A Digital Scholar's Lab

From May 4 to June 21, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and the Universitätsbibliothek der Freien Universität Berlin jointly organize the interdisciplinary digital workshop “Critical Library Perspectives. A Digital Scholar’s Lab”.

Contrary to a widespread perception, libraries are by no means neutral places where knowledge is “only” collected and made accessible. For daily library work such as acquisition, classification, and presentation of media is characterized by valuation, selection, and standardization. These practices can thus be understood as epistemic, i.e., knowledge- and cognition-related processes. They always carry the danger of exclusion and discrimination of elements that do not conform to the applied normative schemes and can thus stand in the way of a diversity-oriented knowledge organization.

We are looking for scholars (at all career stages) from the humanities and social sciences as well as for librarians who are interested in collaboratively carrying out an interdisciplinary case study based on an example from the library world, and in jointly writing a short article on their findings.