Today, we’re talking with Mike Olson, Assistant Professor and Cataloging & Discovery Librarian at Murphy Library, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Mike published two guest posts on “The Scholarly Kitchen” earlier this year which caught our eye.

The first was in March, where he wrote about library catalogs as colonization systems with the power to make naming decisions appear neutral and inevitable by disguising bias behind what a former ALA president called “a facade of technical objectivity.”

His next post in August had to do with layoffs at OCLC justified by claims of advances in AI that could lead to efficiency. Mike noted that “the same technological advances celebrated for their efficiency are erasing the human expertise that creates the high-quality metadata these systems depend on to function.”

As fans of human expertise, local and disciplinary control, and skepticism about tech claims, we wanted to bring him on for a conversation.

The interview does not disappoint, as it echoes concerns from earlier interviews about how academia is being appropriated for rents and extractive processes by tech companies without support for the kind of skepticism and support of human expertise we’d expect from universities.

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