ECC Member Anna Arays, alongside colleagues Megan Browndorf and Erin Pappas, recently completed work on an edited volume titled The Collector and the Collected: Decolonizing Area Studies Librarianship. The book was conceived and developed as an attempt to articulate the theoretical underpinnings of area studies librarianship and to link it to contemporary discourses in information studies, particularly those having to do with diversity, equity, and inclusion and social justice.
The book features ten chapters authored by librarians working across disciplines within area studies, as well as across various functional roles. Authors explore issues including bias in metadata, the positionality of curators relative to their subjects and objects of study, and practical methods for identifying and grappling with colonialist/imperialist legacies in day-to-day library work. A chapter by Kit Condill of UIUC specifically engages with Slavic librarianship, taking collections from and about the North Caucasus as a case study of how research is shaped by collections and vice versa, and suggesting that a reexamination of collecting practices and the role of expertise has a measurable impact on the quantity and quality of research that scholars can produce.
[Header Image: UIUC International & Area Studies Library via Wikimedia Commons.]