Dorothy Porter Wesley and the Knowledge Organization in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center Special Collection
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18617/liinc.v17i2.5780Keywords:
Knowledge Organization, Black knowledge, Black Librarianship – United StatesAbstract
This article presents the black librarian, Dorothy Porter Wesley, with a special focus on her role in organizing the Special Collection of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. Based on bibliographic and documentary materials, we highlight the denunciation made by this black librarian about the ethnocentric, prejudiced and limiting approach of the Dewey Decimal Classification for cataloging the informational resources of the Collection. To address this gap, Porter Wesley has prepared several bibliographies and catalogs designed to organize the knowledge produced by and about the Negro , African and diaspora populations of the Collection. The study investigates the critical development of her trajectory and the metaepistemological and metamethodological role that combines the appropriation of tools from the informational field – starting with bibliography – as a form of fight, resistance and emancipation for the American Negro community. As main results, this research attests to the revolutionary potentiality of the praxis of Dorothy Porter Wesley, as well as substantiating another epistemological-historical way of conception of the library and information science
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