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Amanda Belantara and Emily Drabinski, "Ways of Knowing: Oral Histories on the Worlds Words Create" (Litwin Books, 2024)
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The New Books Network.
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Jen Hoyer
Welcome to New Books Network. My name is Jen Hoyer, and today I'm speaking with Amanda Belantera and Emily Dravidsky, editors of Ways of Oral Histories on the World's Words Create. Published by Litwin Books in March 2025. Ways of knowing presents unique and timely oral histories of alternative thesauri created in response to the inadequacies and biases embed within widely adopted standards in libraries. These oral histories tell the stories behind the thesauri through the narratives of the people who created them, revealing aspects of thesauri work that ordinarily are overlooked or uncovered. And I'm really delighted today to be speaking with Emily and Amanda, editors of this book. So welcome to New Books Network. And before we dive into talking about your book, could you both introduce yourselves to listeners? Maybe you can share a little bit about your background, what kind of path your education has taken, and the work that you're doing now. Do you want to go first, Emily? Sure.
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Emily Drabinski
So I'm Emily Drabinski. I'm an associate professor and chair of the Library School at Queens College at the City University of New York. I've been a librarian. I was an academic librarian for about 20 years and just started as A full time professor, or in gistless we call it. Three years ago, this is my first year as chair. So when you ask what am I doing right now, I'm trying to figure out how to make the spring schedule and get it to line up without making a ton of mistakes. In 20, 23, 24, I served as president of the American Library Association. And so I'm at work on a book that is due yesterday about my sort of experiences traveling the country and looking at libraries and this project I undertook kind of at the same time as that, and really, really glad to have it out in the world and have it out in the world with Amanda.
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Jen Hoyer
Thanks. Amanda, do you want to thanks so.
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Amanda Belantara
Much for having us. Jen. My name is Amanda Belantara. I'm an associate curator at New York University Libraries, and my background is actually in audio visual anthropology, which is what got me started on working with libraries. Actually. I'd been a shelver at the public library in Boulder where I went to undergrad. But then when I did my grad studies in visual anthropology, I decided to make an ethnographic film about the Central Library in Manchester, which, long story made short, brought me to where I am today. And it's been an absolute privilege and pleasure documenting these oral histories alongside Emily. So I'm excited to chat about the book super well.
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Jen Hoyer
And this book is called Ways of Knowing, but it's part of your work on an oral history project with the same name. So I would love if you could introduce listeners to the larger Ways of Knowing project, how it started, maybe what the goals are and what it contains.
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Amanda Belantara
So prior to starting work on the Ways of Knowing project, Emily and I had been collaborating on a different project called Catalogers at Work, where we sat alongside catalogers while they worked and recorded them and asked them to narrate what it was like to make decisions about how to catalog different items in their collection. And while we were recording this current theme that came up and something that we expected to document were different catalogers frustrations with being trapped to using these standard systems that are relied upon for information retrieval, not just in the US but around the world. And in documenting that, we became really interested in seeing how individual catalogers actually have the power to change things or to not change things. And so we started thinking about that, and there are a lot of catalogers that we worked with who do practice critical cataloging. So we thought that's a really interesting intervention. But what about people who decide to instead of intervening in these problematic systems, what about those who instead decide to do something entirely different, because there's more than one ways to do almost everything on earth. So we wanted to investigate alternatives to these normative systems, and that's how Ways of Knowing got started. Emily, do you want to add anything?
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Emily Drabinski
You know, I've been sort of thinking about and writing about the problems of standard classification for quite a while, and there's such a rich sort of history of critique and history of action in the library field around these kinds of standard systems of control. So what was exciting about this project was to be able to document larger scale interventions that are not simply reactive to the existing standards, but are in fact, presentations of wholly new or wholly, maybe not wholly new, but like systems of description and classification that aren't simply reactive to the dominant knowledge organization systems. And I think I'm also really interested in work. Right. And in labor and how library workers make things happen. And we don't document enough, I think, in our field, the actual work that librarians and other kinds of information workers do. So I'm really proud of this as a, as a project that documents not just the problems, but some actual solutions that are coming from communities and coming from communities often of library workers who are really committed to making their worlds known to each other. Yeah.
