White Supremacy in the Stacks
Library classifications exist, in theory, to group books on similar topics together. But, as Melissa Adler noted in her book “Cruising the Library”, these groupings often serve to highlight biases, sometimes conscious and sometimes unconscious. This session examines how Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal classifications handle books on White Supremacy and how this perpetuates the idea of a color-blind or color-neutral society. Furthermore, it aims to enable librarians to identify other problems within the classifications systems as we attempt to improve them for the next generation.
Speaker
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Preston Salisbury