Whether the library in question is as small as a personal collection of books or as large as the Borgesian conception of the library as universe, this article argues that “The Library” can function as a fantasy space that denies its role in white supremacy even while it is intimately and affectively tied to it. As such, the fantasy of the library is a significant obstacle in terms of “denaturalizing whiteness in academic library spaces” (Brook, Ellenwood, and Lazzaro 2015). In order to reveal what the fantasy of the library always seeks to obscure, this article examines three types of “affective economies” (Ahmed 2004): that of library awe, that of library nostalgia, and that of library trespass. By drawing attention to these affective economies, the hope is to shift focus away from the library as a fantastic space to the bodies that circulate in libraries. In doing so, a distinction is always drawn between the bodies that belong and do not belong in library space. Given my status as light-skinned Latina academic librarian, I weave autoethnographic analysis throughout the article as a way of addressing that liminal space between belonging and not-belonging in the library, further accentuating how belonging at the library is constructed around whiteness. In contrast to the affective economy analysis that precedes it, the final section of the article examines how library video tours created by students of color portray aspects of library awe and library nostalgia while also establishing the right of bodies of color to take up space in libraries and fashion their own, sometimes fantastic narratives.

Introduction Kate Adler (bio) and Lisa Sloniowski (bio) Welcome to a weird issue of Library Trends. The work is rife with miscarriages, melancholy, longing, and nostalgia. The writers divulge the personal and explore the political. They examine white supremacy, patriarchy, classism, and colonialism—those complex, hybrid toxicities that spine through our collective circulatory system. Most of the authors rely on methods less familiar to library and information studies (LIS) research, such as autoethnography, close readings of fictional texts and images, and the application of philosophical treatises to complex social questions, rather than using quantitative analysis to gather forms of evidence. A loosening of the epistemological strings can, we hope, intervene upon a set of enmeshed practices in our field that together deploy a sometimes stifling form of LIS-knowledge apparatus. Perhaps, in producing this strange issue we can shake things up a bit, experiment, and pry things open just a little. Afterall, as Leonard Cohen tells us, it is through the cracks that the light gets in. Taken collectively these articles question what counts as evidence in LIS, the concept of evidence itself, and even the idea of libraries themselves as simple representative collections of facts and the evidential. They turn to questions of values rather than value. As editors we felt this expansion of methodological approaches was appropriate to the study of affect in particular and that it takes up the call to action posed by Emily Drabinski and Scott Walter in their editorial for College and Research Libraries where they assert that the debates about method in LIS research complement the epistemological debates in our field as to what constitutes knowledge. As they suggest, Methodology, after all, is methodical. It is inescapably instrumental. When we focus on the question of which method is “best” . . . we invariably privilege the steps we must take to arrive at an answer, rather [End Page 369] than on the extent to which the question is even worth asking or the degree to which a focus in our field on a particular type of question may be limiting our vision of what our work as scholar-practitioners might mean. (2016, 266) This issue of Library Trends enjoins readers to consider new ways of knowing our work, new registers for asking critical questions about how our work operates in the world, and how the world operates on and through us. At any rate—how else to wade through these weird waters, the sticky, murky business of affect? How else to talk about the things just out of sight, the things that propel us in-between what is clearly visible? We have no dispute with social science methods, but like any methodological approach, there are limits to their application. Our issue is filled with complicated questions about messy things, from the personally curious to the structurally untenable. Things that implicate us. Things that make us wonder if we sometimes do more harm than good as librarians. Problems that need to be examined in new ways and from new angles. Our colleagues in archives have begun carefully responding to the generative questions of the affective turn, and we thought it time that librarians did as well. Of course, the first problem is that affect theory actively resists definition. When we released our call for papers, we were heartened by the many excellent proposals received—and chagrined as we began trying to imagine how to weave pieces together. In a terrain marked by disciplines as divergent as neuropsychology and cultural studies, how could we pull together something coherent? Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth gleefully chart the myriad ways affect is used in their introduction to the Affect Studies Reader, settling on the playful “an inventory of shimmers” as the broadest possible description of this interdisciplinary area. Commonly misunderstood as “feelings,” affect is more properly considered a state of in-between-ness, the liminal place where thought, emotion, and embodiment float and intermingle with various forces and intensities propelling us in multiple directions (2010, 2). Affect is not emotion nor is it emotional labor—although emotional labor may well produce affect and is certainly produced by it. Confused yet? Let’s try again. Emotional labor speaks to managing and...

