Building Transnational Knowledge Infrastructures: Librarianship, Digital Scholarship, and Academic Exchange in Senegal and the United States

The narrative examines the development of transnational knowledge infrastructures through a series of interconnected experiences in academic librarianship, digital scholarship, and international teaching between Senegal and the United States. Drawing on the author’s 2015 West African Research Association (WARA) Library Fellowship at the West African Research Center (WARC) in Dakar, a 2018 Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence appointment at Cheikh Anta Diop University (UCAD), and subsequent editorial and digital preservation collaborations, the study documents how libraries function as both technical systems and social institutions that mediate access to scholarly futures. The narrative traces hands-on initiatives in global digital humanities publishing and collaborative audio-archive preservation.  Collectively, these projects reveal librarianship as a form of “invisible infrastructure” that shapes whose knowledge circulates, how scholarship is preserved, and which voices enter global academic records. The article argues that sustainable international librarianship depends less on technology alone than on long-term relationships, local stewardship, and the deliberate transfer of skills, positioning libraries as critical sites of intellectual exchange, cultural diplomacy, and scholarly equity in resource-constrained environments.