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Jen Hoyer
Well, thank you. Well, and I want to, I guess maybe as a step back, the book and the Ways of Knowing project is focusing on the creation of standardized vocabularies used in this work of classification and cataloging. And so for folks who don't spend all of their time thinking about classification systems and controlled vocabularies, could you talk a little bit more about what these are and maybe why we should all spend more time thinking about them?
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Emily Drabinski
I mean, I can start, I think one of my favorite thinkers in, I want to say, in the field, but kind of in the world is Susan Lee Starr, who wrote a book with Jeffrey Barker called Sorting Things Out. And it's a book about the sort of material effects of classification of all kinds. And they look at racial classifications in apartheid South Africa. They look at the classifications of diseases in insurance sort of kinds of settings. But they do a really good job, I think, of talking about what Starr calls boring things in a way that make us understand that it's the boring things that are the sort of substrate for everything that we find interesting. So if you just go into a library and grab a book off the shelf because you want to read it or it applies to your, you don't think about those systems very much anymore than I think about sort of how Whole fires work when I turn on the computer, right. I don't think about the. All of the sort of structures and materiality of the thing that I'm doing. So those of us in libraries, we think about that all the time because we are constantly building, rebuilding, using, reifying these systems of description and access. So to make it really plain for people who don't work in a library, every book that comes into the library, and if this was a video recording, you could see me sort of holding up the book that I just finished reading, which is Ian Milligan's Averting the Digital Dark Age. So this book comes out and the librarians have to decide where it's going to live. On a shelf. It has to have a physical location, and we classify it in order to put it on the shelf somewhere. That makes sense. So that when you look for this book, books like it are sitting next to it on the shelf. So that's the sort of classification piece. And we describe it so that when you are looking in the library catalog, when you're doing a search, it controls the terms. So this book, the subject headings are Web Archiving history and Digital Libraries history. So when I go to the library catalog and I Google web archiving, right? Not Google. See how, like, it just says infected. Like, even the mere act of searching the corporate control of our language, there's another book that we should write, but Web Archiving History, when I go and I search it in the opacity, all books about web archiving history will be cataloged using the same term. So I can pull all the books together. So the example I use when I'm teaching students is like, if I wanted to find everything written about the plant marijuana without controlled vocabularies, I have to search marijuana, weed, grass, ganja, what are other names? Right. Laos.
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Jen Hoyer
I just ran into this when, like, creating a collection in our library catalog of books about cooking with marijuana. And yeah, there were there. It's a good thing there was controlled vocabulary because there were so many ways of talking about it.
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Emily Drabinski
Exactly. So it's really useful to pull them all together. But when we choose one term, that means we're not choosing all of the other terms that one could use to talk about a topic. So we're going to call it Marijuana in the library and Cannabis and the library. I forget. And none of the other words are useful. So weed is sort of a funny example, but when you think about terms that are applied to people, it's significantly less funny. Right. Thinking about how the. Like, I have written Mostly about how. How that controlled vocabulary fails to account for queer identity and queer ways of being and knowing. So, you know, I'm a lesbian to my mom, I'm queer to my queer political communities. I'm a dyke to my sort of dyke communities. Right. Like that. The way that those of us who come from communities that are, you know, places that are not sort of the standard, I think we're all pretty familiar with having to shift between words, Right. And do that kind of code switching work, and the library can't account for that, which means that the only way that things are represented in the catalog, which means retrievable using that control vocabulary, are in the terms of a dominant ideology. That excludes, frankly, most of us. It excludes me. It excludes Amanda, I'm sure it excludes you, Jen, and. And probably most of the listeners. And so we all need to be thinking about it. Yeah, Amanda.
