Factotem: What is Information Access for?

Abstract

Inspired by Allyson Carlyle’s advice to explain fundamental concepts clearly and simply, this article seeks to explain the notion of information access, and what it means to provide information access in a responsible way. Specifically, this essay looks at the idea of facts. How should providers of information deal with facts? To examine this question, the essay considers the 2017 protest slogan “Librarians for Facts.” What does this slogan really mean? Ultimately, the essay contends that information providers need to determine what they are for, and orient information access mechanisms toward that goal.

Keywords:

• Metadata
• classification;
• indexing;
• controlled vocabularies;
• information retrieval

Acknowledgments

Some ideas for this article were presented at a June, 2017 symposium on the politics of classification, organized by Rob Montoya and Johanna Drucker and sponsored by the Breslauer Professor Fund and the UCLA Department of Information Studies.