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The “author” is a concept central to many publication and documentation practices, often carrying legal, professional, social, and personal importance. Typically viewed as the solitary owner of their creations, a person is held responsible for their work and positioned to receive the praise and criticism that may emerge in its wake. Although the role of the individual within creative production is undeniable, literary (Foucault 1977; Bloom 1997) and knowledge organization (Moulaison et. al. 2014) theorists have challenged the view that the work of one person can-or should-be fully detached from their professional and personal networks. As these relationships often provide important context and reveal the role of community in the creation of new things, their absence from catalog records presents a falsely simplified view of the creative process. Here, we address the consequences of what we call the “author-as-owner” concept and suggest that an “author-as-node” approach, which situates an author within their networks of influence, may allow for more relational representation within knowledge organization systems, a framing that emphasizes rather than erases the messy complexities that affect the production of new objects and ideas.

Politics is about the distribution of goods and risks. We can describe the distribution of goods, and we can also characterize those distributions as a kind of inequality. As a baseline definition of “politics of information” we mean the distribution of information goods across different populations. Despite a strong tradition of disciplinary focus in information science, much of the literature is still given over to fairly simple notions of social form and structure. A nascent knowledge organization practice dedicated to social difference is explicitly motivated by justice and nomenclature. Not only is knowledge organization a tool of cultural hegemony, but also it can be read as a product of cultural ordering and bias. Identifying unjust and politically oppressive practice must be part of the path to justice. Understanding the political construction of knowledge organization is essential for the theory of information service in order to build a more just professional practice.