Oral Histories on the Worlds Words Create

Access to information in libraries is provided through classification and cataloging systems that place similar items next to each other on library shelves and enable researchers to retrieve everything on a given topic via standardized vocabularies. Dominant systems reflect dominant ways of knowing. The Dewey Decimal Classification and Library of Congress Classification, the two most common schemes used around the world, have been widely critiqued for their exclusions of knowledge outside of white, Christian, and U.S.-centric domains.

The Ways of Knowing Oral History Project gathers and shares stories of alternate systems that document other ways of understanding the world. The oral histories included in the collection demonstrate the concrete need for alternatives, not just to enable information discovery, but also as tools that challenge the hegemonic ideas that are embedded in library catalogs. Alternative descriptive vocabularies can play an important part in upending systems and realities that have proclaimed themselves as the only way or truth.

Embracing alternative thesauri and the worlds they reflect and produce offers a different way forward than eliminating or attempting to correct normative systems. Rather than pursuing solutions that are bureaucratic, partial, and subject to government policies and confirmation, these efforts create something new that emerges from and belongs to the community itself. The projects documented here are revolutionary and joyful. Their creators do not wait for approval, and they do not answer to the Library of Congress. They do not ask for accommodation or inclusion. They document their own worlds, in their own words, with and for each other.