Labor/Valuing-Labor/2018-02-21
DLF WG on Labor in Digital Libraries, Archives and Museums: Valuing Labor Subgroup
Meeting minutes: February 21, 2018
Note-taker: Amy Wickner. Participant names redacted.
News & Resources
Libraries in the Context of Capitalism
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/libraries-in-the-context-of-capitalism-tickets-41386229326#
- This is Why We CAN Have Nice Things: The radical promise of libraries - Barbara Fister
- Rethinking Value in Academic Libraries - Roxanne Shirazi
- Organizing for Opposition: How to Build Power to Contest Power - Emily Drabinski
- Describes how she got involved in a labor organization during walkout at LIU
- What is actually involved on the day to day of organizing, e.g. details like organizing spreadsheets
- Ebb & flow of interest: hard to keep people engaged once they have a conctract
- People’s interests tend to correlate to how much of a crisis there is
- Friction in the (Unpaid Internship) Machine: An Organizing Brainstorm, presented by Jeanne Swadosh, dues-paying member of the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York (ART)
- Jeanne has shared research; may add to DLF Labor WG Zotero
- Should internships circulate on professional organizations’ listservs? How about school lists?
- Not a lot of oversight about what opportunities get sent to students.
- Unpaid internships exist on a ladder of precarity, related to contract & term work, e.g. 2-3-year positions
- Recommendations for ART as to how internships should be posted on job board
Code4Lib 2018
- Fail4Lib: http://2018.code4lib.org/workshops/fail4lib-2018
- Slides & readings: https://osf.io/4wu8c/
- half-day pre-conference workshop at the Code4Lib annual conference discussing, dissecting, being open about failure as counterpoint to perpetual pressure to celebrate success in library work
- labor is labor, whether outcomes are success or failure
- talking about failure as a different way to value labor
- Code4Lib community, meetups, annual conference, journal could be good venues for talking about labor in/and digital libraries
- heterogeneous work & workers all related to digital libraries
Considering Labor Models in Archives Work
- SAA Issues & Advocacy Section steering committee
- Research project (likely survey) on experiences of temporary workers in archives
- Will reach out to committee about whether/how we (DLF Labor WG) can support
Upcoming Events
NYC, February 25, 2018 – ARLIS/NA conference workshop on Advocating for Ourselves: Negotiation Skills and Closing the Gender Pay Gap
Los Angeles, April 27, 2018 – Los Angeles Archivists Collective ArchivesNOW
- How can we denormalize unpaid internships while recognizing that there's a lot of people invested in maintaining the system?
- Little data available about how common they are, mostly under the radar
- How labor is valued at the start of your career stays with you as you advance
- What tactics are available to us?
Boston, July 20, 2018 – Gender & Sexuality in Information Studies Colloquium on WORK
Project Ideas
Develop a research agenda on valuing labor in digital libraries, akin to ACRL WGSS: http://acrl.ala.org/wgss/resources/resagendafeminism/
- What kinds of ongoing research would we like to see?
- Summary of 2017 conversations, research questions, potential projects
- Major questions / potential starting points:
- Are digital workers in libraries/archives organized?
- How about grad students?
- What guidelines already exist for valuing labor in digital libraries?
- Matching people with comparable or compatible research interests, experience, methods expertise (see e.g. #critlib research interests spreadsheet)
- Find flexible ways for group members to contribute as available
- Compile resources in Zotero
Next Steps
Next meeting March 21
Wiki clean-up https://wiki.diglib.org/Labor
Orientation/catch up on working group activities to date
Draft research agenda document