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Amanda Belantara
Yeah. Well, I think you did a great job of summarizing what classification is and what the stakes are around it. And just to point out, one other thing that got me interested in this project is before I started doing library work, I was always interested in this question of classification because it drives so much in our world, whether you're going to find a plug that fits your adapter or you're deciding which bathroom to use or which box to tick. And I was always thinking, you know, who decides these rules? Who decides these rules? And then once I got into working in libraries, I was fascinated by this idea of just committees coming together to make these decisions. And then I heard from people who are on these very huge committees or these, you know, high up committees in the cataloging world. They argue over whether or not to include ellipses or not. And they're making these choices that have huge impact. And so I found that very fascinating and also fascinating, fascinating within the context of this project, to think about how communities would create these rules or these standards for themselves rather than trying to work with ones that don't work because they were made by communities or committees that aren't as familiar with your world or way of being or seeing things.
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Jen Hoyer
Amazing. Thank you for that. Really terrific foundation for what we're talking about. And so then going back to the book, your book contains transcriptions of oral histories that you've done with creators of three different Thesauri, the Chicano Thesaurus, the Homosaurus, and the Woman's Thesaurus. I can't say words with a th in them today. How does this book fit into what you're accomplishing? With your overall project. And what do you think this print book can do that other entry points to the oral histories don't? Because the oral histories are available at NYU libraries, there's some access on a website. But I was maybe overthinking it, but thinking about print publishing as a tool, and I was really curious what you think this tool can do that complements and expands on what the oral histories might be doing on a physical archive, in a physical archive or on a website.
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Amanda Belantara
So we wanted to make the book. You're right. We first recorded all of the oral histories as audio and we released them through NYU libraries and later on the waysofknowing.org website. But we felt it was important to also publish a print book of these transcripts because, well, as the name of the book implies, there's lots of different ways of knowing and there's a lot of people who will not sit down and listen to an oral history interview, where for me, that would be the preferred way of interacting with these stories and the people who are sharing them. But it's not for everybody. And some people really would rather read the text as a print book and be able to discover more about these thesauri in that way. The book also includes some additional references that you won't find in our transcript. So there's opportunities to kind of get more insight into some of the backstory for people who are unfamiliar to get more information via the footnotes and the citations at the end of the book. So I think it adds to the scholarly conversation in a way that maybe people who don't listen to oral histories, you know, might connect to with in a different way than they would just through accessing online. What do you think, Emily?
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Emily Drabinski
You know, I think also, like, I think we can't get away from the fact that part of why we wanted to do a book was for tenure and promotion. Right. Like the fact that even as we in this, in this project, I think are doing the important work of documenting sort of outsider or non dominant sort of ways of knowing, we as individuals and everybody, we're still embedded in these systems. And if you, if you am constrained by them. Right. And so part of why I wanted to do a book is because I need to do a book for my job. And here is a book. And so that's kind of a boring answer. Although I think it also reminds us that all of the, like, the argument that we make, you know, by, by putting the book together is not that these worlds exist separately from one another, but the worlds are all sort of interconnected, right. And so we. We. We did a book, in part because books are one of the ways that academic work becomes legible inside of the systems in which we do our work. I also love books because they're material, right? And one of the things that I really struggle with is, like, making sure that my students in the classroom and the professionals that I work with and just in my own life, that we remember that things are real, that things are material, that the book, you can hold it in your hands, right? And it's a physical manifestation that will outlast whatever they do to the Internet, right. Then it will persist.
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Amanda Belantara
Somewhat related to what Emily just shared is also this idea about a book, right? Like, people somehow value ideas shared in print in a book more than they'll value something that's available online in a website. And the stories that we share in these books are stories, you know, some of them are more well known than others. But I think each of them actually deserved their own book. The stories that they shared about, you know, building the Chicano thesaurus and all the workers that were involved in making that project possible, I think these stories really merit a full manuscript, not just these transcripts, but they all merit reading. They all merit a book of their own. And so I think it's just our small contribution to also hoping that these stories will remain and remain a source of inspiration and positivity in light of everything that's going on and to just also show people what's possible when they discover this on the bookshelf.
