Derrida and digital libraries: exploring the (im)possibility of virtual hospitality

Introduction

Throughout the latter half of his career, theorist Jacques Derrida wrote dozens of books, essays, and lectures on hospitality, combining the philosophical focus of Emmanuel Levinas with his own practical concern for the refugee crises of the late twentieth century. Derrida’s theory of hospitality is deconstructive, simultaneously creating and dismantling tension to interrogate the concept as something affective, intellectual, and fundamentally ethical. Hospitality, according to Derrida, involves navigating boundaries between self, other, and the other of the other, a labour critical in any interaction between host and guest. Though steeped in the tangled, literary, and philosophical prose of its author, Derridean hospitality is a practice-oriented theory that has found application in a broad range of scholarship over the past three decades. It has specifically taken root in traditionally feminized fields where hospitality labour is continually devalued; Derrida’s theory is a way to reclaim hospitality as conceptually complex and critically important (Hamington, 2010; Öresland et al., 2013; Cockburn-Wootten and Brewis, 2014). Librarianship, insofar as it involves a relationship between librarians as hosts and patrons as guests, is a field in which Derridean hospitality can be used to challenge and elevate service labour (Mestre, 2020).

Though the application of Derrida’s theory is broad, its use is most often tied to examples of physical interactions between host and guest. The last two years, however, have brought a cessation to many elements of in-person work and a temporary closing of many physical buildings. Has this also implicated hospitality? To what extent is virtual Derridean hospitality possible? What does it look like in a digital library setting?

Using these questions as a starting point, I proceed by placing a theoretical exploration of virtual Derridean hospitality into conversation with digital library scholarship. I define digital libraries as curated digital spaces imbedded in an institutional context which provide access to digitized resources like collections, subscriptions, and services (Gartner, 2021, pp. 17-18). Their curation and maintenance require labour; their use involves access. Therefore, digital libraries are spaces of virtually mediated interaction between those who maintain them and those access them. They provide an important context in which to ground hospitality theory.

My goal for this paper is to introduce theoretical debate surrounding virtual Derridean hospitality; to demonstrate how this debate centres on questions of ethics and place, questions important in an examination of hospitable digital libraries; and, finally, to present various contact points in library and information science literature that help frame future inquiry into this topic. This paper is an exploratory first venture into the subject matter. As an introduction to the (im)possibility of virtual Derridean hospitality, it raises more questions than it answers, providing groundwork for a subsequent, more in depth study. I begin by presenting a Derridean theory of hospitality, using Derrida’s texts alongside secondary literature to draw forth the theoretical controversy surrounding its application in a virtual environment. Such theoretical debate frames the potential for using Derridean hospitality as a heuristic through which to examine hospitality in relationship with digital libraries. I then review a sample of relevant literature from library and information science. This review is not comprehensive, but it does provide topical connections to contemporary debates within the field, creating space for a discussion on what may constitute hospitable digital libraries.

Derridean Hospitality:

Derrida challenges contemporary understandings of hospitality, resisting both simple definitions of complacent welcome as well as economic definitions of transaction. Instead, he draws on the aporetic etymology of the term, recognizing that hospitality is ultimately derived from the Latin hostis, a word which translates to friend and enemy, host and guest (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000, p. 45; Vaan, 2008, p. 291). This ‘internal tension and instability’ is important, for it ‘keeps the idea of hospitality alive, open, loose. If it is not beyond itself, it falls back into itself and becomes a bit of ungracious meanness, that is, hostile’ (Derrida & Caputo, 1997, p. 30). Derrida specifically examines how a deconstructive theory of hospitality is affected by ‘the two Latin derivations: the foreigner (hostis) welcomed as guest or as enemy. Hospitality, hostility, hostpitality’ (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000, p. 45). What is the relationship between hospitality and hostility, host and hostage?

