get used up during its consumption. This is sometimes called a non-rival or non-excludable good.

How did we arrive at a situation in which scholars gift their intellectual production to a massive corporation with no monetary compensation? In brief, the answer to this question is found in the power dynamics of scholarly publishing over the last 30-70 years (Young, 2009).

condone this practice because they feel as though Elsevier and other companies provide them with a service, but a growing number of faculty are dissatisfied and want to see their work shared more equitably (McKenzie, 2019). 

familiar with, but its perniciousness becomes more clear in the context of examining information capitalism.

The commodity fetish also makes the process of exchange appear as though it creates profit for capitalists instead of the exploitation of workers. This false notion allows capitalists to claim to be the creators of profit because they circulate commodities. Instead, workers created the surplus-value and profit, and are paid less than what they produced, if at all. They also have no democratic say over the fruits of their labor.

Cedric Robinson (1980), who popularized the term racial capitalism, argued convincingly that capitalism always required racial differentiation and exploitation to function. Silvia Federici (2012) and others prove the same for gendered exploitation. The primary manifestations of racial and gender differentiation in capitalism are the production of racist and sexist ideologies, differentiated work arrangements across racial and gender identities, and disparities in the flow of material resources, i.e. varying degrees of exploitation. Capitalists exploit these socially produced hierarchies in order to drive wages down and control workers. This uneven exploitation is evident in academia where women and people of color are rendered more vulnerable to the exploitative scholarly publishing process. It is difficult to take risks by publishing outside of the mainstream commodified journals when you are already under scrutiny based on marginalized identities. In this sense, being anti-capitalist also requires being anti-racist and anti-patriarchal.

People always get paid less than they are worth. This coincides with outright theft, primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2005), which is how “free laborers” came into to being. Examples of this are slavery and the outright theft of land from Native Americans. This also coincides with gendered reproductive labor that women traditionally do: activities like housework in factory-worker homes in which women did not get direct remuneration. A more just vision of political economy calls for democratic control and ownership over the surplus value and labor conditions.

Marxian political economy tradition is central because his project sought to describe and disrupt capitalism and this inquiry is seeking to understand and challenge capitalist information relations

It is possible for members of this class to become allies of working class struggles. An example of this is Resource Generation, an organization that helps people who have inherited wealth funnel that wealth towards grassroots movements. This structural, information capitalism approach opens up collective inquiry and action as opposed to a focus on information privilege which emphasizes individual inquiry.

process of granting privileges to certain groups is an essential capitalist strategy for maintaining power and avoiding a change in the overall social and economic structure.

focus on individuals who are not necessarily the owners of the means of information production and distribution, but are granted privileges by those owners.

They connect fighting white nationalism, advocating for higher wages for workers, eliminating overdue fees, and food and housing insecurity all to paywalls. Booth also points to attempts by for-profit companies to co-opt the open access movement. They make mention of collective action in supporting the efforts to challenge information privilege by fighting for information justice. Booth’s work pushes us towards a political economy analysis of information and I want to build from their information privilege concept towards a more comprehensive understanding of information capitalism. I suggest that we supplement the term information privilege with the term information capitalism because, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues, the concept of privilege without an analysis of capitalism muddies the overall picture of the political world. It obscures our ability to identify the elites and those who have power in a capitalist society, i.e. the capitalist class (Taylor, 2017).

Students might not notice this privilege until they get out of school and experience various paywalls when attempting to access sources. Part of teaching the concept of information privilege is uncovering these underlying issues and injustices. Booth also hopes to encourage more open forms of information creation, critique of profit motives (although they do not elaborate on this in their original blog post) and to examine personal and institutional privilege. They have students think about the profit drivers beneath paywalls, the value of the openness of publications, and how to help those without information privilege circumvent strict licensing agreements. 

Their strength is in the interpretive and ideological side of the information economy. In order for students to understand the dynamics of information capitalism we have to provide them with a theory that helps them interpret the system across multiple sites. The narrow focus of CopyLeft and CML cannot do this alone.  They also do not center capitalism, which weakens their analysis of the system of source production. This article seeks to build a more comprehensive approach. Focusing on capitalism is necessary for improving our understanding of ideology and interpretation. However, despite these shortcomings, the teaching activities presented by these authors fit well into a broader political economic approach and should be consulted going forward. 

copyright has evolved to primarily benefit corporations, which actually dissuades creativity (McChesney 2013). In their view, it is important to teach the limitations of copyright and to enlighten students about alternatives like CopyLeft which is defined as: “a movement responding to the constraints of traditional copyright by allowing the licensed work to be used, modified, and distributed as determined by the work’s creator” (Haggerty and Scott, p. 253).

students reflect on collective intelligence by having them encounter Wikipedia. 

critical media literacy (CML) to teaching information literacy in ways that work to help students think analytically about media production.

a political economy of information enables us to understand the material basis for information production and dissemination. People make money by commodifying information which in turn consolidates power into elites’ hands. The political economy of information unveils how information producers are exploited for the profit of a few. In this sense, it helps us sharpen our identification of elites with concentrated power. This is particularly useful when the current popular discourse describes a wide range of people as “liberal elites” (e.g. academics, college students, media workers, etc.), which muddies the collective understanding of who is elite. Political economy exposes the problems of commodifying information and identifies trends across multiple information markets like textbook, scholarly communication, and news media markets. It reveals similarities and contrasts between information markets and other kinds of commodity markets that library workers can use to, among other things, connect broader anti-capitalist struggles to anti-information capitalist struggles. 

Social praxis.

