Category: Recognition
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The Great Cataloging Glitch of ’24: When the Sloth Accidentally Moved the Entire Fiction Section into “Applied Sciences”
In Biblios Heights, we try to keep the chaos organized, but some days the infrastructure just decides to take a nap. And in the library world, there is no nap more dangerous than the one taken by the Slow Processor Sloth. It was a Tuesday (traditionally a day for “Optimistic Metadata”) when the progress bar…
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Et tu?
Being harmed by someone who knows exactly what harm feels like is not the same as being harmed by someone cruel, or careless, or ignorant. Injury is produced in those sorts of situations. Harm caused by one who knows how it feels to be harmed in the exact same way is different. It’s a particular…
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The Inter-Library Loan Abyss: A Biblios Heights Stacks Thriller
The coffee crisis of last week had settled into a fragile peace, but in Biblios Heights Academic Library, “peace” is just the quiet before the metadata hits the fan. My duties as Melissa the Metadata- Wrangler (or Librarian Cardenas–I answer to both names), a subject librarian, sometimes requires me to hunt for specific books that…
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The Mystery of the Silent Steamer: A Biblios Heights Stacks Academic Library Noir
The rain in Biblios Heights was coming down in cold, gray sheets, the kind of drizzle that turns the Social Science stacks into a labyrinth of shadows and damp wool. I was at my desk, navigating the precarious centrality of my own dissertation, when the silence hit me. It wasn’t the “shhh” of a student…
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The Official Wild Stacks Survival Guide: How to Handle the Silence Behaviors in the Stacks of Your Academic Library
Welcome, fellow academic library explorers! Have you ever noticed that a university library isn’t just a quiet place for study? It’s a dense, thriving ecosystem of institutional logic and relational labor! And like any wild habitat, it has its distinct, and often amusingly predictable, inhabitants. Today, we’re going to help you identify and manage the…
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Didn’t We Almost Have It All
I am not a historian of the internet. I want to say that definitively at the start, before the argument gets going. Because the argument I want to make is going to make claims that historians, media theorists, and platform economists have made more clearly, more rigorously, and with better citations than I am about…
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The Open Gate: Dar’Khan Drathir and the Politics of Insider Betrayal
Let’s take a closer look at the particular kind of damage that the named enemy cannot do to you. Arthas Menethil arrived at the gates of Quel’Thalas with the Scourge at his back and death in his hands. We see him coming. His arrival was declared. Whatever he was going to do, he was going…
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The Rubber-Meets-the-Road Test
Critical librarianship is everywhere. The reading lists, the conference panels, the bios. Nobody is against it. The profession has learned to wear the critique like a lanyard. Sara Ahmed, writing about institutional diversity work, calls it “doing the document.” The report that stands in for the action, the statement that substitutes for the risk. The…
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The Current Doesn’t Know Your Name
Earlier today, I was watching a movie. It was one of those feel-good things that just hit the right spot. I needed to feel good. Then, it said what they always say — it’s never too late. Instead of feeling good, I felt something tighten. I followed that feeling back, the way you sometimes do,…
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Sophisticated Extraction: Wrathion and the Politics of Allegiance
The first time I encountered Wrathion in Mists of Pandaria, I was suspicious of him in the way you are suspicious of someone who is performing transparency. He tells you who he is. He explains his motives. He places himself above the factions with a reasonableness that is almost disarming: I don’t care who wins…