This article summarizes the actions taken by the Spanish government pretending to censor information published and applications developed by the Catalan government and some independent activists in order to organize an independence referendum. It describes the goals, the technical approaches, and some countermeasures, analyzing also the level of success achieved. There is also an introduction to the legislation being deployed in the European Union and Spain that could give support to some kind of Internet censorship, and the concerns about the compliance of those regulations with the civil rights of freedom and opinion, which should be guaranteed by governments to citizens. The conclusions suggest some ideas to prevent arbitrary application of censorship practices by national authorities using criteria not widely accepted by the Internet community.

In this essay, we explore the relationship between the MLS and professionalization within librarianship broadly and then look more specifically at academic librarianship, which increasingly turns to other means of professionalization, such as more prestigious forms of credentialing, due to its precarious existence within higher education. The emphasis on professionalization through credentialing invisibilizes library labor, which is already feminized and devalued. Academic librarianship instead seeks to gain prestige and power by associating itself with whiteness and masculinity, rendering its specialized work and knowledge domain unimportant. Removing the MLS requirement from professional library positions will not address these broader issues, and as hiring trends demonstrate, might already be a moot point. Prestige, professionalization, and credentialing within academic librarianship have been debated since the inception of the profession; the interaction of these with gender ideologies and a predominantly female workforce has received attention since the 1970s. Librarianship's constant state of crisis and search for external markers of prestige can only exist comfortably outside of historical memory and critical analysis, however. This essay problematizes individual solutions such as credentialing that paper over systemic sociopolitical issues; specific solutions are beyond the scope of this paper, but we do suggest that solutions need to account for broader context, such as current and historical gender ideologies.

Library and information science (LIS) literature about workplace bullying and burnout in academic libraries continues to grow, and a recent study has revealed the experience of low morale in the same environment. Concomitantly, research focusing on continuing recruitment, promotion, advancement, and retention problems for ethnic and minority librarians; links between North American library values and workplace abuse; and historiographies on the historic marginalization of minority librarians has also appeared in LIS literature. Citing aforementioned developments in LIS literature and the racially homogenous participant make-up of Kendrick's 2017 study of low morale in academic libraries, this follow-up qualitative study focuses on racial and ethnic minority academic librarians to understand this group's experience of low morale. Emerging data validate the development, trajectory, and health-related consequences of low morale; center the load of additional impact factors; and highlight the impact of low morale on recruitment and retention efforts of racial and ethnic minority librarians employed in North American colleges and universities.

This paper explores methods for building relevant, accessible academic services in the context of a liberal arts college with a growing population of students with psychological disabilities. This work is situated in a learning commons, where academic-support programs, including accessibility services and library services, work collaboratively with a shared goal of getting students to access support earlier and more often in their college careers. The college is home to many students who identify as holding marginalized identities, including those who are LGBTQ+, disabled, students of color, and/or international students, and are thus particularly susceptible to discrimination (Roberts et al. 2010; Seng et al. 2012; Ellis, n.d.; Harrell 2017; Coulter and Rankin 2017; Polaris, n.d.; Proctor, Semega, and Kollar 2016). In consultations with staff, students often name past academic experience as an underlying cause for academic struggle. Exploring this connection, staff observed that histories of trauma and marginalization can make it difficult for students to trust staff and have positive academic experiences. Through action research, the authors developed methods to better support students, including those with histories of trauma. The authors share their methods and suggestions to support readers interested in bringing this work into their communities.

In providing an autoethnography of the author's own reproductive failures while working as a librarian, this paper considers the ways in which neoliberalism maps disability onto non-(re)productive bodies thought to be outside the realm of individual control. The author calls upon feminist disability theory to surface themes of embodiment and relationality and to unearth the unrecognized labor of reproductive failure. Suggesting that library and information studies would do well to take seriously all sorts of "failures," the author recommends that we turn to archives of failure; doing so would allow for a richer and more nuanced exploration of how neoliberalism casts some bodies and minds as "normal" and others as not, and makes the necessary space to, rather than celebrate the triumphant, recognize the failed.

