In advance of a very busy summer, I have some free time right now to focus on the library website. So I decided that May is Library Infrastructure Month, and I have been going about on Mastodon pretending like this is actually a thing.
It’s not entirely a joke. Academic libraries are very infrastructural projects. Academic librarians make sure that students, faculty and others get the building blocks they need for their academic endeavors. But academic libraries aren’t usually thought of as infrastructure, except in the frustratingly old-timey way that a library is seen as a building to hold books. But library websites are infrastructure, discovery services are infrastructure, ILL is infrastructure, metadata is infrastructure, etc.
Those who build this infrastructure know that their work is foundational, but much of it goes mostly unseen by the academic community. Let’s add a bit of visibility this year by celebrating Library Infrastructure Month this May.
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