Exploring this internal bifurcation within hospitality leads Derrida to create an equally dichotomous definition of the concept. He argues that hospitality is caught in deconstruction between the absolute and the conditional. Absolute hospitality, also referred to as ‘unconditional hospitality’ or ‘the Law of hospitality,’ requires one ‘to give the new arrival all of one's home and oneself, to give him or her one's own, our own, without asking a name, or compensation, or the fulfilment of even the smallest condition’ (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000, p. 77). In the library setting, this would involve opening the library to any patron at any time with no conditions, an impossibility for both physical library buildings and digital libraries. Allowing unfettered access to digital library spaces would mean opening the code and the metadata to all, potentially creating situations in which a minority of patrons monopolize digitized collections and take curation into their own hands. It could also render contract negotiations for subscriptions to specific services impossible. Unconditional hospitality is therefore placed into relationship with conditional hospitality, also referred to as ‘the laws of hospitality’. These laws recognize the importance of transaction between host and guest, denoting ‘those rights and duties [of host and guest] that are always conditioned and conditional’ (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000, p. 77). In a library setting, this would involve providing access to patrons conditioned on the rules and regulations of the library. Therefore, unconditional and conditional hospitality create a tension within the concept of hospitality itself; they are ‘both contradictory, antinomic, and inseparable. They both imply and exclude each other, simultaneously’ (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000, p. 79). Derridean hospitality is a continual deconstruction between the unconditional and the conditional. Hospitality labour, therefore, involves an affective obligation towards a vulnerable and unknowable other as well as a simultaneous intellectual obligation towards individual safety and responsibility.

By complicating hospitality beyond welcome and beyond the hospitality industry, Derridean hospitality ‘inevitably touches on that fundamental ethical question [...] of the boundaries of the human, and how we set those up’ (Still, 2013, p. 4). Hospitality operates at borders; it mediates the relationship between self and others, sameness and difference, private and public, host and guest, possible and impossible, etc. This is why Derrida (2001) concludes, ‘ethics is hospitality; ethics is so thoroughly coextensive with the experience of hospitality’ (pp. 16-17). Derridean hospitality, therefore, provides a promising ethical heuristic through which library interaction can be examined.

Though Derrida offers a comprehensive study of hospitality spanning decades of scholarship, there is a question related to hospitality posed late in his career that he was unable to fully address before his death in 2004: How are virtual spaces reconceptualizing the home, and how is hospitality enacted in these digital spheres? This question is of central importance to digital libraries, and teasing through the theoretical nuance grounding this debate will open up space to examine the extent to which hospitality is possible for digital libraries.

Virtual Derridean Hospitality as Impossible:

Derridean hospitality, rooted in the ethics of Levinas, is sometimes construed in a way that necessitates embodiment. Derrida repeats throughout his works that his interest in hospitality is never purely conceptual; he is intimately concerned with humanitarianism, the refugee crises of his time, and a tangled ‘juridico-political’ reality in which hospitality is often misconstrued or ignored (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000, p. 135). Does hospitality, as Levinas argues, require ‘the very straightforwardness of the face to face [interaction], without the intermediary of any image’ (Levinas, 1991/1961, p. 200)? If hospitality is grounded in proximity without intermediary, then virtual Derridean hospitality would seem impossible.

One theorist who ties together Derrida and Levinas is Hamington (2010), an ethicist who places these thinkers in conversation with feminist theorists to examine ‘issues of identity, inclusiveness, reciprocity, forgiveness, and embodiment’ (p. 21). Hamington (2010) assesses the social and political implications of hospitality, specifically paying attention to the gendered dimensions of this concept. He notes, ‘gender oppression does not easily map onto the host/guest metaphor. Both men and women have played the role of host but, in the case of women, ‘host’ is not always a freely chosen role nor does it always entail power or decision-making ability’ (Hamington, 2010, p. 21). Hamington’s (2010) examination of hospitality ties Derrida to Levinas and to feminist theory. From this perspective, hospitality becomes essentially embodied; its physicality is one reason why ‘hospitality is not an abstract concept, but a performed activity directed at particular individuals’ (Hamington, 2010, p. 32). This article poses serious questions regarding the possibility of disembodying Derridean hospitality to apply it to a digital environment.

