[Sighfis-l] CFP reminder: Libraries and Archives in the Anthropocene: A Colloquium

[Rory Litwin]

Call for Proposals

**Proposals due August 1st**

Libraries and Archives in the Anthropocene: A Colloquium
May 13-14, 2017
New York University


As stewards of a culture’s collective knowledge, libraries and archives are
facing the realities of cataclysmic environmental change with a dawning
awareness of its unique implications for their missions and activities.
Some professionals in these fields are focusing new energies on the need
for environmentally sustainable practices in their institutions. Some are
prioritizing the role of libraries and archives in supporting climate
change communication and influencing government policy and public
awareness. Others foresee an inevitable unraveling of systems and ponder
the role of libraries and archives in a world much different from the one
we take for granted. Climate disruption, peak oil, toxic waste,
deforestation, soil salinity and agricultural crisis, depletion of
groundwater and other natural resources, loss of biodiversity, mass
migration, sea level rise, and extreme weather events are all problems that
indirectly threaten to overwhelm civilization’s knowledge infrastructures,
and present information institutions with unprecedented challenges.

This colloquium will serve as a space to explore these challenges and
establish directions for future efforts and investigations. We invite
proposals from academics, librarians, archivists, activists, and others.

Some suggested topics and questions:
– How can information institutions operate more sustainably?
– How can information institutions better serve the needs of policy
discussions and public awareness in the area of climate change and other
threats to the environment?
– How can information institutions support skillsets and technologies that
are relevant following systemic unraveling?
– What will information work look like without the infrastructures we take
for granted?
– How does information literacy instruction intersect with ecoliteracy?
– How can information professionals support radical environmental activism?
– What are the implications of climate change for disaster preparedness?
– What role do information workers have in addressing issues of
environmental justice?
– What are the implications of climate change for preservation practices?
– Should we question the wisdom of preserving access to the technological
cultural legacy that has led to the crisis?
– Is there a new responsibility to document, as a mode of bearing witness,
the historical event of society’s confrontation with the systemic threat of
climate change, peak oil, and other environmental problems?
– Given the ideological foundations of libraries and archives in
Enlightenment thought, and given that Enlightenment civilization may be
leading to its own environmental endpoint, are these ideological
foundations called into question? And with what consequences?

Formats:
Lightning talk (5 minutes)
Paper (20 minutes)

Proposals are due August 1, 2016.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent by September 16, 2016.
Submit your proposal here: http://goo.gl/forms/rz7uN1mBNM

Planning committee:
Casey Davis is Project Manager at the American Archive of Public
Broadcasting at WGBH and co-founder of ProjectARCC: Archivists Responding
to Climate Change.
Madeleine Charney is Sustainability Studies Librarian at UMass Amherst and
co-founder of the Sustainability Round Table of the American Library
Association.
Rory Litwin is a former librarian and the founder of Litwin Books, LLC
(Colloquium sponsor)

For more information about the colloquium, including a profile of our
keynote speaker, Roy Scranton, go to:
http://litwinbooks.com/laac2017colloq.php
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