David W. Bade

Who is David W. Bade?

David W. Bade was a Senior Librarian and Monographic Cataloger at the University of Chicago’s Joseph Regenstein Library until his retirement in 2014. He is the author of the 2002 monograph Khubilai Khan and the Beautiful Princess of Tumapel, several bibliographies on Mongolia and the Mongols, a three-volume catalog of the books in African languages in the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University, and several books and articles about linguistics, libraries and librarianship, including Responsible Librarianship: Library Policies for Unreliable Systems published in 2008.

In his writings on libraries, Bade’s research focus has been on the “processes of misunderstanding, mystifying and mythologizing technologies and how this allows a technocratic elite to turn convivial tools into tools for control and exploitation.” He has written extensively about cataloging, bibliographic control, authority control, and misinformation, drawing upon the literatures of philosophy, linguistics, rhetoric, ergonomics and resilience engineering in making his arguments.

He is a graduate of the University of Illinois, Ubana-Champaign where he studied librarianship and linguistics.