The possibility of virtual hospitality is further complicated by questions of place, ownership, and privacy. In relation to state surveillance, Derrida writes that there exists an

effacement of the limit between private and public, the secret and the phenomenal, the home (which makes hospitality possible) and the violation of the home. This machine renders impossible the hospitality, the right to hospitality, that it ought to make possible.

Here Derrida declares the impossibility of hospitality in digital space. However, his declaration of hospitality’s impossibility cannot necessarily be taken at face-value as it is part of a larger dichotomy Derrida establishes to then deconstruct.

Virtual Derridean Hospitality as Possible:

There is precedent in separating Derrida from Levinas, thus creating space for virtual Derridean hospitality. In Of Hospitality, Derrida begins redefining the home, acknowledging, ‘my ‘home,’ in principle inviolable, is also constituted, and in a more and more essential, interior way, by my phone line, but also by my email, but also by my fax, but also by my access to the Internet’ (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000, p. 51). Being ‘at home’ is a critical element for hospitality, and therefore redefining the home in this way also blurs the borders of hospitality. In Without Alibi, too, Derrida recognizes how ‘This new technical ‘stage’ of virtualization’ is destabilizing, affecting ‘work in the classic forms we have inherited, in the new experience of borders, of the nation-state, of virtual communication, of the speed and spread of information’ (Derrida, 2002, p. 210; p. 227). In this light, virtual Derridean hospitality becomes possible, a way to negotiate the concept of home and to navigate ‘the new experience of borders’.

Some Derridean scholars have pulled upon such strands in Derrida’s research, examining the scholarly tendency to conjoin the theories of Derrida and Levinas and instead arguing that these two theorists are better read against each other rather than as extensions of each other. Hägglund (2004) specifically questions if Derrida ascribed to the primacy of the face-to-face encounter as Levinas did. After exploring the treatment of the face-to-face encounter by both theorists, Hägglund (2004) concludes, ‘like Levinas, Derrida repeatedly speaks of justice in terms of a relation to ‘the other.’ But this does not mean [...] that Derrida adheres to the Levinasian notion of an originary ethical experience in the face-to-face encounter’ (p. 66). By dislocating the primacy of the face-to-face encounter, the possibility of Derridean virtual hospitality is further heightened.

There are some theorists who have expanded these elements of Derrida’s theory, not only disjoining Derrida from Levinas but also then applying Derridean hospitality to questions of physical place and virtual space. One such theorist is Barnett (2005), a geographer who observes, ‘In both geography and moral philosophy, the tension between a partial ethics of care and an impartial ethics of justice is often mapped onto a spatial distinction between responsibilities to proximate others and responsibilities to distant others’ (p. 5). Turning against this scholarly tendency, Barnett (2005) critically interrogates geography’s engagement with moral philosophy and post-structuralist thought. He initially examines Levinasean ethics as ‘an entry point for rethinking the equation of proximity with partiality, and of distance with impartiality’ (Barnett, 2005, p. 6). Barnett (2005) then turns to Derrida’s theory of hospitality, exploring how it is tied to geographic politics while simultaneously presenting the argument ‘that we should resist a temptation to read the theme of hospitality as immediately pertaining to geographical concerns’ (p. 6). Complicating Derridean hospitality in this way allows Barnett (2005) to explore other dimensions of the theory, dimensions like temporality, intangible power relationships, and non-spatial responsibility. This article does not discuss implications or extensions into virtual environments, but dislocating Derridean hospitality from geographic place would be a necessary first step in that argument.

Whitlock (2015) goes a step further than Barnett (2005), writing an article on, specifically, a Derridean hospitality of cyberspace. Whitlock (2015) conducts a critical case study of ‘Operation Sovereign Borders,’ ‘Mare Nostrum,’ and the ‘Stop the Boats’ campaign to explore how virtuality disrupts traditional notions of hospitality. The author is particularly interested in how reconceptualizing technology and self affects the dispossessed. How does this population mediate painful emotions such as fear and abjection, and what resources for social protest and collective action become available to them? To address these questions, Whitlock (2015) uses Derrida’s theory of hospitality, Zygmunt Bauman's theory of liquid lives, and Sara Ahmed's border theory. Grounding these theoretical explorations in concrete examples, the author recognizes, ‘Derrida’s speculations about the hospitality of cyberspace draw new technologies into those thresholds where the boundaries between self and other, citizen and stranger, are constantly under negotiation’ (Whitlock, 2015, p. 263). These technologies have enormous impact on asylum seekers: ‘the affordances of these technologies include increased surveillance and detention, as well as new assemblages that engineer microactivisms in the mercurial spaces of the event’ (Whitlock, 2015, p. 263).

