Libraries are not neutral: A pocket sized guide to libraries and their colonial legacy

After being invited by a workshop speaker to “interrogate the history and assumptions of [my] discipline,” I began exploring the role of libraries in colonialism. I looked for literature exploring this in a European context, as so often the story of racism and colonialism is explored via an American lens (Eddo-Lodge, 2018) ignoring cultural differences (Inskip, 2022). This poster introduces some findings so far, including:

• The role played in the colonial project by public library systems across Asia (Fitzpatrick, 2008) and Africa (Odi, 1991, Mutonga and Okune, 2022).
• How this is echoed in current academic publishing practices and Open Access (The Right to Research Coalition, 2017, Okune, 2019, Albornoz, Okune and Chan, 2020, Mboa Nkoudou, 2020).
• How vocational awe prevents us from critiquing the systemic failures of our sector (Ettarh, 2018, Chiu, Ettarh and Ferretti, 2021) and how this can be linked to the overwhelming whiteness (Inskip, 2022) of our profession (Hall et al., 2015, Khan, 2020).

This poster is available to download, and once folded forms a zine that can be distributed under the terms of a CC BY license. I hope this visual, bitesize format will communicate some of the systemic issues within libraries to colleagues and users not already engaged with literature on this topic, helping to build a movement equipped to ‘do the work’ (Clarke, 2022). As a subject librarian at a research institution, I have found that providing library users with an insight into these historic factors contextualizes their struggles to find information on certain topics. As Marsh states: “stressing the non-neutrality of libraries is important because there are then a series of implications for working with library information in a decolonial way” (2022, p:20). Once library users are armed with the knowledge of the systemic issues within information management, they can adapt their approach to finding and using resources.