Guest Editorial by Prof Philip Hider, RAILS 2019 Program Committee Chair

This issue features some of the papers presented at the Fifteenth Australasian Conference on Research Applications in Information and Library Studies (RAILS), held on 28^th and 29^th of October 2019, at St Mark’s National Theological Centre in Canberra, and convened by the School of Information Studies of Charles Sturt University. A total of sixty participants from eight countries attended the conference, which had as its theme, ‘Towards critical information research, education and practice’, in recognition of the key role that the information professions play in ‘combatting social injustice, social exclusion, digital divides, censorship, filtering, and misinformation, and attempts to undermine democracy, freedom of information and the right to know’, as the conference website (https://railsconference.com/rails-2019) puts it.

Indeed, the need for a critical approach to information provision has become all the more pressing in the world in which we now find ourselves. Since the time of the conference and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic much has changed. The current crisis has demonstrated in the starkest of ways what can happen when people make poor information choices, and the important ways in which information professionals and information researchers can help support better information choices, not only by providing access to accurate and timely information, but also by exposing the motives and power structures behind alternative messaging. In the past, there was a tendency for librarians to adopt a positon of neutrality: they were merely the gatekeepers, the intermediaries. Such a position may never have been wholly convincing, but in today’s digital world it is untenable. With armies (in some cases literally) of ‘information providers’ pushing their competing messages in ever more complex ways, librarians and other information professionals must take a stand, if it is their message they want people to listen to. This stand must include recognition that their own information is also built upon certain power structures and certain worldviews. To gain the trust of their clients, information professionals must come clean, by being self-critical as well as critical of external sources. Likewise, information researchers must investigate not only the power structures to be found behind ‘enemy lines’, but also those structures embedded in services and practices closer to home. They will exist, in one form or another. Through their uncovering, library and information science (LIS) research becomes truly critical, in more both senses of the word.

Eight of the 39 papers presented at the RAILS conference have been included as articles for this issue, following the journal’s usual process of double blind peer review. It is possible that other papers, still being written up or reviewed, will appear in later issues, but those offered up here are representative of the quality and breadth of a highly successful conference, in which many different ‘information’ topics were explored critically and in depth. Many of the presentations displayed a healthy interest in living up to the name of the conference by discussing the application of particular research for practice, while the keynote addresses gave the audience plenty of pause for self-reflection. The stream on the first day that constituted the Australasian Information Educators’ Symposium (AIES) is represented in this issue by one of the articles by Rajesh Singh.

The first of the research articles was awarded Best Paper for one of the three venues in which the conference papers were presented. Pierson, Goulding, and Campbell-Meier (2020) report on their study of New Zealand public librarians’ self-identity, and the ways in which it is affected by their professional education and various other inputs as they progress through their careers. By reflecting on their identities, they reflect on their practices, a vital element of critical librarianship.

The next article, based on Rajesh Singh’s AIES paper, picks up on the importance of entry-level education in helping to cultivate information professionals’ critical outlook. Singh (2020) shows through a content analysis of student assignments that reflection on one’s own cultural circumstances can go a long way to becoming more sensitive to those of others.

Moving on to concerns of practice, Maeva Masterson (2020) identifies a lack of discussion in the LIS literature about how leaders can increase cultural safety in public libraries. Turning to the literature of other fields, she suggests that a model of intercultural leadership, developed with Aboriginal Australians in the Northern Territory, might be successfully applied to Australian public library services.

Giving voice to non-dominant cultural groups is another part of the critical librarianship mission, and this can be done through inclusive collection development practices. Lymn and Jones (2020) provides an example of this by reporting on a study of university student newspaper collections, which often demonstrate engagement with ‘radical thinking, dissent and political activism’.

Not only should the content of collections subject to critical reflection, so too should be the ways in which they are described. White and Hider (2020) demonstrate how the vocabularies used by librarians and curators to describe films, for instance, are a product of their wider cultural environments and vary accordingly, even when the different cultures use a common language (in this case English).

The research papers are followed by two research-in-practice articles, the first by Luca and Ulyannikova (2020), which describes how ‘service design thinking’ was used to produce a user-centred systematic review service in an academic library. The second article, by Roana Flores (2020), surveys the wide array of Filipiniana held in the National Library of the Philippines and discusses the importance of the Library’s collections as unique windows into Philippine culture.

The set of papers from the RAILS conference is rounded off by an information-in-practice article, by Olivar, Schijf, Bundalian, and Ecelevia (2020), which reports on a ‘human library’ program offered in Filipino schools. Promoting respectful dialogue between human books and students, the program set out to break down cultural barriers and reduce prejudice and discrimination, causes that go very much to the heart of critical librarianship.

On behalf of the RAILS 2019 Program Committee, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the JALIA editors and reviewers for their role in turning some of the excellent presentations we heard at the conference into print. I would also like to thank once again all those who contributed to the success of RAILS 2019, including its organisers and helpers, the reviewers of the paper/panel/poster proposals, the presenters, and, last but by no means least, the audiences.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Philip Hider

Philip Hider is Professor of Library and Information Management at Charles Sturt University (CSU), as well as currently the Associate Dean Research of its Faculty of Arts and Education. He is an Associate Member of the Australian Library and Information Association and a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, and has worked at the British Library and the National Library Board of Singapore, before joining CSU’s School of Information Studies in 2003.