Deconstructing the (Im)Possibility of Virtual Derridean Hospitality:

Ultimately, the question of virtual Derridean hospitality can be narrowed down specifically to a question of hospitality itself. Is this concept rooted in interaction without intermediary, in ownership and place, or in the establishment of a relationship between the self and the other (and the other of the other)? Dufourmantelle, collaborator in Of Hospitality, elaborates:

Hospitality gives as unthought, in its ‘night,’ this difficult, ambivalent relation to place. As though the place in question in hospitality were a place originally belonging to neither host nor guest, but to the gesture by which one of them welcomes the other—even and above all if he is himself without a dwelling from which this welcome could be conceived.

Can this ‘ambivalent relation to place’ be extended into virtual space, and, if so, how can it be used in the concrete context of digital libraries?

It is certainly possible to continue to raise questions complicating virtual Derridean hospitality and its (im)possibility. However, here it is beneficial to turn to literature in library and information science. The following literature provide points of contact for the prior theoretical conversation—grounding questions of hospitality, ethics, and digital civics in existent scholarly debate.

A Review of Relevant Literature in Library and Information Science:

Hospitality and Libraries:

While the concept of virtual Derridean hospitality is yet to be addressed in library scholarship, the concept of hospitality itself has a complicated history in relation to the field. Garrison (1973/1979) explores this history across several publications surrounding library labour at the turn of the twentieth century. She specifically examines the trope of the ‘genteel library hostess’ and the subjugation of a largely feminized workforce in the name of hospitality (Garrison, 1973, p. 153). Piecing together scholarship and testimony, Garrison (1979) concludes that female librarians were historically encouraged to practice a specific type of gendered hospitality—to be hostesses who embodied a Victorian-era femininity (p. xiv). Garrison (1979) viewed hospitality as synonymous with the ‘warmth of a well ordered home’ presided over by a woman and consequently antithetical to the ‘cold impersonality of the business world’ predominated by men (p. 179). More recently, however, Johnson and Kazmer (2011), turn precisely to the business world, to the industry of hospitality, to draw forth a new definition of hospitality for librarianship. Oscillating between user as ‘patron’ and user as ‘consumer,’ Johnson and Kazmer (2011) conclude that hospitality in librarianship involves ‘the provision of library resources by a genuinely motivated employee to fulfill the library need of a patron in an environment conducive to the provision of those resources’ (p. 387). They then relate this industry-driven definition of hospitality to librarianship, focusing on what they deem the six tenets of library hospitality: library resources, service motivation, library employee, library need, patron, and environment (Johnson and Kazmer, 2011, pp. 392-397). I argue that Derridean hospitality is a way to reclaim the concept from both gendered complacency and industrialized transaction, relocating it instead as an ethical heuristic (Mestre, 2020).

Hospitality is also a core concept in bibliographic classification literature where it is used to describe a classification scheme’s ‘ability to accommodate new topics, whether these happen as a result of the interaction of existing subjects [...], or are completely new subjects that no one had thought of before’ (Broughton, 2018, p. 53). The relationship between hospitality and knowledge organization has relevance in shaping digital collections, which, in turn, contributes to the shaping hospitable digital libraries.

