Journal of Critical Digital Librarianship

Editors' Introduction

Leah Duncan — 2024-06-11

Editors' Introduction. Special Issue, "Turning it Off and Back On Again: Speculative Digital Librarianship."

Let Us Fail

Natalie Estrada — 2024-06-11

Let Us Fail explores what digital librarianship work might look like if digital library workers were not tied to the technology, infrastructure, or work culture of academia that we currently experience. We explore what work could look like if we were given the agency to play and be creative, support to learn from failure, and freedom from traditional assessment metrics. This podcast dreams about a future in which digital library workers are self-directed, autonomous workers with the capacity to explore, experiment, and iterate.

Speculative Telephone

Kae Bara Kratcha — 2024-06-16

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.

Desire Paths in the Information Landscape

Victoria Van Hyning — 2024-06-13

Libraries and archives serve so many different users who come to information institutions with various perspectives, needs, experiences, and desires around accessing physical or digital collections. While our users may find what they are looking for immediately, many have to beat their own paths through complex systems and metadata that doesn’t align with their needs. Their search strategies may leave digital “desire paths”–alternative routes through the information landscape that can show us how to better meet their needs. This article covers three scenarios where users’ desire paths can be seen or where gaps around user experience can be better addressed. Through an analysis of institutional accessibility statements, queer archival experiences, and the affordances of volunteer crowdsourcing, the authors investigate desire paths in the information landscape and what practitioners and scholars can learn from them. This article also takes a highly experimental approach to scholarly collaboration, by revealing rather than concealing our writing process through the use of different fonts to represent the different makers of this piece: we preserve our comments, feedback, corrections, discussions, and the evolving perspectives of the authors, reviewers, and editors. Artifacts of collaboration are often invisible and obscure the many kinds of work and thinking that goes into a piece of writing. By making this process visible, we make our shared desire path visible to you, dear reader, and invite you to walk it, too.

The President’s Shoelaces, Goncharov, and Other Cultural Artifacts

Kestrel Ward — 2024-06-11

Tumblr is an online community of over 496 million blogs which are interconnected into a social media platform. Long the home of those whose voices are pushed to the margins, Tumblr has had an active LGBTQ+ population almost since it's launch. This paper explores the impact of Tumblr on the culture of the Queer community and how the culture created there is or is not being preserved for the long-term. Formatted into a series of Tumblr posts and reblogs, the paper is embedded into the community that it studies and imagines a possible future for the community and culture found only on this site.