Moral philosophy.

social totality

to sell our labor for a living (working class

Drabinski (2017), in a strategic twist, argues that IL emerged from the context of neoliberalism, but nonetheless provides an opening for librarians. Librarians now have a seat at the curricular table and we can use the opportunity to implement changes that benefit librarians and students in their local contexts. Drabinski’s argument is an example of political economy thinking in that she roots IL in history, but leaves room for struggle and change in the analysis.

commitment to history

approach to economics forecloses the possibility for everyday non-elite people to change the structure of the economy to be more just. Political economy has been around much longer than the modern discipline of economics. It is a long-standing intellectual tradition that maintains that the way in which humans provide life’s necessities is not natural or inevitable, but is something that can be altered through political struggle

Mainstream economics attempted to naturalize the laws of capitalism as though they are universal truths and the only way to conduct economic activity, as if capitalist economics were a natural science (Mosco, 2009).

political economy simply as the relationship between democracy (how decisions are made about fundamental aspects of our daily lives) and the economy (how we sustain and reproduce ourselves materially) (McChesney, 2013).

Both Enright (2012) and Seale (2012) argue that information literacy under neoliberal capitalism aimed to produce perfect neoliberal individuals. These imagined atomized individuals do not think collectively, but instead are able to use information to successfully navigate markets in order to better themselves and to be productive employees. Nicholson (2018) argues that libraries are being swept into the corporatization of the university and that IL is primarily about preparing people to compete in the international market. This results in the corporate culture-like quantitative assessment permeating IL practice. Eisenhower and Smith (2010) are concerned that the higher education classroom in the neoliberal era is too commodified and entrenched in social and economic hierarchies to effectively challenge capitalism.

Neoliberal capitalism is a global political project initiated in the mid-1970’s by members of the capitalist class (those with ownership stakes in large businesses and corporations). They had the political backing of powerful government officials and the intellectual backing of Chicago School economists and the Austrian-British economist Friedrich Hayek. They had two primary goals: (1) converting as much of human activity as possible into market-based exchange; (2) transferring wealth to economic elites— and while this second goal was not explicit, when these two goals were in conflict, the second goal was to take precedence (Harvey, 2005).

contest current legal and socioeconomic practices concerning the value of information”.

2019 blog post Information Literacy’s Third Wave, Barbara Fister argues that we are entering a third wave of IL education, a wave that focuses on the systems that structure our information environment. The first wave involved teaching students to answer questions through navigating library resources. The second consisted of teaching students how to maneuver the rise of the internet as an unwieldy site of information circulation. The third wave, she argues, needs to respond to the vast commodification of the internet. She demands that we “have to think about the economics underlying both the distrust of institutions and these new institutions of capital that depend on gathering and analyzing the minutia of our lives for predictive and persuasive purposes….” Librarian scholars are piecing together new ways to understand and teach about information structures.

behavior is being manipulated by corporate algorithms seeking profits and political power.

library workers of all types face increasingly precarious work arrangements and they serve students who are anxious about affording skyrocketing tuition as well as outrageous textbook prices.

Tenopir et al. (2013) found that 60% of librarians who did not have RDS as part of their job responsibilities did not feel they had the skills and confidence to provide these services. Knowledge, training, and support are all vital elements for developing new services. Therefore, finding ways to provide professional development will need to be a priority f

emphasis on research are growing their RDS, while other institutions are waiting for the need to arise.

55% of libraries said their faculty and students only had a modest need for data curation

offer consultative or reference services, but fewer than half currently had policies

data curation (e.g., data citation, data cleaning, discovery services, indexing

variety of RDS, their level of satisfaction with these services was low

uneasy about making their data public for fear of data misuse and improper citation

hinder data sharing during projects, as sharing data with global partners can be in conflict with data security requirements.

researchers are interested in using a data storage system that is secure and easy to use, preferably one supported by their university

environmental sciences, lack common standards,

faculty struggle to create data management plans (Parham, Bodnar, Fuchs, 2012

four major themes that hinder data sharing: lack of problems with seamless infrastructure, data security requirements, development of data management knowledge and skills, and anxiety about releasing data.

Finding common ground and getting on the same page regarding terminology and jargon when speaking about research.” “Finding incentives for good data management practices.” “Integrating library services into the variable and complex workflows of researchers from medicine to informatics to public history.”

There has never been a time when raw data and information have been so valuable [as they are today]. As far as I’m concerned, sometimes we collect data that we have no idea what we’re gonna do with in the future, it just seems like a really timely, reasonable, thoughtful thing to do.

The model of a single individual taking responsibility for RDS may not be sustainable, in particular in large institutions

Support for staff to attend relevant conferences or take RDS training sessions and the emergence of a new generation of RDS librarians will be essential in all types and sizes of academic libraries

Still, many academic libraries, especially those other than libraries in doctoral institutions, do not yet offer many RDS.

collaborate with social sciences departments

However, as shown repeatedly, just because libraries plan to implement RDS services does not mean they will.

in 2014 to compare library directors’ perceptions of how their libraries are providing RDS support for staff and perceptions of librarians on the availability of that support. These perceptions were found to be disproportionate. Particularly, library directors believed they offered opportunities for staff to develop their RDS skill set, while staff reported that those numbers were lower than directors indicated.

actions that library directors need to take to support RDS on their campus including: recognizing that research data services will be needed by researchers at the institution; determining the course the library will take; supporting library faculty and staff in professional development for RDS; and considering creating a data librarian position

including lack of time and funding, the need to publish first, and the inability to make data public

the scheme.