Where It’s At: Social Justice in the Canadian MLIS Landscape

Did you learn about social justice in your Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) program? With libraries facing issues such as a boom in book challenges, controversial event bookings, decolonization, increasing securitization and policing in libraries, budget cuts, data surveillance, serving as shelters, helping with overdose prevention, and more, questions around social justice issues are unavoidable in libraries these days. Are students learning what they need to know to work in the complex arena of libraries? In this article, I examine program and course information using content analysis methods to answer questions about whether, where, what, and to what extent students are learning about social justice in the 8 ALA-accredited Canadian MLIS programs. What kinds of social justice topics are taught in MLIS courses? Are there courses explicitly focused on topics of social justice? What other courses look at these kinds of issues? Are these topics being addressed widely across the curricula? Are students required to engage with these topics?  My work then considers relevant literature to discuss the importance of social justice in MLIS education, as it is essential to prepare students to think critically about and take action on social justice issues in their future library work

Review of Solving Names: Worldliness and Metaphysics in Librarianship

Review of Popowich, S. (2024). Solving Names: Worldliness and Metaphysics in Librarianship. Library Juice Pres

Review of Solving Names: Worldliness and Metaphysics in Librarianship

Review of Popowich, S. (2024). Solving Names: Worldliness and Metaphysics in Librarianship. Library Juice Press

Byte the Hand That Feeds: Late-Stage Capitalism's Grip on Digital Preservation

The pervasive influence of late-stage capitalism in the 21st century has permeated all aspects of digital preservation efforts as well as the broader context of cultural heritage. This paper uses social media preservation to examine the intersection of digital preservation with capitalism's prioritization of financial gain at the expense of all else, causing systemic harm to individuals and resulting in archival silences and challenges to preservation. The privatized landscape of cultural heritage pervades every aspect of digital record generation and preservation, introducing hurdles to object content and context, as well as to the logistics and mechanisms of social media object preservation. This discussion explores these challenges to the "who," "what," and "how" of digital preservation through the lens of social media objects and concludes by discussing digital preservation approaches existing outside of, or counter to, the capitalist mechanisms that dominate the modern digital age.

Highlights of SRRT History

Copy of speech given at Building Radical Collections: Advocacy, Access, and Alliances with SRRT and Indie Presses program on Saturday, June 28, 2025. Article originally published by the Social Responsibilities Round Table of the American Library Association at http://www.ala.org/srrt/history. Reprinted with permission]

Review of Platform Power and Libraries

Review of Smith, C. F. (Ed.). (2025). Platform Power and Libraries. Library Juice Press

Censorship, Artificial Intelligence, and AI Literacy: Responding to New Challenges in an Enduring Agenda for Libraries and Librarianship

This paper focuses on AI censorship, an under addressed aspect of AI risk that intersects with the foundational library tenets of information literacy and intellectual freedom. AI censorship is a form of “automated censorship in which AI systems are used to selectively suppress or block specific types of information, content, or voices deemed undesirable to those controlling the AI.” This paper examines AI censorship in the context of existing threats and library principles. It explores specific techniques and methods of AI censorship. Lastly, it recommends adopting a critical AI literacy perspective that includes a political dimension essential to understanding AI censorship

Representing the Spectrum, Autism in the United States Children’s Choice Book Award Nominees, 2014-2024

This study examines the 67 books featuring autistic characters in a main or secondary role nominated on the United States’ children’s choice book award lists from 2014-2024. The books for this study were examined using directed critical qualitative content analysis guided by a framework of Critical Autism Studies (CAS).  CAS critiques the deficit model of autism that often defines how autistic individuals are understood. Several themes emerged in terms of how autism is described as a difference in communication and behavior, with individuals showing a variety of sensory needs. While these characters often needed a variety of support from schools, therapists, and their families, they also sometimes showed evidence of special knowledge or skills.  Unfortunately, the number of books showing autistic main characters who have agency over their own lives is still a tiny percentage of books nominated for state award nominees

Review of Digital Degrowth: Technology in the Age of Survival

Review of Kwet, M. (2024). Digital Degrowth: Technology in the Age of Survival. Pluto House

The Bib Record in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Taking both structural and thematic inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” this article posits that the movement from physical card catalogs to ALSs [Automated library systems] and ILSs [Integrated library systems] was not solely the result of technological progress. Rather, this transition had its genesis in a process Marx called primitive accumulation—in this case a form specific to the library profession. In other words, this article seeks to recast the history of digitized catalogs within libraries, seeing them, first and foremost, as harbingers of disenfranchisement and dispossession, specifically of catalogers. The article then turns towards a broad critique of the scientifically progressive tilt within the field before ending with a call for a more skeptical form of librarianship, one that privileges the well-being of library workers over technological advancement