Digitization and Exploitation: Toward Ending the Exploitation of the Incarcerated in Memory Work

Kristen C. Howard, MISt Student, McGill University

Large-scale digitization projects require an enormous amount of resources and labour, both of which are frequently in short supply in libraries and archives. Patrons increasingly expect unique and archival documents to be freely and readily available online in a digital format with robust item- or collection-level descriptions and optical character recognition. To respond to user demand, memory institutions have sought cheaper ways to provide these high-quality digital surrogates. One solution is outsourcing various aspects of digitization. For example, many U.S. libraries have turned to the Yearbook Project, a service that digitizes high school yearbooks for free in order to ensure the long-term preservation of these important community resources. But this free service comes at a high moral cost: the Yearbook Project, a service of Oklahoma Correctional Industries, is able to offer this service for free because the labour is performed by incarcerated individuals. This paper draws on exploitation theory to argue that the use of underpaid prison labour for digitization projects and other memory work is unethical: such projects, and therefore our cultural memory institutions, exploit the incarcerated. As the for-profit prison industrial complex only continues to grow and disproportionately impacts BIPOC, it is imperative that the information profession recognize our contribution to this moral wrong. To this end, I offer two potential interventions. Enacting the proposed interventions will not end the exploitation of the incarcerated, but will provide meaningful benefits to the (formerly) incarcerated and work toward greater transparency with our patrons.

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