Contextualizing Disability

The interconnection of language and societal context is demonstrated through the Library of Congress Subject Headings surrounding disability. This study examines and compares how language encapsulates contemporary understandings of disability in the second edition (1919) and eighth edition (1975). Created and published during the so-called “Progressive Era,” the second edition emphasizes Victorian beliefs in the correspondence of morality with participation in the labour force and genetic fitness (i.e., conformity to physical and psychological norms). The language of this context further marginalized persons with disabilities. In contrast, the eighth edition marks the growing respect for and autonomy of people with disabilities, with language related to the civil rights movement, medical advances, and the replacement of ableist terms such as “Deaf and dumb” with neutral terms or self-definitions, such as “Deaf.” This evolution demonstrates the positive effects when we as librarians accept our social responsibility to eschew marginalizing language and instead use language that affirms minority identities.

ELIP 2021: Expanding Possibilities for Community

In the editorial, ELIP's 2021 Managing Editor Aarushi Mohan reflects on her experience compiling the journal over the year, particularly in terms of building an intellectual community online.

Unresolved Privacy and Ethics Issues Related to Learning Analytics in Higher Education and Academic Librarianship

Learning analytics involve big data collection, analysis processes, and technology that are used in higher education institutes and academic libraries to support student success and perform organizational assessment. Since these processes require the input of personally identifiable student and patron information to be effective, there are major ethical and legal considerations that must be addressed concerning privacy. This article demonstrates that privacy concerns about learning analytics can be mitigated by requiring informed consent from participants, establishing protocols for the collection and management of personally identifiable information, and advocating privacy rights of patrons. By synthesizing and expanding on viewpoints from the literature, this article offers recommendations pertaining to the collection, analysis, and management of patron data that are gathered for the purpose of learning analytics.

'Major Technological Challenge'

While archival description has been standardized in North America since the 1990s, the online environment has introduced new challenges in preserving the hierarchical nature of archival description. Many archival databases, in an attempt to mimic library discovery layers and web search engines, have collapsed the archival aggregation into item-level records, which can erase the context and structure of the content described. This article examines the communication breakdown that happens between the archivist and end user via online archival description and proposes solutions to improve multi-level description including the use of predicates in links, increased online instructional support, and the inclusion of digitized assets in archival description databases.

Dark Archives

Review of Rosenbloom, M. (2020). Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.