Amanda Belantara and Emily Drabinski, "Ways of Knowing: Oral Histories on the Worlds Words Create" (Litwin Books, 2024)

Oct 5, 2025

In this engaging discussion, Emily Drabinski, an expert in critical cataloging and former ALA president, teams up with Amanda Belantara, an associate curator with a focus on audiovisual anthropology. They delve into the groundbreaking oral histories featured in their book, exploring alternative thesauri that challenge conventional classification systems rooted in bias. Key topics include the importance of these alternative vocabularies for marginalized communities, the labor behind creating them, and their hopes for inspiring future community projects and inclusive practices.

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INSIGHT

Origins Of The Ways Of Knowing Project

Ways of Knowing began from documenting catalogers' frustrations and exploring alternatives to dominant classification systems.
Emily Drabinski and Amanda Belantara sought to record projects that created wholly different vocabularies rather than only reactive fixes.

INSIGHT

Classification Shapes What Is Retrievable

Controlled vocabularies make retrieval reliable but simultaneously exclude alternative terms and communities.
Emily Drabinski highlights that choosing one standard term inherently omits other culturally meaningful words and identities.

ADVICE

Use Print To Amplify Oral Histories

Publish oral-history transcripts as books to reach readers who prefer print and add scholarly apparatus like footnotes.
Use print to preserve material evidence and make work legible within academic systems like tenure and promotion.

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Ways of Knowing: Oral Histories on the Worlds Words Create (Litwin Books, 2025) sits at the heart of the library project, shaping how materials are described and organized and how they can be retrieved. The field has long understood that normative systems like Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress do this inadequately and worse, deploying language and categories that are rooted in white supremacy, patriarchy, and U.S. imperialism. In Ways of Knowing, Emily Drabinski and Amanda Belantara present unique and timely oral histories of alternative thesauri created in response to the inadequacies and biases embedded within widely adopted standards in libraries. The oral histories tell the stories behind the thesauri through the narratives of the people who created them, revealing aspects of thesauri work that ordinarily are overlooked or uncovered.

The set of oral histories included in the volume document the Chicano Thesaurus, A Women’s Thesaurus, and Homosaurus. Drabinski and Belantara recorded hour-long oral histories with two representatives from each project, documenting the origins of each thesaurus, the political and social context from which they emerged, and the processes involved in their development and implementation. Introductory essays provide a context for each thesaurus in the history of information and activism in libraries. The book and accompanying digital files constitute the first primary source of its kind and a unique contribution to the history of metadata work in libraries. Capturing these stories through sound recording offers new ways of understanding the field of critical cataloging and classification as we hear the joy, frustration, urgency, and seriousness of critical metadata work.

Find the Ways of Knowing project online at https://waysofknowing.org/. This interview also makes reference to Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences by Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, available open access from MIT Press. Amanda mentioned her online exhibit about the Chicano Studies Library, available at https://bibliopolitica.org/.

Amanda Belantara is Assistant Curator at New York University Libraries. Emily Drabinski is Associate Professor and librarian at the City University of New York.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025).

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