One of the primary tasks of librarians is the classification of materials. Classifying materials into logical groupings and orderings is essential in order to ensure individual items in a collection can be located and to allow for serendipitous discovery of related works via browsing. All classification systems to some extent encode the reality of the … Read more
As an autistic, I’m eager to share my experiences and thoughts about how those experiences differ from the neurotypical ones I’m surrounded by. When I heard that the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee was seeking input about autistic experiences, I thought I’d share some of those thoughts with them. If you’d like to share your thoughts, … Read more
I used to be primarily employed as a healthcare provider. If you’ve read my articles before, this may come as a surprise to you, because I’m a situationally mute autistic person. The care I provided was often during the first time a patient interacted with a medical condition with long-lasting effects, such as asthma, heart … Read more
I’m Autistic. I enjoy reading, producing, and especially participating in research. It’s something that I specifically set aside time to do because I find it rewarding, but also because I want the output of research to include the experiences of people like me. It’s one of the ways I advocate for improvements in the world … Read more
Last time, we took a look at some of the challenges archivists face as the world transitions to digital. The restriction and loss of access to information is a significant concern, but it’s not the only one. The digital revolution has given birth to an era of surveillance capitalism. Across all digital domains, corporations hungrily … Read more
The advent of digital information technology has produced some fantastical results. Digital publishing has made it easier than ever to disseminate information. I can press Publish on a blog post and instantly make it accessible to billions of people (not that any of them will read it). I can buy a book online and have … Read more
I often write here about my experiences as an autistic MLIS student and library patron and researcher. That’s pretty much the point of this blog. I write about it because it’s important to me that libraries be an inclusive and accessible space for people with different types of neurology (and other types of diversity), both … Read more
Libraries used to have apprenticeship programs. Rather than attending a university to learn the ins and outs of information science, folks who wanted to learn to be a librarian could just start being a librarian. And they’d start off pretty bad at it, but the other people in the library would teach them as they … Read more
The year is 2023. Accessibility has been included in discussions around the world-wide web since Tim Berners-Lee talked about it in 1994. And here we are nearly 30 years later, using the web for all sorts of things that Berners-Lee couldn’t have imagined. One of those things is online learning platforms which allow fully remote … Read more
As an autistic MLIS student, it probably comes as no surprise that I’m particularly interested in the ways that libraries can be made more friendly for neurodivergent patrons and staff. I look up scholarly research on this topic for my own edification, and I have a Google Scholar alert for new entries related to autism … Read more