Another potential attribute of hospitable digital libraries may involve their ability to foster identity negotiation, a topic broadly explored in Salmi-Niklander and Dalbello’s (2022) Reading Home Cultures Through Books. This volume examines how books and libraries impact our experiences of home and self. In the introduction, Dalbello and Salmi-Niklander (2022) present an argument surrounding ‘the significance of books in creating the notion of home as a transactional concept’ (p. 1). This ‘notion of home’ is necessary for Derridean hospitality, and exploring the home through printed and virtual books opens space to examine library hospitality in physical and virtual environments. Dalbello and Salmi- Niklander (2022) utilize ‘Michel de Certeau’s classic theoretical and methodological blueprint for the study of practices of everyday life’ as inspiration for focusing ‘on the empirical encounters of home and reading in a number of contexts in everyday life’ (p. 2). Combining a critical and affect-sensorial approach, the introduction explores the concepts of books and home from a material perspective while also defining the ‘at-home’ in an essentially immaterial way: ‘the home is a place of becoming’ (Dalbello and Salmi-Niklander, 2022, p. 2). This leaves space for a virtual exploration of the library, the ‘at-home,’ and hospitality.

Because scholarship in library and information science emphasizes both hospitality and hospitality labour as something that occurs in an everyday context, it is important to better understand how the everyday use of libraries impacts hospitable exchanges. During the pandemic, everyday use has become increasingly dependent on digital platforms (Ćirić and Ćirić, 2021; Radford et al., 2021). Ćirić and Ćirić (2021) examine the impact of COVID on digital library usage, using a case study to track ‘insights into when, where, and how readers accessed the digital content, not only in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also the more normal year before it’ (Ćirić and Ćirić, 2021, pp. 65-66). They found a significant increase network traffic during lockdown months, noting trends that point towards a disruption of the traditional workday, the success of social media campaigns, and the increase in access of digital collections from mobile devices. Similarly, Radford et al. (2021) explore a spike in virtual reference services during the pandemic. Prompted by the rapid shift to online services, Radford et al. (2021) focused on the perspective of academic librarians to study the ‘adaptations and innovations to reference services, especially VRS and perceptions of changes in user interactions’ (p. 106). Utilizing survey results and interviews, the authors concluded that, because of existing digital infrastructure, librarians were able to weather the ‘seismic level shifts’ caused by the pandemic relatively well, and ‘Library profiles were raised within institutions as librarians responded to fill the gap of shuttered offices’ (Radford et al., 2021, p. 107). Online experimentation with new technologies and services were met with varying degrees of success, and the missing human interactive dimension of library labour caused an affective burden on many involved (Radford et al., 2021, pp. 107-108). This article is important not only because it is demonstrative of the online surge during the pandemic, but also because it centres the often-invisible labour behind digital library services.

Though virtual services have expanded and digital library usage has spiked over the past two years, there still exist debates surrounding digital library accessibility and assessment. What are contemporary debates surrounding these virtual spaces, and how can these debates frame a conversation around virtual Derridean hospitality?

Contemporary Debates in Digital Library Literature:

Contemporary digital library scholarship raises questions about accessibility and assessment. Xie et. al (2020) specifically interrogate assumptions surrounding digital library accessibility, using a mixed-methods study to reveal the inhospitable nature of digital platforms for blind and visually impaired users. While this study focusses on one excluded population, the research implicates other presumptions surrounding digital librarianship. Such an undermining of assumptions then raises new questions regarding how digital libraries are evaluated. These are questions picked up by Villanueva and Shiri (2021) who conduct a ‘systematic review and meta-analysis on the evaluation of cultural heritage digital libraries and archives’ (p. 317). The authors collected data through a search of key terms on relevant databases, resulting in 103 articles on evaluation within digital libraries. They then analysed these articles through Saracevic’s seven approaches to digital library evaluation: ‘systems-centred, human-centred, usability-centred, anthropological, sociological, economic, and ethnographic’ (Villanueva and Shiri, 2021, p. 317). The data collected revealed a ‘lack of a cultural component in many CHDL evaluations’ which ‘seems like a vast oversight by many’ (Villanueva and Shiri, 2021, p. 326). While this research is focused specifically on cultural heritage digital librarianship, the gap the authors unearth perhaps points to a larger trend regarding the ignoring of cultural elements within digital spaces. Culture, however, is essential to Derridean hospitality: ‘Hospitality is culture itself and not simply one ethic amongst others’ (Derrida, 2001, p. 26). Virtual Derridean hospitality as a concept must centre questions of culture and ethics.

