Introduction

Correction:
Due to a digital process error (wherein a penultimate version was printed), a revised edition of Library Trends 64(4) was necessary. When quoting from this issue, the Project MUSE digital version should be considered the authoritative and archival edition, and any citations should refer to this version. We sincerely regret this error.

In October 2014, more than a hundred scholars, practitioners, and activists gathered at the University of Toronto to discuss the ways that race, gender, sexuality, and their intersections with other identity-constituting discourses shape the ways in which information is produced, organized, and preserved, particularly in libraries and archives. Organized by the independent publisher Library Juice Press/Litwin Books and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, the Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies Colloquium (GSISC) emerged in part from the publication of the Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader (2013), edited by Patrick Keilty and Rebecca Dean as part of the Press’s Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies series. Their volume brought established and emerging scholars in library and information studies (LIS) together with scholars from other fields that share a commitment to critical race theory, feminism, and queer theory. Pairing scholarship by Hope Olson and D. Grant Campbell with that of Dean Spade, Chela Sandoval, Judith Halberstam, and Ann Cvetkovich, Keilty and Dean’s volume positioned race, gender, and sexuality as central to the project of information studies, and information and technology as central to race, gender, and sexuality studies. The GSISC attempted to do the same.

The GSISC joined a number of other attempts to bring scholars and practitioners together to talk about issues of race, gender, and sexuality in LIS. The GLBT Archives, Libraries, and Museums (ALMS) conference has been held at international locations every two years since 2006, and sessions at conferences, including those run by IFLA, ALA, and ASIST, and the iConference, have embraced critical perspectives on race, gender, and sexuality. Published scholarship has also begun to center this work. Archivaria, the flagship journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists, devoted half a volume in 2009 to the topic of “Queer Archives” (Sheffield & Barriault, 2009), and nearly every LIS journal has published several essays in the past two decades relating to these topics. However, this issue of Library Trends marks the first of its kind for an LIS journal.

The contemporary interest in these subjects builds on and extends scholarship pioneered by scholars such as Roma Harris, Mary Niles Maack, Kathleen de la Peña McCook, and Sanford Berman. The 1990s and 2000s gave rise to an increase in scholarship concerning sexuality, including Cal Gough and Ellen Greenblatt’s ground-breaking book Gay and Lesbian Library Service (1990); Hope Olson’s The Power to Name (2002); and Ellen Greenblatt’s Serving LGBTIQ Library and Archives Users (2011). The Women and Gender Studies Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has compiled a fairly comprehensive bibliography of library and information science research concerning gender and sexuality, which can be found online (Gilley, 2015).

Sexuality also has a long history in the discourse and practice of the profession. Commensurate with the postwar women’s rights and civil rights movements across the country, ALA created the Social Responsibilities Roundtable in 1969, the year cited in LGBT liberation rhetoric as the beginning of that movement when police raided a New York gay and drag bar called the Stonewall Inn. The following year, ALA created the Task Force on Gay Liberation, later known as the GLBT Round Table, the first professional organization of its kind in the United States. Since that time, librarians have concerned themselves with issues facing gender and sexual minorities, including the difficulties accessing LGBT information, intellectual freedom, privacy, prejudice among librarians and library staff, independent publishers, and bookstores, LGBT subject headings, and services to LGBT youth. During the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, librarians were, on the whole, defenders of access to books with LGBT content.

The racial segregation of libraries and inadequacy of library collections to serve racial minorities have had a long-lasting legacy within librarianship. According to the American...