Melissa Adler is Associate Professor at Western University (London, Ontario) in the Faculty of Information & Media Studies. She is the author of Cruising the Library: Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge (Fordham).
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Description
This book is a masterful tour of how information worlds - even those more than 200 years old - continue to shape our cultural and political sensibilities. Choices about what to include and exclude from an archive or a library, how to organize and arrange those items, and how we memorialize our memories and histories rarely come together in one book. Adler handles all these themes deftly and clearly. This will be of great use to cultural historians, librarians, media scholars, and Jefferson fans alike. ---Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor of Media Studies, the University of Virginia Melissa Adler's nuanced and original work demonstrates that history is embedded in libraries and archives, and not just between the pages of books. Traces of Thomas Jefferson show up in our cataloging and classification systems, influence our architectural decisions, and help determine what counts as history in the first place. Through rigorous engagement with Jefferson's own words, Adler puts information studies at the center of the study of United States institutions.---Emily Drabinski, Associate Professor, Queens College, City University of New York In this sweeping, erudite, and posthumanistly-attuned exploration of the complexities of Thomas Jefferson's information practices-- at once entrenching a politics of domination and imagining ruptures that call forth new modes of freedom -- Melissa Adler deftly brings Jefferson's concerns into our present moment, where the role of robust information systems open to public use has never been more crucial, nor more threatened. Full of surprises found in the archives, Adler makes an urgent case for the value of the Library of Congress and libraries more generally in our political and cultural life.---Nathan Snaza, author of Tendings: Feminist Esoterisms and the Abolition of Man