July 10, 2024

Just recently we posted an open job call for a brand new position at Data & Society: a research and reference librarian. Since we’ve never before had a librarian as part of our research team, we thought it would be worthwhile to reflect on why we’re hiring one now, and why we’ve proposed to study the problem of archiving, organizing, and circulating independent social science research.

Put simply, the public infrastructures of new social scientific knowledge are a mess. Major universities and professional academic journals each have their own systems for organizing and preserving research, but for those working outside these institutions, the process of making work known and visible is all too reliant on a mishmash of technologies beyond their control. The citation-linking database of Google Scholar, for instance, has become the de facto center to much of contemporary academic work. But for “individual authors” outside of universities or journals, the means for having work indexed is uploading a pdf to the public web and then waiting a few weeks and hoping that the “search robots” find it. (Oh, and if the robots can’t read your PDF formatting, they’ll just skip it.) 

This Google Scholar pdf trust fall is just one example of how independent researchers have to navigate an uneven landscape of data infrastructures. Deciphering journals’ up-charge open-access fees, wrangling the management of shared Zotero libraries, toggling private/public settings on SSRN to get DOIs, emailing old colleagues to pry recent articles out of library databases…these are all the very real and very un-ideal activities of modern social science research. Think of it as citational injustice — these bits of friction add up to a consistent disadvantage for those outside institutions: frequently women, people of color, and those without academic credentials or whose expertise comes from lived experience. 

When we started thinking about how to address the scale of this problem, we imagined a repository — some great, independent archive of sociotechnical knowledge that could stand on its own. But that’s not where we’re starting. We’re starting by hiring someone who can help Data & Society develop a repository as method. 

Our first research and reference librarian will be someone who is trained in the formal aspects of these problems, but who also understands the social realities of trying to produce sociotechnical knowledge from the margins. We want to work with someone who can first look at Data & Society’s own practices of infrastructural navigation and figure out better methods for making our research visible, discoverable, and durable. But once we put on our own oxygen mask, we want to make what we learn available to those around us. There is so much powerful knowledge being created by people outside the centers of academia. Lay experts, radical thinkers, community organizers, activist scholars — we want to make it more possible for their work to reach the places where it can make a difference.

We’re looking for someone who can help us talk to our collaborators and network about these challenges, and who can synthesize the needs of a broader field — someone who can help us craft good solutions for great thinkers. If that’s you, we’d love to hear from you.

We’re grateful to the Mellon Foundation for supporting this important work.