Uncaged Library Information Services is a consultancy founded by Anand Jay Kalra in 2016. I earned a Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Michigan in 2010; I had pursued the degree on the hunch that there was something about this “information stuff” that could transfer to social justice and nonprofit work to help us work more efficiently and humanely, and therefore compete better against more well-funded right-wing groups. It turns out that the organic librarians of an organization are its operations staff, and the work I sought to do shows up most naturally in operations and finance, and to a moderate degree in communications and fundraising.
I incorporate lessons from sub-fields such as information organization and retrieval, information seeking behavior, information literacy, bibliographic and technological instruction, community informatics, and combinatorics in my current work. Since launching my consulting practice, I have helped more than thirty social justice organizations ground their systems, practices, and processes in principles of transparency, justice, and shared power in service of collective liberation.
Please note: I served as Executive Director at Queer Cultural Center from September 2022 through December 2024 and paused taking new clients since then. I am now taking consult appointments with potential new clients for contracts beginning July 2025. I am particularly interested in supporting organizations that are sunsetting, or would like to get organized in case they do need to shut down in the next 1-3 years.
For detail on my work and education history, please see my profile on LinkedIn.
Services
I am pleased to support your work in a variety of ways. Below you’ll find samples of work in each of our core areas.
Information Services (Systems, Structures, & Processes)
My work surfaces the invisible conduits of information in an organization, identifies breakdowns in internal communication channels, facilitates knowledge development about the power inherent in an organization’s information ecosystem, and proposes practical solutions that are both technically and relationally sound. Overall, the approach is about bringing organizations into internal alignment and improving the efficiency with which they map their values into practice, which in turn decreases conflict and increases spaciousness around the work. Specific projects have included conflict mediation, file management (architecture, reorganization, access & permissions), CRM database assessments and data model design, mail server migration, coaching operations staff, designing and hiring in an operations department, and tailored training in everyday language about all of the above and more. Here is a presentation I gave recently about information in social justice organizations with a focus on contact records management (CRM) databases. But my FAVORITE presentation to teach is “Information Flows, Collections, & Networks in Community-Led Organizations” – it synthesizes the theory, concepts, and practices that are throughlines in all my work.
Contact
Anand Jay Kalra
anand@uncagedlibrarian.org
734.845.2577