Biography
Kathryn La Barre is an Associate Professor Emerita at the School of Information Sciences and Gender and Women's Studies faculty affiliate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work interrogates the power dynamics of historical and contemporary naming practices in cultural heritage collections. Her research has been published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Library Trends, Knowledge Organization, Libraries and the Cultural Record, and Cataloging and Classification Quarterly. She is an active member of the Association of Information Science and Technology, serving as the Chair of the 80th Anniversary Working Group, as co-facilitator the oral history project "Leaders of Information Science Worldwide" and the ASIST Curator. Her public outreach activities include: hosting Zine workshops, Caretaker for the UCIMC Zine Library, and Librarian at the Rantoul Multi-Cultural Center.
Project CoBRA (Comic Book Readership Archive)
Research Interests
Interrogating historical and contemporary naming practices and power dynamics in cultural heritage collections of films, comics and zines. Methods: Community-based participatory research and oral history.
Additional Campus Affiliations
Associate Professor Emerita, School of Information Sciences
External Links
Honors & Awards
Association for Library and Information Science Education and OCLC Library and Information Science Research Award, 2010
Centennial Scholar, School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois, 2011-2012
Director-at-Large, Association for Information Science & Technology, 2015-2018
Principal member of the Knowledge Organization Research Group in the School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2016-present
J. William Fulbright Specialist, 2016-2021
Recent Publications
Kerr, P., La Barre, K., & Lilley, S. (2021). Diversity in local and comparative contexts grounding change in academic libraries through dialogue. College and Research Libraries News, 82(10), 458-465. https://doi.org/10.5860/CRLN.82.10.458
La Barre, K., & Richardson, C. (2021). Chaos and conception in the opened archive. Library Trends, 69(3), 646-671. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2021.0008
La Barre, K., Burke, C., Buckland, M. K., & Gorichanaz, T. (2020). ASIST AM 2020. SIG HFIS panel proposal April 27, 2020. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 57(1), Article e290. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.290
Graf, A., Fulton, C., Jackson, A., La Barre, K., Walsh, J., Tilley, C., Lucky, S., & Gorichanaz, T. (2018). Everyday documentation of arts and humanities collections. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 55(1), 680-683. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.2018.14505501080
La Barre, K., Buckland, M. K., & Arafat, S. (2018). Glittering in the dark: Memory, culture, and critique in light of the history of information. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 55(1), 701-703. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.2018.14505501086