The Digital Is Critical: Designing Radical Library Systems
Systems reflect the people and organizations with the privilege to build them. If our libraries and museums are not neutral, then the applications and services we create and maintain cannot be neutral. Our values, our biases, and our histories manifest in our open source projects. Both the individuals with the power to make local technology decisions, as well as the organizations with the resources to influence collaborative projects, impact global users and shape communities in myriad ways. Embracing an intentional and caring practice is as essential to the health of our projects as functional code—and without both, we put our digital cultural heritage at risk. This presentation serves as a starting point for a reflective and challenging dialogue spanning those who code and those who care, and building shared understanding of the ways race, gender, and wealth come to bear on our products and communities. With this common knowledge, we can seek to build systems that truly deliver on the social mission of libraries.
