“Colleges Are Deeply Unequal Workplaces,” reads the title of Jeffrey Selingo’s August 1 essay in the Atlantic Monthly. Examining how the pandemic has affected university […]

We sometimes like to say that something happens because of “magic” – in reality, that “magic” is the result of the (invisible) labor of real and unmagical people. To some patrons, this “magic” takes the form of the many programs, resources, and services the library provides daily. It takes the work of people in both … Continue reading "Open Data of Another Kind"

Author(s): Geiger, R Stuart; Howard, Dorothy; Irani, Lilly | Abstract: Free and/or open-source software (or F/OSS) projects now play a major and dominant role in society, constituting critical digital infrastructure relied upon by companies, academics, non-profits, activists, and more. As F/OSS has become larger and more established, we investigate the labor of maintaining and sustaining those projects at various scales. We report findings from an interview-based study with contributors and maintainers working in a wide range of F/OSS projects. Maintainers of F/OSS projects do not just maintain software code in a more traditional software engineering understanding of the term: fixing bugs, patching security vulnerabilities, and updating dependencies. F/OSS maintainers also perform complex and often-invisible interpersonal and organizational work to keep their projects operating as active communities of users and contributors. We particularly focus on how this labor of maintaining and sustaining changes as projects and their software grow and scale across many dimensions. In understanding F/OSS to be as much about maintaining a communal project as it is maintaining software code, we discuss broadly applicable considerations for peer production communities and other socio-technical systems more broadly.

First Black grad of Wisconsin Library School forced to pass as white.

Photo by Dollar Gill on Unsplash    Some Context    While we're making dinner, my husband (also in academia) and I will usually talk about our workday, despite the fact that, at the moment, our offices are separated by only one wall. These conversations usually devolve into what I'll politely refer

You know how someone can make a throwaway comment that hits you right in the soul and you can’t let it go? That’s been my week. It’s been really horrible for my brain, trying desp…

A genealogy of one of the most important datasets in AI.

A discourse of ‘fairness’ has emerged in open-access circles in recent years. It has come from a sense that big, for-profit publishers have not played ‘fairly’ with libraries over the past 30 years. It is unsurprising. These large publishers make margins of 35%+ on billions of dollars of revenue, even while library budgets stagnate. They hold much of the world’s research output to hostage, even to the extent that, during the pandemic, it was due to acts of publisher generosity, surplus to their legal requirements, that they granted a temporary lowering of the paywall.

On labor in nonprofits

Organizers of the Alphabet Workers Union say they aren’t stopping at pay disparity.

Using contract as an ethics leverage point.

Laurence Berland and Kathryn Spiers were fired in the wake of employee organizing efforts. Now, the NLRB says the terminations violated labor law.

Perhaps the lesson to take from this year of living online is not about making better technology. It’s about recognizing technology’s limits.

For the past decade, I have listened to a number of stories from a minority of cybersecurity professionals I talk to about unbelievably hostile and abusive workplaces. More insidious to me, are the…

Metadata Snippet: Drawing on Fobazi Ettarh’s notion of vocational awe, this essay by Lynne Stahl examines the ideological roots of libraries in Enlightenment ideals alongside the increasingly catch-all services offered by contemporary public and academic libraries. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, it calls for greater attention to professional boundaries as not only a matter of personal exigency but also a necessary political step in remediating the institution’s systemic failings.

Contains an interview with Fobazi Ettarh.

PLS & ESRT Combating Racism in Libraries Series Main

The Chicago Public Library's flagship teen program was a refuge for Black and Brown youth. Recent layoffs put that in jeopardy.

The usual "libraries are suck factories for anybody/anything new" stuff.