Speculative Telephone

Oral Historians and Digital Librarians on How Libraries Could Be

Abstract

In the summer of 2023, librarian and oral historian Kae Bara Kratcha interviewed three oral historians about their relationships to libraries and their dreams for what digital libraries could be. Then they played portions of each oral historian interview for a digital librarian and asked the librarian to speculate about what their jobs and lives would be like if they implemented the oral historians' ideas about digital libraries. “Speculative Telephone: Oral Historians and Digital Librarians on How Libraries Could Be” is eleven edited audio tracks of wide-ranging conversation on topics like public space, online communities, library anxiety, relationships with library workers, the future of scholarly communication, creativity in research, finding cosmic purpose, telling stories with archives, when knowledge should remain ephemeral, artificial intelligence, and more. The oral historian and librarian narrators are as follows, in order of appearance: Chris Pandza, Justin de la Cruz, Tamara Santibañez, Sheila García Mazari, Benji de la Piedra, and Sean Knowlton.