Citation Required

This note is part of a series that critiques the cult of literacy in libraries — exposing how reading, writing, and the book have been crowned as the only valid forms of knowledge, while everything else is silenced, excluded, or reshaped to fit the page. Check all the notes in this section's index.

The Logic of Legitimacy

In the modern information order, the ability to cite is more than a scholarly convention. It is a threshold. A filter. A way of determining whether knowledge is real, valid, and worthy of transmission. Citation —that structured, standardized act of pointing to a specific page in a recognized publication— functions as a passport. Without it, knowledge cannot cross borders. It cannot enter collections. It cannot count.

Libraries have inherited this logic wholesale.

Through collection development policies, cataloging standards, and user-facing services, libraries continuously reproduce the belief that truth lives in written, citable form. Books and articles are described, preserved, and shared. Oral testimony, embodied memory, and non-literate epistemologies are ignored — or included only when mediated by print.

This system is not neutral. It privileges those who control publication channels. It silences those who carry knowledge without a press. It aligns libraries with the bureaucracies of academic legitimacy, even when those bureaucracies exclude the very communities libraries claim to serve.

No Author, No Page, No Value

Libraries often refuse —implicitly or explicitly— to collect, catalog, or circulate materials that lack conventional citation anchors. A story passed down through generations is dismissed if it cannot be sourced. A voice is not considered credible unless it appears in a peer-reviewed journal. A practice is not preserved unless it has been documented in writing, by someone with institutional authority.

These exclusions are framed as professional standards. But they are acts of epistemic violence.

To demand a citation is, in many cases, to demand translation into a literate, Western, academic framework. It is to say: your memory does not matter unless it has been filtered through our structures. Your truth does not belong here unless it conforms to our formatting rules. Your knowledge is not knowledge until it becomes ours.

Even when libraries attempt to diversify their collections, they often remain tied to these validation systems. "Diverse voices" are acquired if they are published. "Community knowledge" is included if it is mediated by scholars. The original holders of the knowledge remain marginal. Their voices are used, but not trusted. Referenced, but not believed.

The Politics of Collection

Every library decision about what to include is also a decision about what to exclude. And because libraries are still anchored in literate, citable media, the boundaries of their collections reflect broader dynamics of power and erasure.

Materials that originate in oral cultures —or in contexts of dispossession, exile, trauma, or resistance— often do not meet the thresholds for acquisition. Not because they lack meaning, but because they lack the bureaucratic infrastructure to be recognized. There is no ISBN, no publisher, no catalog record, no metadata.

So they are left out.

And when a form of knowledge is not included in the library, it becomes harder to reference. When it cannot be cited, it cannot be included in research. When it cannot be researched, it is dismissed as anecdote. The cycle reinforces itself. And citation becomes not a bridge between knowers — but a wall.

Reclaiming Citation Or Leaving It Behind

The solution is not to abandon rigor. It is to recognize that rigor is not the same as standardization. That truth can emerge in forms that resist citation. That authority does not always wear a name, a page number, a publisher's imprint. That sometimes, the refusal to be cited is an act of resistance.

Libraries must confront their complicity in these structures. They must ask whether their systems serve memory or only its domesticated versions. Whether their collections reflect knowledge or only that which has been made legible to institutions. Whether citation is a tool for access or a tool for control.

To truly support plural epistemologies, libraries must learn to listen where there is no footnote. They must trust knowledge that has not been formatted. And tghey must make space for truths that do not point back to a page, but forward to a presence.