Hospitality and Digital Civics:

Though digital libraries may lack an emphasis on culture, other information institutions centre stories of cultural heritage, civics, and migration in online settings. Lenart-Cheng (2021) studies one such institution, using France’s National Museum of the History of Immigration in Paris as a case study ‘to explore [a] new form of story-activism and our concepts of hospitality’ (p. 1). This museum is an example of a migration museum, institutions which ‘seek to challenge the one-directional narrative of departure, arrival and integration’ while also shaping political debates and policies (Lenart-Cheng, 2021, p. 3). They utilize autobiographical stories of migrants, including asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants, to force the viewer or visitor to self-negotiate conceptions of hospitality. Lenart-Cheng (2021) concludes that, ‘In the future, [...] migration museums could indeed play a unique role in expanding our ideas about hospitality, but only if they acknowledge the hostility at the heart of their own gesture of hospitability’ as well as distinguish and mediate the call for citizenship ‘from the open-ended transformations occasioned by story-sharing’ (p. 18). Overall, Lenart-Cheng (2021) critically engages in the concept of hospitality, placing Derridean theory in relationship with physical and digital information institutions.

Migration museums demonstrate the possibilities of integrating Derridean hospitality in a virtual setting, centring questions of hospitality, culture, ethics, and the blurring of boundaries to challenge assumptions. The intersection of hospitality, culture, and ethics is also found in other areas of information science, specifically in the area of digital civics. Digital civics is defined as ‘the study of the rights and responsibilities of citizens who inhabit the infosphere and access the world digitally’ (Clements, 2019, p. 571). Clements (2019) uses Floridi’s philosophy of information to examine digital civics from a critical and pedagogical perspective. After exploring a philosophy of the infosphere, Clements (2019) concludes, ‘the non-physical nature of the digital portion of the environment leads to a world that is increasingly interactive and trades in abstract ideas impacting civic interactions, and affecting privacy, relationships with corporate organisations and personal identity’ (p. 582). Ultimately, Clements (2019) raises questions of digital citizenship and responsibility through the lens of Floridi in a way that may extend to research surrounding Derridean hospitality.

These same questions regarding digital citizenship and responsibility are also addressed from a more technological perspective by Talhouk et al. (2018). These authors focus on how ‘HCI researchers are taking an active role in addressing refugee crises’, summarizing strategies for how to best integrate research with activism to better the lives of this population (Talhouk et al., 2018, p. 46). Talhouk et al.’s (2018) qualitative research is rooted in the ‘Refugees & HCI’ workshop conducted at the Communities and Technologies 2017 conference, which brought together researchers, refugees, and researchers who are refugees (p. 48). HCI researchers ‘are in a position to promote the voices of refugees as stakeholders in the design of technologies and solutions. Technological designs should reflect refugee needs, experiences, and values’ (Talhouk et al., 2018, p. 48). Need was expressed in areas such as ‘integration, health, basic education, higher education, and livelihoods’ (Talhouk et al., 2018, p. 48). Additionally, contradictory tensions were explored, including the tension between a refugee’s need for privacy and anonymity compared to their want to take ownership of their data and stories. This article centres the voices of refugees, providing interesting insight into human computer interaction design choices. While it doesn’t discuss digital libraries, digital civics, or hospitality directly, I question if this type of human computer interaction research might be integrated with digital library research in the name of hospitality.

Deconstructing the Virtual and the Physical

One interesting aspect of both Clements (2019) and Talhouk et al. (2018) is that both concentrate on blurring the boundaries between digital and physical worlds. Clements (2019) specifically discusses designing digital spaces which act as ‘transmediated laborator[ies] for fostering digital civic experience that offers immersion in perpetually connected, interactive environments where the boundaries between the online and offline realms are blurred’ (Clements, 2019, p. 582). This demonstrates a commitment to questioning the boundaries between digital and physical environments.

