Featured - Information Matters

March 16, 2026 Sakeena Alikhan

Who Is Research For? Rethinking Information Privilege

Have you ever shared your personal story with someone—only to never hear what happened to it afterward? This happens more often than we realize in academic research. Communities open their homes, share their experiences, and give researchers hours of interviews and photographs. Later, the research appears in journals, conferences, and university libraries. But the people whose lives shaped that research may never see the final results. Why? Because academic knowledge often circulates within privileged spaces—behind paywalls, in English, and through technical language.

Education Featured

March 13, 2026 Lynne Bowker

Localizing OER to Counter Information Privilege

The rising cost of textbooks can lead university students to make tough decisions, such as buying a cheaper, outdated version, sharing a single copy among a group, making an illegal copy, or going without a textbook altogether. Each of these coping strategies can negatively impact a student’s learning. Thankfully, open educational resources (OER) are emerging as a means of combatting information privilege that is linked to finances. This is a positive step forward, but is it enough? How else can we leverage the potential of OER to reduce other types of information privilege?

Featured Original

March 11, 2026 Tova Harris

Who Gets to Train the Machine? AI, Race, and Storytelling in Library Makerspaces

As generative AI tools move into library makerspaces, they do more than draft metadata or translate text—they reflect the power structures embedded in the spaces where they are deployed. Without intentional design, we risk automating the very inequities libraries seek to dismantle.

Featured Original

March 6, 2026 Sheng-Hsiang Lance Peng

AI and Modern Wars: How the 2026 US‑Israeli Strikes Rewired the Kill Chain

War has always been a theatre of speed, strategy and chaos but today, the performers are changing. No longer confined to generals, pilots and analysts, artificial intelligence has marched into the war room and pirouetted across screens and networks with a poise that is terrifying and exhilarating. As Craig Jones, a lecturer at Newcastle University, notes, AI now compresses the “kill chain,” shrinking the time from target identification to destruction in ways almost unimaginable in previous conflicts. In essence, bombs can drop faster than the speed of thought.

Featured Original

March 5, 2026 Janice Roman-Tamesis

Information Privilege and the Urban South: Lessons from Doing Tondo Studies

Information privilege is usually framed as unequal access to journals and databases. But place-based research in Tondo shows it also shapes which cities become legible in scholarship, how Urban South communities must be narrated to be publishable, and who benefits from the knowledge produced. Drawing from fieldwork in Isla Puting Bato, this essay traces how information, visibility, and authority are distributed, and offers practical ways scholars can help research travel back across paywalls, institutions, and languages.

Featured Original

March 4, 2026 Nove E Variant Anna

From Uneven Access to Shared Support: Responding to Information Privilege

This is what information privilege looks like in practice: the ability of some people to access information that others cannot, shaped by affiliation and economic context. It also shapes visibility in which work becomes easy to find, cite, and treat as “authoritative.” The ACRL Framework’s “Information Has Value” frame invites us to examine how information is embedded in economic and social systems, and how unequal access influences what counts as legitimate and trustworthy knowledge.

Education Featured Original

March 3, 2026 Azeez Adeoye

The Forgotten Jewel of a Good Book: A Compass to Modern Discoveries such as the Internet, Search Engines, and Generative AI

Many have argued about the place of technology, computer systems and their paraphernalia such as e-books, audiobooks, and websites, whether they are a blessing or a curse. Nevertheless, the products of past civilisations, such as the discovery of paper and the invention of the movable printing press, books, and writing itself, remain the true success stories behind all modern emerging technologies.

Cartoon of an AI data centre with a bag of TSMC computer chips saying 'byte-sized snack' even as an enormous bag of money goes up in flames in the background. Blue skies and other data centres form rest of the background.

Featured Original

February 26, 2026 Abhinav Choudhry

AI—The Familiar Promise of the One Ring

Generative AI (GenAI) has raised quite a stir in the past three years, pun intended. Trained, very arguably, on the ‘entire internet’, these models not only effortlessly breached the Turing Test barrier but today, laypersons are even using them as appeals to authority: ‘@Grok, is this true?’, or journalists quoting AI as ground truth for fact checks. The machine heuristic is still at play: AI is assumed to be unbiased, objective and rational. The hype around AI is palpable too: it being the panacea to the world’s problems and sparking debates on future need for universal basic income, even as hungry data centres gobble up gargantuan quantities of RAM and chips. However, trillions of dollars need to take stock first.

Featured Original

February 25, 2026 Toni Anaya

The Impact of Digital Redlining in a Post-Pandemic World

As public spaces, employers, and schools shut down in response to the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020, an issue that librarians and educators were familiar with became evident: the digital divide was alive and well in communities around the world. While historically, the digital divide has been defined since the middle of the 1990s as “the gap between those who do and those who do not have access to new forms of information technology” , two decades later, this definition encompasses information technology such as broadband internet, home computers, stable mobile telephone connectivity and digital television.

Education Featured

February 20, 2026 Michele Costello

The Data Divide: How Premium Financial Databases Stratify Business Education

Two students complete the same business degree, take similar courses, and earn comparable grades. One graduates with a Bloomberg certification and fluency in an industry-standard financial database. The other has never logged into a professional data platform. One has the opportunity to compete in a case competition using financial market information to build professional information literacy, while the other is excluded based on lack of database access. The difference comes down to the funding capacity and priorities of the institution they attended.