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Emily Drabinski
Yeah, totally.
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Jen Hoyer
They deserve us, like, taking time to sit down and hold the book and, like, really, really spend time with the stories. They're incredible stories. And so I guess thinking about the oral histories, the experiences that folks share, as I was reading, there were a couple of themes that jumped out to me across conversations. Things like the importance of relationships, the theme of joy, Definitely. Themes of technology and labor and the politics of language. But I'm really curious to hear what themes jumped out at you as you conducted these interviews and then worked with the transcripts. And I'm really curious, actually, if there were any concepts and themes that stood out maybe that you didn't expect or that surprised you.
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Emily Drabinski
I mean, I think the themes that you name are the themes that jumped out to me as well, particularly the theme of labor. And that's partly because that's an interest of mine. Right. Like, I'm interested in work and people working and how we organize ourselves and work. But also not just that, but many of the Vocabularies were not built by library workers. Right. So I'm thinking about the Chicano thesaurus especially. And Amanda, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, but the. The themes there, like, yes, it's about libraries, yes, it's about information access, yes, it's about the actual vocabulary. But one of the things that's captured in the conversations with Richard and Lillian is just how much the process of putting the thesaurus together was an act of meaning making and community making. And it is like, you know, I guess in archives they say more process, less product. Right. And I wouldn't advocate for that here, but I would say that the process is worth caring about and documenting and remembering. And, you know, I was. We were working on this book as I was serving as president of the American Library association and learning about how much of thesaurus came together simply by people meeting at the annual conference and exchanging folders and envelopes of paper and using the physical mail. And for everybody who has sat behind a computer and stared at an endless scroll of the horrors of the world and thought, what can I do? This book is an antidote. You can go hang out with your friend who cares about what you care about and think about what you might build together. And I think for me, that that is a theme. We need. We need more examples of how people have worked together collectively to solve problems. And this book is full of those.
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Amanda Belantara
Yeah, I'll just add the real theme that stands out to me across the entire project is just this side, this possibility. I feel like a lot of the time in working in the library, it's hard sometimes to Move. Right. It's hard to make a big change because there's so many moving parts and there's a lot to think out and we all want to get it right. Right. And avoid mistakes and make sure everything is well thought through and whatnot. But what happened in these stories is somebody had an idea and knew it was really necessary and how meaning it could be, and then they took action. Right. It's this power of collective action. It's the power of possibility, of seeing something different and imagining something different that's going to actually make a real difference in the lives of people you love and in future generations. So I think it just really shows that when people really want to do something, you can, it might feel impossible. It might. You know, hearing all these stories about sending things through the mail like Emily mentioned, and manually filling out worksheets that went on to create, you know, giant 5 inch thick volumes of the Chicano Periodical index in the 1970s, that's powerful. You know, if people back then could do it. And people have been fighting different struggles for generations. You know, we, we have all these technologies now that make it even easier and there's so much we can do. So for me, the key theme is possibility, change and action.
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Emily Drabinski
Yeah. And I would just add to that, that possibility of change in action is infused with joy, with the pleasure of being with each other, of sharing our problems and solutions. And you know, like, read the book and then make sure that you listen to the oral histories because I think especially with the homosaurus, the interviews there, you can just hear how much joy people take in one another in communities. And that is another thing we need more of right now. Absolutely.
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Jen Hoyer
I mean, I was thinking while you were talking about how to make clear what readers might be interested in this book. And really it's anybody who wants a little bit more joy. So I guess if you're identifying yourself as not a potential reader will let you put yourself in that bucket. But, you know, thinking then about how we never really know what actually happens with a book and the lives that books live when we put them out into the world. I guess you've alluded to some of this, but how do you hope people use the book? And you noted in the introduction that this volume offers a vision of change. So what changes would you be really excited to see the book provoke?
