President’s Message Andromeda Yelton 
 

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES | DECEMBER 2017 2 

 

Andromeda Yelton (andromeda.yelton@gmail.com) is LITA President 2017-18 and Senior 
Software Engineer, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, United States.  

 

 

Before I dive into my column, I’d like to recognize and thank Bob Gerrity for his six years of service 
as ITAL’s Editor in Chief. He oversaw our shift from a traditional print journal to a fully online one, 
recognized by Micah Vandegrift and Chealsye Bowley as having the strongest open-access policies 
of all LIS journals (http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2014/healthyself/). I’d like to 
further extend a welcome to Ken Varnum as our new Editor in Chief. Ken’s distinguished record of 
LITA service includes stints on the ITAL Editorial Board and the LITA Board of Directors, so he 
knows the journal very well and I am enthusiastic about its future under his lead. 

I’m particularly curious to see what will be discussed in ITAL under Ken’s leadership because I’ve 
just come back from two outstanding conferences which drove home the significance of the issues 
we wrestle with in library technology, and I’m looking forward to a third. 

In early November, I attended LITA Forum in scenic Denver. The schedule was packed with 
sessions on intriguing topics – too many, of course, for me to attend them all – but two in 
particular stand out to me. In one, Sam Kome detailed how he’s going about a privacy audit at the 
Claremont Colleges Library. He walked us through an extensive – and sometimes surprising – list 
of places personally identifiable information can lurk on library and campus systems, and talked 
through what his library absolutely needs (which is less than he’d thought, and far less than the 
library has been logging without thinking about it). In the other, Mary Catherine Lockmiller took a 
design thinking approach to serving transgender populations. She shared a fantastic, practical 
LibGuide (http://libguides.southmountaincc.edu/transgenderresources), but the part that stuck 
with me most is her statement that many trans people may never physically enter a library 
because public spaces are not safe spaces; for this population, our electronic services are our 
public services. As technologists, we create the point of first, and maybe only, contact. 

A week later, I attended the inaugural Data for Black Lives conference (http://d4bl.org/) at the 
MIT Media Lab, steps from my office. This was – and I think everyone in the room felt it –
something genuinely new. From the galvanizing topic, to the sophisticated visual and auditory 
design, to the frisson of genius and creativity buzzing all around a room of artists, activists, 
professors, poets, data scientists and software engineers, it was a remarkable experience for us all. 

Those of you who heard Dr. Safiya Noble speak at Thomas Dowling’s LITA President’s program in 
2016 are familiar with algorithmic bias. Numerous speakers discussed this at D4BL: the ways that 
racial disparities in underlying data sets can be replicated, magnified, and given a veneer of 
objective power when run through the black boxes that power predictive policing or risk 
assessment for bail hearings. Absent and messy data was a theme as well: in a moment that would 
make many librarians chuckle (and then wince) knowingly, a panel of music industry executives 
estimated that 40% of their metadata is wrong, thus making it impossible to credit and 
compensate artists appropriately. 

  

mailto:andromeda.yelton@gmail.com)
https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2014/healthyself/&sa=D&ust=1512118443864000&usg=AFQjCNEDFyL-YwFgnAdmdzfCRVVnMHLhhQ
http://libguides.southmountaincc.edu/transgenderresources
http://d4bl.org/)


 

PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE | YELTON 3 
https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v36i4.10238 

And yet – in a memorable keynote – Dr. Ruha Benjamin called on us not only to collect data about 
black death, as she showed us an image of the ambulance bill sent to Tamir Rice’s family, but to 
listen to our artists and poets as we use our data to imagine black life – this in front of an image of 
Wakanda. With our data and our creativity, what new worlds can we map? 

Several of my MIT colleagues also attended D4BL, and as we discussed it afterward we started 
thinking about how these ideas can drive our own work. How does the imaginary world of 
Wakanda connect to the archival imaginary, and what worlds can we empower our own creators 
to imagine with what we collect and preserve? How can we use our data literacy and access to 
sometimes un-Googleable resources to help community groups collate data on important issues 
that are not tracked by our public institutions, such as police violence 
(https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/) or racial disparities in setting bail? 

With these ideas swirling in my mind, I am looking forward with tremendous excitement to LITA 
Forum 2018. Building on the work of our Forum Assessment Task Force, we’ll be doing a lot of 
things differently; in particular, aiming for lots of hands-on, interactive sessions. This will be a 
conference where, whether you’re a presenter or an attendee, you’ll be able to do things. And 
these last two conferences have driven home for me how very much there is to do in of library 
technology. Our work to select, collect, preserve, clean, and provide access to data can indeed have 
enormous impact. Technology services are front-line services. 

https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/)