Such questioning can be extended to digital libraries, a project undertaken by Pomerantz and Marchionini (2007) who explore the digital library as place. These authors build a framework to reconceptualize library space and then applying this framework to collection development, preservation, maintenance, and reference services (Pomerantz and Marchionini, 2007). They begin by recognizing, ‘it is seldom the materials in libraries that attract people but rather the ideas carried by the materials, the conceptual structures that support access, and the community of stakeholders who use the library’ (Pomerantz and Marchionini, 2007, p. 505). Library as place is thus not a solely physical construct, but one which embraces a physical-conceptual continuum; libraries connect the physical and intellectual ‘to link people to ideas and to each other’ (Pomerantz and Marchionini, 2007, p. 506). Because both digital and physical libraries occupy this continuum, the boundaries between the two are sometimes rightfully blurred. Ultimately, both forms of library ‘are cognitive spaces that can be intellectually moved through and modified to suit cognitive needs [...but they] differ in their capacity to fulfill the same functions’ (Pomerantz and Marchionini, 2007, p. 528). Pomerantz and Marchionini (2007) end their article by questioning the duality of the physical and virtual dichotomy, instead introducing the intellectual as a core component of library place (p. 528). Such a deconstruction of the physical and the virtual towards the intellectual may work well in conjunction with Derridean hospitality, which highlights the intellectual labour required of the host. The librarian as host must exercise this labour whether in physical or virtual settings.

Conclusion:

This review of theoretical and topical literature offers an initial and exploratory glimpse into the complexities surrounding the application of Derridean hospitality to digital libraries. It is a project that must begin in the pages of Derrida’s scholarship, grappling with the deconstruction of hospitality and hostility, theory and practice, self and other, host and guest, librarian and patron, physical and virtual. However, the application of Derridean hospitality in virtual spaces must extend beyond such deconstruction to also grapple with questions of digital library accessibility and assessment, digital civics, human computer interaction, information ethics, and critical theory in ways that blur disciplinary boundaries. There is an existing foundation in library and information science for future engagement with the (im)possibility of a virtual Derridean hospitality in relation to digital libraries. As trends point towards increased use of virtual library services, it is important to further examine how a Derridean deconstructive hospitality might bolster both our perception of library labour as well as our understanding of these digital spaces. Doing so has the potential to build a philosophical foundation for hospitable digital libraries rooted in both an ethical concern for the other as guest as well as an elevation and recognition of librarian as host.

Here it is important to acknowledge that Derrida’s theorizing on virtual hospitality is situated at the turn of the 21st century. Since his death in 2004, enormous technical leaps have been made. Therefore, future theorizing necessitates advancing a theory of hospitality beyond the boundaries established in Derridean texts. Despite its sometimes-dated elements, however, Derrida’s theory, in conjunction with the subsequent debate it has inspired on hospitable interaction in virtual space, provides a productive starting point for establishing hospitality as an ethical heuristic through which to conceptualize hospitable digital libraries.

Moving forward, I plan to continue studying this topic, expanding upon Derrida’s theory of hospitality and then placing this theory into conversation with case studies of digital libraries. Derrida (2001) boldly proclaims that ‘ethics is hospitality; ethics is so thoroughly coextensive with the experience of hospitality’ (pp. 16-17). In so doing, he sets a challenge for deeper engagement of themes of hospitality within places of hospitality. Libraries, as places of hospitality, are set to pick up this Derridean challenge in ways that centre the relationship between host and guest, librarian and patron, carrying this ethical discourse into digital spheres. Doing so establishes libraries as hospitable institutions and continues the elevation of traditionally undervalued hospitality labour.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the many individuals at Rutgers University and the University of Alabama who have helped me think through questions of hospitality in relation to librarianship. I am also grateful for the support of my anonymous reviewers, all of whom helped polish and improve this paper.

About the author

Juliana Mestre is PhD student in Communication, Information, and Media at Rutgers University. She received her master’s in library and information studies from the University of Alabama. Her research interests include using critical theoretical perspectives to engage questions of information, library, and technology ethics. She can be contacted at Juliana.Mestre@Rutgers.edu.

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