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Amanda Belantara
I think I would like to see more people coming together to help serve their communities in meaningful. And that covers a wide range of topics and ideas, but specific to this idea of knowledge organization, there's more people who are trying to build projects like these. There's people who are trying to create new vocabularies. Just earlier this year, Emily and I went and documented the really inspiring Mondobigan Classification at the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal Libraries. And our goal is to help show people that, yes, you can do this work. Work. It sounds like a lot of work. It can be daunting, and it does take up a lot of time. But look at how worthwhile it is. Look how life changing it is. Look what it's going to mean to future generations to be able to find something in a library by using words that are meaningful to them. Right? Like, that's so powerful. So our hope is to show the possibility, the hope and change, and to hopefully encourage people to not be scared to take something on. You know, you've got a community of supporters. Anybody who was interviewed for this book will be glad to talk to anybody who wants to do something similar for their own communities, for their own libraries. And it's just to show that there is the power to do this and how powerful it is to do this when people are willing to put their heart into it and put the time into it, because that's what it boils down to.
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Emily Drabinski
You know, I think people. What I hope people take from the book is like, how. How you do it, right? Like, I think of all the different places I've been where people have been, like, do the work. We have to do the work. Are you doing the work? The work, the work. We've got to do the work, right? And I'm always like, well, what work is that exactly? Is it getting together and telling each other to do the work? Because I think, you know, I've done that and nothing has changed. And so what this book does is it offers you, like, here is what the work actually is. Like. There's a part in Richard Chevron's oral history where he talks about the funding mechanisms for the Chicano Thesaurus. Right. And so is this going to be. You know, they're all inside of the academy, right. But also outside of it. And what kinds of resources are we going to get from the university library that can pay for the production of this? And, you know, and that how are we going to pay for it? Is a question everybody who wants to make some change has had before, Right. But we don't often talk about, like, what we did to get that right in a way that you want to read it. And so here's what you're just talking about, like, asking the University librarian and being told, no. And, like, this is how we funded it. This is what that looked like. And so I hope that people will take from it examples of what that work actually is, you know, and that homosaurus, Right. We hear from JJ Rawson, who is the. I believe is still head of the editorial board, or was. Was the. The chair of the editorial board when we. When we interviewed him. And he talks a lot about sort of. He had. He wanted. He had a thing he wanted to do, right. He has a trans history archive. And, like, he wants people to be able to retrieve information, and he's lacking a vocabulary. And so rather than being like, there's no vocabulary for this, he went out into the world, investigated, found one that worked, pulled hold some people together to try to figure out how to keep it moving into the future. And so I think we often think that social change or social justice happens when we believe something really hard, Right? But what it actually means is that we, you know, the. Amanda sent me an email that said, emily, do you want to work on this book together? And then we got a meeting together, and then we had a call, and then we applied for a grant. And, you know, all of those are the steps of change. And so I hope that people will read this and be like, oh, this is not that. It's not hard to do things. I think also, Amanda, you get a clear sense of how difficult it is to develop a controlled vocabulary or a classification system for something new, but you get a sense of how hard it is, but also how really all hard things are basically just a number of small steps that people take in over, you know, and there's, like, a lot of examples of that. And I also, you know, on another note, I really hope that catalogers and classifiers and people who work in technical services, the part of librarianship that I think has been pushed the farthest to the side that's the most invisible. Like I always say, I've worked in libraries for more than two decades, and I've never seen a library hire a new technical services person. Never. Right. I've never seen a position created. What I've seen over and over again is somebody leaves, and they're like, we don't need that anymore because we can get it from a vendor. We have AI to do it, or whatever. But, like, people doing the work is important. And so I hope that by documenting this, some of the catalogers and classifiers in the field will see that their work is valued by people who don't do it as part of Their day job, which would include me and Amanda.
