Is Metadata Also Ignorance? — 2023

Is Metadata Also Ignorance? Agnotology, Race, and Description

Peer Review Presentation | Friday, May 19, 2023 | 12:00pm – 12:45pm

In a research project on the history of Latin American collections in US libraries, I learned that a library knowingly mis-described materials as part of an attempt to preserve them. This presentation inquires into this episode to provoke a broad discussion on how critical race theory’s interventions might critique and dismantle descriptive practices in libraries that, intentionally or not, maintain white supremacy. Against the presumed innocence of metadata as “data about data” that is equivalent to or always only in pursuit of knowledge, I ask “how does metadata also produce (white) ignorance through the performance of certainty?” I draw on Charles W. Mills’s concept of “white ignorance” and the aforementioned research to argue that metadata–not only as content but also as form–is indebted to and maintains a project of racialized ignorance-making. This theoretical frame and example suggest that metadata is the weapon, not the wound, and outline the limits of the reparative turn in descriptive cataloging. While “metadata as ignorance” can be used to impose a destructive order on a marginalized group of people, I discuss some scholars’ and artists’ responses to racism’s permanence that eschew repair and instead pursue ignorance-making, destruction, and refusals of the compromised legibility metadata (and the cultural heritage sector more broadly) offers. Thus, this presentation prompts considerations of destruction and ignorance as core elements of libraries–an illiberalism hidden by libraries’ superficial liberalism–not external threats.

[This peer review presentation will not be recorded.]

Presenter: Jose Guerrero / Presenter slides

Jose Guerrero works as a cataloging librarian at the Berkeley Public Library. He received his MLIS from Wayne State University and was an IMLS-Rare Book School Fellow in 2016. Prior to librarianship, he worked in the rare book trade selling new and out of print books from Latin America and the Caribbean. His interests include library history and histories of books and book collecting in Latin America. Jose believes every book is a rare book.