Bibliothek Wyborada, Lucie Kolb and Eva Weinmayr in conversation with Feminist Search Tools
Starting from the question Why are the authors of the books I read so white, so male, so Eurocentric?, in the conversation with the working group Feminist Search Tools you get a glimpse into their guiding question of how to address intersectionality in library search. They share the development of two search tool interfaces, one for Utrecht University Library, and the most recent for and with Ihlia, an LGTBQ archive housed at the Public Library in Amsterdam. Feminist Search Tools workgroup is a collective of collectives: Read-in (Sven Engels, Annette Krauss, Laura Pardo), Hackers & Designers, (Anja Groten, André Fincato, Heerko van der Kooij, and previous member James Bryan Graves), Ola Hassanain, Aggeliki Diakrousi and Alice Strete. The conversation took place in the framework of the artistic research and education project «Teaching the Radical Catalogue: A Syllabus 2021–22», which investigates the process of information retrieval as a political project (syllabus.radicalcatalogue.net).
During a one-week workshop, the women's library and Fonothek Bibliothek Wyborada and affiliates (Karin Bühler, Marina Schütz, Ruth Erat and Sibylle Omlin) gathered at Sitterwerk's Kunstbibliothek and investigated its holdings from a feminist perspective. They discussed the need for a feminist, non-hierarchical library catalogue and for a new approach to keywords and search vocabularies.