Sustainability and Resilience: A Critical Review of Sustainability Literature and Implications to Resilience of U.S. Academic Libraries, Archives, and Information Systems

The field of Library and Information Science (LIS) is one often associated with sustainability. Sustainability is inherent and embedded in the guiding values of library information science, education, praxis, and theory, as well as two of its main sub-disciplines of human information behavior (HIB) and information communication technology (ICT) systems. Both HIB and ICT are designed with the goal of sustaining information and data access into the future. However, this sustainability traditionally forefronts sustaining material and property into the future versus sustaining the future of the environment: both in terms of the natural environment and natural resource use, but also the social environment of people employed within institutional library environments or for sustaining the resilience and agency of communities neighboring academic institutions and their climate justice efforts. This conceptual paper reviews the existing literature on economic, social, and environmental sustainability in the LIS field and examines the scholarly conversation concerning critical university studies and environmental sustainability in academic libraries and academic information production infrastructures. Using existing LIS environmental sustainability literature and triple bottom line theory as a framework, this article then suggests potential new considerations for expanding United States academic libraries' sustainability in ICT and HIB practices beyond calculating energy use and building emissions. Lastly, this review ends by highlighting case studies and future research opportunities that offer new perspectives on sustainability in academic libraries and theorizes that by first acknowledging that the colonial capitalist neo-liberal forces accelerating the climate crisis are the same forces that underpin and drive U.S. universities' knowledge production and by extension academic libraries, and in facing those implications, we can then begin to imagine more resilient paths forward.