Title
Opening Keynote: The Postcolonial Knowledge Commons: Vision to Practice
Location
KIPJ Theatre
Session Type
Keynote Address
Start Date
18-4-2023 9:15 AM
End Date
18-4-2023 10:10 AM
Abstract
Libraries are beset with the rhetoric of crisis, whether it is the “scholarly communications crisis,” the “crisis in reproducibility,” the “crisis in the humanities” or the continuing pandemic. This talk will recontextualize and reframe familiar narratives of crisis in academic and research libraries into a framework of postcoloniality. By understanding our current condition as one of postcoloniality, rather than crisis, we may appreciate the current challenges of academic and research libraries as aspects of a larger shift from a print culture paradigm to a new orality, and identify opportunities for libraries to use organizational design, resource allocation, and collaboration to foster a postcolonial knowledge ecosystem that aligns with enduring professional values.
Opening Keynote: The Postcolonial Knowledge Commons: Vision to Practice
KIPJ Theatre
Libraries are beset with the rhetoric of crisis, whether it is the “scholarly communications crisis,” the “crisis in reproducibility,” the “crisis in the humanities” or the continuing pandemic. This talk will recontextualize and reframe familiar narratives of crisis in academic and research libraries into a framework of postcoloniality. By understanding our current condition as one of postcoloniality, rather than crisis, we may appreciate the current challenges of academic and research libraries as aspects of a larger shift from a print culture paradigm to a new orality, and identify opportunities for libraries to use organizational design, resource allocation, and collaboration to foster a postcolonial knowledge ecosystem that aligns with enduring professional values.
Comments
Gregory T. Eow (PhD, MLIS) is President of the Center for Research Libraries, responsible for setting strategic directions and overall CRL programming and services in collaboration with the CRL Board of Directors, CRL staff, CRL member libraries, and CRL strategic partners. Before joining the Center for Research Libraries in 2019, he served as the Associate Director for Collections at the MIT Libraries, where he led an administrative portfolio that included scholarly communications and collections strategy, digital preservation, acquisitions and metadata creation, and the Institute Archives and Special Collections. Eow has held previous appointments as Charles Warren Bibliographer at the Harvard Library and as Kaplanoff Librarian for American History at the Yale University Library. Eow currently serves on the Management Board of the MIT Press, the Committee to Visit the Harvard Library, and the Board of Directors of the Chicago Collections Consortium. He is a member of the American Historical Association.