SI Information Privilege - Information Matters

March 12, 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The rising cost of textbooks can lead university students to make tough decisions, such as buying a cheaper, outdated version, sharing a single copy among a group, making an illegal copy, or going without a textbook altogether.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?

Education

March 12, 2026 sakee

Who Is Research For? Rethinking Information Privilege

This is what information privilege looks like in everyday research practice. Universities reward publications. Journals measure impact through citations. Scholars gain recognition. Meanwhile, participants—especially those in marginalized communities—often remain outside the circle of knowledge circulation. The very people whose experiences form the foundation of research may never see how their stories were interpreted.

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.

Original

March 4, 2026 Nove 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.

Original

February 25, 2026 Toni Anaya

The Impact of Digital Redlining in a Post-Pandemic

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

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.

Original

February 15, 2026 Nicole Thomas

From Gatekeepers to Guides: Unlocking Information Privilege in the Library Classroom

In my practice, I use Critical Information Literacy as a teaching method to help students understand the power structures that exist behind their sources, in an effort to deconstruct barriers of information. There is considerable value in teaching the complexities of information privilege, especially to undergraduates who are the next generation of researchers and information consumers.

Op/Ed

February 15, 2026 Maria Bonn

SOS: Dismantle Information Privilege to Save our Science

The start of this year’s Open Access Week coincided with No Kings demonstrations that took place around the nation on Oct. 18. I found myself that day, as so many of us did, shoulder to shoulder with friends, family and strangers speaking up for democracy. I was at the Seattle Center, at the foot of the Space Needle in downtown Seattle, in a vast crowd, my attention divided between fired-up speakers, inflatable unicorns, posters with wry comments and a rank of flags for veterans for peace. Amid the crowd was a group of intellectual-looking types, most wearing glasses and lab coats, waving SOS banners: Save Our Science. When I saw the SOS signs, I thought about how difficult it is to protect something we can’t see, how difficult it is to convince people of the value of something that they can’t use.

Original

February 13, 2026 Danielle Allard

Towards Knowledge Justice: Centering Marginalized Community Expertise in Academia

Many Canadian post-secondary institutions currently describe themselves as supporting community-based research, where the work of marginalized community members is valued and integrated into community-based research projects. Our experiences working on sister projects the Sex Work Activist Histories Project (SWAHP) and Eco-systems of Community Research and Recordkeeping (ECRR) have led us to conclude that these institutions in fact often undermine or ignore non-academic knowledges and expertise. University reform is needed to support community-driven research, especially for extremely marginalized communities such as sex workers.

Opinion

February 12, 2026 Elaine Kong

The Double Silence: When Scholarly Publishing Can’t Hear Immigrant Survivors

In my previous career as a systems librarian, I saw information privilege as a technical problem: who has the password to the database, and who has the funding for the subscription? But as I transitioned into research with Chinese immigrant cancer survivors, I realized that privilege runs deeper than a personal login. Even if we made every medical journal in the world “Open Access” tomorrow, many of the survivors I work with would still be excluded from the conversation. Removing a paywall doesn’t help if the person behind it can’t read the language or can’t find their cultural realities reflected in what counts as evidence.