Call for Proposals
The concept of extraction (or extractivism) has been used in myriad disciplines - geography, international relations, environment, economics - often to describe social formations around natural resource management. However, we can also think about how extraction functions in academic libraries-with libraries being extracted from, or libraries doing the extracting-in how we see, for example, the growth of library consulting firms or how libraries collect materials produced by marginalized groups. Engaging with these ideas is not new; librarians have been researching extraction through other lenses, such as racial capitalism, neoliberalism, surveillance, and issues surrounding academic librarian labour. This special issue of the Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship seeks to hone in on the concept of extraction or extractivism as a logic and operating principle of current forms of capitalism within academic librarianship.
Examples of topic areas on extraction in academic libraries include but are not limited to:
- Extraction from libraries and library staff
- The role of consultants in libraries, e.g. around DEIA, strategic planning, and other areas
- The role of vendors, e.g. vendors that sell tutorials to libraries
- Educational technology
- Library value, material, and immaterial
- Library instruction
- Overreliance on metrics and quantification
- Libraries as institutions & library staff as individuals participating in extraction
- Libraries and archives as collectors
- Library labour
- Data, e.g. patron, collection, and so on
- The use of library collections for large language models/AI
- Outsourcing, e.g. cataloguing, preservation, and other labour
- Closed and proprietary platforms
- Environment and energy, e.g. the move to cloud computing with its associated costs
- Transactional relationships with faculty, staff, students, and other communities
- Library organizations extracting from members
- Volunteer labour in professional organizations, e.g. OLA, CAPAL, CFLA, ALA, ACRL, and others
- The role of library-adjacent organizations, often nonprofits such as CARL, ARL, CNI, OCLC, Lyrasis, Ithaka, and others
- Library consortia
Read more here
The Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship (CJAL) invites submissions to our special issue on Libraries and/as Extraction. CJAL is an open access, peer-reviewed journal published by the Canadian Association of Professional Academic Librarians (CAPAL). Authors interested in submitting a proposal are asked to submit their work (maximum 800 words plus bibliography) as an email attachment (Word document or PDF) to can.j.acad.lib@gmail.com by December 18, 2023 at the latest.
Those interested in serving as peer-reviewers can also submit their information to the peer-reviewer form linked on the same page.
CFP and more information
Maura Seale, Nicole Pagowsky, and Rafia Mirza are guest editors for this special issue.
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Nicole Pagowsky, MLIS, MS
Librarian, Curriculum & Pedagogy
University of Arizona
ACRL IS Chair 2023-24
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