4.2.5: Privilege, Privilege, and the Findability of Information
- Page ID
- 260827
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Finding What You're Looking For
Privilege, social hierarchies, and biases influence the findability of information as well as its creation.
Think of the experience of grocery shopping. When you shop at a particular grocery store for the first time, how easy is it to find the items you're looking for? How might the availability of certain items and the way they are arranged on the shelves be influenced by what is most popular? Or by what the grocery store owner most wants you to buy? Or by the target population the grocery store is trying to reach? How might your shopping experience change if you couldn't read the language(s) on the labels? How does the experience differ when foods from your culture are or are not available?
Whether and where you can find the items you need in a particular grocery store may be influenced by the marketing strategies of the store owner, incentives from other companies to feature their items in particular places, and requests from customers for specific items. These factors benefit some people more than others. For example, if you need an item that is not popular with most of the store's other customers, or is not very profitable for the store to sell, it may not be available, or may not be featured in a prominent location, regardless of the quality of the item or its importance to you.
Information Findability on the Internet
Just as a variety of factors contribute to how items are arranged on grocery store shelves, several factors contribute to where a particular website will appear in the results list of a Google search. Many of these factors have less to do with the quality and relevance of the information than with the marketing strategies used by website owners, search terms used by searchers, and the bias built into the search engine's algorithm.
Information Findability in Libraries
Both on the internet and in libraries, information sources that include a lot of complicated language or jargon may be difficult to find if we use more common terms in our search. Knowing and understanding this jargon is one form of information privilege because it allows us to construct more accurate and/or flexible searches, and may allow us to find more scholarly information.
The ways that libraries are organized and internet search algorithms are constructed also reflect biases that make some information more difficult to find. For example, library classification schemes, which determine where books are put on shelves and how they are found through libraries' online catalogs, are "constructed from a European worldview, tend to silence the Native voices ... or marginalize them with implicit value judgements, such as classifying Native creation stories as folklore rather than religion" (Hurley, 2017).
Sources
Hurley, D. A., Kostelecky, S. R., & Aguilar, P. (2017). Whose knowledge? Representing Indigenous realities in library and archival collections. Collection Management, 42(3–4), 124–129. doi.org/10.1080/01462679.2017.1392805
Image: Assorted food packs on shelf by Ravi Sharma is in the Public Domain CC0