- [30:17]
Jen Hoyer
Thank you. Well, before we wrap up our conversation, I want to give you both a chance to talk about whatever you're working on next. And maybe that includes future directions for Ways of Knowing that you'd like to talk about or other totally different projects that you're working on and that you want to talk about. Amanda, do you want to go first?
- [30:38]
Amanda Belantara
Sure. So, as I mentioned before in the interview, Emily and I have done some more interviews that we want to add to the project website. We want to keep documenting additional alternative vocabularies and classification systems and keep adding to the Ways of Knowing project. That's one thing. Also, after Ways of Knowing, I went on to continue working with Lily and Richard, who helped create the Chicano Thesaurus to create a digital exhibition on the Chicano Studies library, where they both have worked and have made huge impact on communities for generations now. So we documented the history of that library on bibliopolitica.org it's digital archive that's searchable and it includes original histories that document the history of that library. And then another thing that I would love to do maybe with Emily, if she's still key, still game, would be to create an exhibition on library technologies over the years, because I think libraries have really been the innovators in a lot of these areas and don't really get. Get the credit for all of that work. And one part of this we have already started working on because Emily and I recorded an interview with the person who created your favorite famous library kickstep step stool. Anytime you need a lift to grab that book off that shelf, you're most likely going to be using a library kickstep. So we actually recorded an interview with the creators of the kickstep and that was a lot of fun. So we have have some other projects that we have yet to complete that would be great fun whenever they're. Emily, do you want to go next?
- [32:26]
Emily Drabinski
Yeah, I mean, we continue to record. Amanda told you about. We went to Michigan to record with the folks who came up with the Mondobe Gang classification of materials for the Chippewa Tribal Library in. In Michigan. And that is like, all of these projects are incredible, but that one is truly remarkable. The tribal leaders settled on a classification as visual and organizes knowledge according to the clan structure, so that the knowledge is organized according to who in the tribe would have had responsibility for particular areas of knowledge. And it's. And listening to the designers and developers of that talk about how it's not only an information retrieval tool, but also a tool for teaching people about the clan structure is really fascinating. So I'm really looking forward to getting those oral histories edited and made available. And yeah, I can't wait to get this kickstep story out into the world, Amanda, because another thing is, you know, we're talking to you on one of the hardest days of this, of the last year for me, in terms of, like, looking at the news, right. Really struggling with an administration that has, just to name one thing, has eliminated E rate funding for lendable hotspots in US Public libraries. So hotspots that give broadband Internet access to everybody. Right. We live in a. In a place where we've just decided that some people don't need to get on the Internet, even though that is where every single government service exists. And so that's just one thing. And the day is full of those. And so I'm really focused on finding where I can. Joy and pleasure in the work, which is something Amanda and I have written about. Out of this project, we have a publication about the joy of cataloging. And it's absolutely at the heart of our collaboration. We try to have a lot of fun and so really excited about. About what's to come from our collaboration. And including that we also recorded. Jen, I should let you and your listeners, nor with many, many librarians who told us the stories of their kickstarts. Really got to get that out there. Amanda. Yeah.
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Jen Hoyer
That is incredible. Please make it available.
- [35:03]
Emily Drabinski
The public wants it.
- [35:04]
Jen Hoyer
And by the public, I mean, definitely me, probably.
- [35:08]
Emily Drabinski
Yeah. But yeah, mostly have fun, don't you think, Amanda? Like, more library joy, I think is part of, you know, to sort of call out Michael Threets, the incoming head of Reading Rainbow. Right. We need more library joy, including in academic libraries where we often don't make enough fun.
- [35:25]
Jen Hoyer
Absolutely. Well, thank you both so, so much. Once again today, I've been speaking with Amanda Belantara and Emily Drabinski, editors of Ways of Oral Histories on the world's Words create. My name is Jen Hoyer, and you're listening to New Books Network.
- [35:55]
Amanda Belantara
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Emily Drabinski
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Emily Drabinski
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