This issue of Library Trends—“Race and Ethnicity in Library and Information Science: An Update”—will revisit the conversations started in the Summer of 2000 by McCook and Balderamma, update several other seminal articles published around that time, assess the status of race and [End Page 3] ethnicity in LIS some twenty years later, and hopefully incite readers to social justice advocacy and action.
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\nFalling into three categories—diversity in the history of LIS and updates to seminal articles; current diversity issues in LIS; and, new voices in the ongoing conversation—the articles in this issue are honest, insightful, and necessary.

The Case against Information and the Body in Library and Information Science Jenna Hartel (bio) What follows is an editorial that makes a case against the development of an empirical research frontier in library and information science (LIS) devoted to information and the body. My goal is to offer a sober and constructive counterbalance to this Library Trends special issue that is otherwise uncritical of its proposition. In asserting that original research into embodied information may be unproductive for our field, I draw from my personal experience and reflections as well as foundational conceptions of LIS from past and contemporary luminaries. My conclusion reminds all stakeholders in this Library Trends special issue of the many fascinating and urgent research questions that remain unanswered within the conventional boundaries of LIS.1 In 2003 I was a doctoral student at the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and happily learning information behavior under Marcia Bates. I enrolled in a methodology seminar offered through the Sociology Department entitled Ethnography, Ethnomethodology, and Symbolic Interactionism, taught by the late Melvin Pollner. Our class read a book-length ethnography of one sociologist's experience as the paid caretaker of a teenage girl living with severe mental and motor impairments; the study reported the sexual way the child pressed her body against her older, male assistant during their daily routine and the inexorable sexual response of his body—two haptic forms of embodied information. The aspiring sociologists and anthropologists in the course found these microsocial physical dynamics to be riveting and discussed their meaning for two hours. The next week our enlightened professor assigned an article by Lucy Suchman about the coordinated flow of information via documents in a workplace—a brilliant paper. To my surprise, my classmates were dismissive of Suchman's study. One budding sociologist remarked, "Well, the research design is solid, but it's all about these [End Page 585] documents. I mean … who really cares?" This flippant criticism left me speechless, while everyone else in the class laughed in agreement (excepting the magnanimous Dr. Pollner). To me the anecdote above is loaded with meaning for this special issue. For starters, other social sciences have long histories of studying what we are now in LIS discovering as embodied information. The German sociologist Norbert Elias's (1939) ground-breaking analysis of table manners (including blowing one's nose and spitting) established a research tradition within sociology that is centered on the body. Similarly, anthropology is home to subdisciplines devoted to research into body language and gesture (kinesics), the body in space (proxemics), touch (haptics), the experience of time (chronemics), and the use of vision (oculesics), and it goes without saying that these corporeal phenomena are seen as informative and communicatory. The aforementioned disciplines have well-developed theoretical and methodological tools to describe these bodily functions and to explain them through lenses of history, sociality, and culture. Hence, any LIS scholar interested in information and the body is a latecomer to a mature research domain; has much catching-up to do; and risks reinventing the wheel. Another notable aspect of the story above is that certain phenomena—namely, the relationship between human beings and recorded knowledge—are deemed not compelling or research-worthy by other social sciences and are eschewed. The precocious protosociologist in my story sounded almost allergic to paper. Indeed, LIS stands as the resident expert and overseer of the universe of recorded knowledge, and there are no significant contenders, a chance blessing that should be leveraged and celebrated by LIS. On the library side, this authority dates to 2000 BC and the clay tablets in the palace at Nineveh. The information science side has roots in the European documentation movement of a century ago. Later luminaries have continued to position LIS as the singular mediator between people and the documentary realm. Jesse Shera proclaimed that the library brought humankind and the graphic record into harmonious relations. Howard White positioned LIS at the intersection of people and literatures. Marcia Bates cast LIS as a metadiscipline charged with the transmission of and access to recorded knowledge. Why turn our attention away from a nexus that is historically and rightly ours...

This article provides an overview of the changing role of the library in scholarly publishing and the rising phenomenon of library-press collaboration. It examines, through a literature review and two case studies, how and why the library has taken on this new role in scholarly publishing and created partnerships with university presses. The case studies describe current library-press partnerships from the perspective of institutional context, publishing services, and respective roles and responsibilities.