Reassembling Scholarly Communications by Martin Paul Eve

Author:Martin Paul Eve
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press

Changing Values

Through efforts like Documenting the Now, Mukurtu, and Local Contexts, the scholarly record is beginning to expand to include more marginalized perspectives and sources of knowledge creation. This work helps to ensure that efforts to preserve the past for the future involve preserving everyone’s past for everyone’s future. However, it is not enough. In order truly to ensure a more complete and inclusive scholarly record, we must change our scholarly criteria for determining what is of value for creating, sharing, and preserving in the realm of knowledge creation. Nonetheless, it is important to note, these preservation decisions are made not only on the basis of intellectual value but also on the basis of economic value.23 The preservation of material culture, including scholarly works, requires funding and human labor—finite resources that will only ever be spent on that which meets certain criteria for priority. Essentially, that which is valued is that which is preserved, so we must critically examine our values if we wish to make meaningful change to the ways we preserve the past and present for the future.

A critical step in transforming scholarly values lies in diversifying those who serve as gatekeepers to knowledge creation and sharing. It is important to incorporate more diverse voices to break out of the current echo chamber of scholarship. We need more diverse perspectives among scholars doing the actual labor of research and writing; we need more diverse perspectives among reviewers who determine what scholarship is worthy of publication and what is not; we need more diverse perspectives among publishers packaging this research and making it available; and finally we need more diverse perspectives among librarians who are organizing and curating this material and making it discoverable to researchers. As librarian Charlotte Roh notes, we need “to push back against these biased systems and support publications that might not otherwise have a voice.”24 Likewise, Mountz et al. provide crucial advice:

We should take time to seek out unfamiliar names that may be attached to high quality, original work, names we do not recognize because they have been mapped as marginal to the field by gendered, racialized, classed, heteronormative, and ableist power relations. We can recognize the value of collective authorship, mentorship, collaboration, community building, and activist work in the germination and sharing of ideas.25

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